Fall '06 NVIDIA GPU Refresh - Part I: GeForce 7900 GS

Final Words

The introduction of the GeForce 7900 GS has certainly tightened up the competition between the $200 and $250 marks: there really is no hands down winner in this match. The X1900 GT did manage to at least edge out even the overclocked XFX 7900 GS in most benchmarks, which is hardly surprising considering the X1900 GT was already competitive with the 7900 GT. ATI does get points for the inclusion of a high quality AF mode and the capability to perform AA on fp16 render targets, but NVIDIA's Transparency AA is higher quality than ATI's Adaptive AA. With the X1900 GT costing only slightly more than a modestly overclocked 7900 GS, the value of these two cards is very close.

This is one of those times where a choice will have to come down to individual gaming tests. Those in the market for a new card at the $220 price point will need to pay careful attention to each game test and decide which ones are most important on an individual basis. It is much too difficult to declare a clear winner here without including an absurdly huge volume of game tests. At the same time, the stock 7900 GS is no slouch and the cheaper price tag may make it possible for people with a hard budget cap to reach a very comfortable level of performance.

High resolutions with high detail settings are not always attainable with these ~$200 cards, but you do get performance roughly equal to last year's $400-$500 offerings. Gamers who play at the highly prevalent resolutions of 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 will be more than satisfied with these cards under current gaming conditions (with the possible exception of Oblivion). It is difficult to be forward looking about the increased demand for performance from games when a new version of DirectX is around the corner, but we certainly feel comfortable saying that these cards can handle just about anything developers will throw at a DX9/PS3.0 class of hardware at a reasonable resolution. For all but the most demanding gamers, the X1900 GT and 7900 GS/GT are very good values.

In our intra-architectural comparisons, our tests indicate that the 7900 GS has good potential to scale well with clock speed. If NVIDIA decided to bin and sell these chips based on the failure of one vertex pipe and one quad, it is likely that we could see the same huge potential for overclockability we noted with the 7900 GT. Hopefully this time around manufacturers will better understand the limitations of the hardware before selling parts with clock speeds and failure rates that are both way too high.

We can also say with confidence that the extra vertex and pixel pipelines aren't just their for looks on the 7900 GT. With every game but Half-Life 2: Episode One we saw a substantial performance increase due to the inclusion of 4 more pixel pipes and one more vertex pipe. With performance increases of 10-15% being common otherwise, the efficiency of adding more hardware in parallel is very clear. We don't see a perfectly linear scaling with vertex or pixel pipelines, but we certainly see a huge boost as we move to wider GPUs.

For those more demanding gamers, we will have to wait to see if the 7950 GT can quench our desire for affordable high resolution gaming. Based on clock speeds, we can easily say that performance will fall short of the 7900 GTX. As the 7950 GT is basically an overclocked 7900 GT with twice the memory on board (or an underclocked 7900 GTX if you prefer), it wouldn't be beyond the realm of possibility to see some overclocked 7900 GT solutions winning out in some benchmarks. We are hoping to demonstrate this next week.

We have not included SLI/CrossFire performance testing in this article, and NVIDIA touts that is one of the major advantages the 7900 GS holds over the competition. We will be looking at multi-GPU performance next week in the 7950 GT article. That does present some additional considerations, as you will have the option of getting two 7900 GS cards as opposed to a single 7900 GTX -- provided you have the appropriate motherboard.

On a slightly more editorial note, while we do have a hard launch for the 7900 GS, the 7950 GT is not available today. Between this semi-hard launch and ATI's paper launch last month, we are a little concerned about the future. Not only do hard launches make it easier for reviewers to recommend the proper product, they help protect consumers from debacles on the order of the phantom Radeon X700 XT. Unless we can buy it when it launches, we can't be sure it will even exist in the retail market. We sincerely hope that these recent missteps by ATI and NVIDIA are not the beginning of a pattern.