The Competition

ATI has been very aggressive as of late, and we have been quite happy with what we have seen so far. After their circuit design setback with the X1800 last year, ATI really turned things around and offered the X1900 lineup in rather quick succession. Before today, the X1900 was clearly the king of the hill in all things graphics. With the new RD580 chipset from ATI offering 2x x16 PCI Express slots, Crossfire is looking better than ever as well. The comparison at the high end is very exciting: it's never been a better time to be a graphics enthusiast with tons of excess money.

At the same time, the midrange is heating up as well. With prices on the X1600 looking good, the new pressure on NVIDIA from ATI's upcoming X1800 GTO (which we unfortunately don't have), and solid products like the 6800 GS and 7800 GT already out there, the 7600 GT is a welcome addition in price/performance.

So we can get a good idea of what we will be working with, we are providing tables comparing the features of the high end cards and mid range cards we will be testing from NVIDIA and ATI. CrossFire and SLI will be looked at as well.

NVIDIA Graphics Card Specifications
  Vert Pipes Pixel Pipes Raster Pipes Core Clock Mem Clock Mem Size (MB) Mem Bus (bits) Price
GeForce 7900 GTX 8 24 16 650 800 512 256 ~$500+
GeForce 7900 GT 8 24 16 450 660 256 256 ~$325
GeForce 7800 GTX 512 8 24 16 550 850 512 256 $600+
GeForce 7800 GTX 8 24 16 430 600 256 256 $450
GeForce 7800 GT 8 20 16 400 500 256 256 $300
GeForce 7600 GT 5 12 8 560 700 256 128 ~$200
GeForce 6800 GS 5 12 8 425 500 256 256 $180


ATI Graphics Card Specifications
  Vert Pipes Pixel Pipes Raster Pipes Core Clock Mem Clock Mem Size (MB) Mem Bus (bits) Price
Radeon X1900 XTX 8 48 16 650 775 512 256 $600+
Radeon X1900 XT 8 48 16 625 725 512 256 $500
Radeon X1600 XT 5 12 4 590 690 256 128 $150


We will also be including SLI and CrossFire setups for these cards in all cases but for the X1600 XT. Unfortunately, during testing one of our X1600 cards decided to roll over and die (such is the price of working with engineering samples and prerelease products). The other card we would love to have included is the X1800 GTO which has 12 pixel pipes and is clocked similarly to the X1800 XL. As we mentioned previously, ATI didn't get a card to us for testing.

For our comparison, we have decided to test all applications with 4xAA and 8xAF in all tests but Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. For Splinter Cell we are testing with SM3.0 options enabled and AA disabled as the game doesn't allow both to be set while playing. With all of this power available, our opinion is that AA is worth enabling in just about any situation. The visual quality benefit, even at high resolutions, is well worth it.

NVIDIA's Die Shrink: The 7900 and 7600 The Test and Power
Comments Locked

97 Comments

View All Comments

  • DigitalFreak - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link

    One of the reasons I just picked up 2 7900GTX boards. That, and I've been hearing of more and more problems with Crossfire.
  • Rogue 2 - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link

    On "The Competition" page, they're showing the 7600GT w/ 256 bit memory bus, and the 6800GS w/ 128 bit memory bus. Isn't it exactly the opposite?
  • DerekWilson - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link

    yes -- fixed
  • DigitalFreak - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link

    Power test info is missing.
  • DarthPierce - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link

    Yep... I see no graphs :)
  • DerekWilson - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link

    fixed
  • DarthPierce - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link

    I think the 7900GTX vs 7800 GTX512 graph is also missing
  • DerekWilson - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link

    Do you mean 7900 GT vs. 7800 GTX? We didn't do a seperated 7800 GTX 512 vs. 7900 GTX comparison.
  • BigLan - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link

    "Today marks the launch of NVIDIA's newest graphics cards: the 7900 GTX, 7900 GT and the 7900 GT."

    Should that be 7900 GT and the 7600 GT ?
  • SpaceRanger - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link

    That was the first thing I noticed too... Pretty obvious typo that should have been caught.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now