- .11 micron process
- 302 million transistors
- DirectX 9.0
- Pixel Shader 3.0
- Vertex Shader 3.0
- High Dynamic Range
- Floating Point 16-bit blending
- Render to Texture
- Transparency Multisample and Supersample Antialiasing
- PureVideo
- G70 chipset
- 20 pixel pipelines
- 7 Vertex Shader pipelines
- OpenGL 2.0
ATI is on the verge of launching their next-generation video card, the R5xx series. It’s said to be on a 0.09 micron process, allowing very high clock speeds. The problem with their cards is it is about 5 months after NVIDIA launched their 7800 series and is late. NVIDIA chose to stick with the proven 0.11 micron process and was able to release their cards 4-5 months before ATI launched theirs. 302 million transistors is a large number, nearly doubling the 150 million found on the GEFORCE 5800 Ultra of 2003.
Key features of the 7800 series include support for DirectX 9.0 Pixel and Vertex Shader 3.0. Microsoft first introduced DirectX 9.0 in late 2002 with Pixel Shader 2.0 and 3.0, and Vertex Shader 2.0 and 3.0 specifications included. One thing that’s key to PS 3.0 is the addition of dynamic branching, near infinite length shader programs and nearly identical feature sets between the PS and VS. ATI’s new card will likely support these standards when it is announced in the next day or so.
Another key feature of NVIDIA’s 7800 series is High Dynamic Range support. HDR is found in games like Far Cry, HL2 Lost Coast, and others. The dynamic range of a scene on a computer game is the ratio between the lightest and darkest parts of the scene. Standard lighting in a game with 24 bits (8-bits per pixel) +8 bits for the alpha channel provide a dynamic range of 255:1. The human eye can see a range of 10,000:1. HDR in games allows the gamer to see natural looking light.
