EVGA 7900GTX 512MB SLI Video Card Review :: E-GeForce 7900GTX Features

• 278 Million Transistors
• 90 nanometers on TSMC's low-K Dialelectic process
• 24 Pixel Pipelines
• 8 Vertex Shader Pipelines
• 16 ROPs
• 650MHz Core clock speed
• 1.6GHz Memory clock speed
• DirectX 9.0c
• Pixel Shader 3.0
• Vertex Shader 3.0
• HDR
• Up to SLI 16XAA
• Up to 16X AF
• Render To Texture

The 7900GTX is based upon NVIDIA's G71 core, a slightly improved G70 architecture. Consisting of 278 Million transistors, the 7900GTX has 24 million transistors less than the previous high-end, the 7800GTX due to some optimizations to the architecture. The 7900GTX is one of NVIDIA's first 90 nanometer products, which allowed a speed jump from the 500MHz of the 7800GTX to the 650MHz of the 7900GTX. The 7900GTX has 24 Pixel Shader Pipelines, the same as the 7800GTX.

There are two primary gaming APIs on the computer today, Direct3D and OpenGL. Microsoft's Direct3D was introduced many moons ago with the first iteration of Windows. Over the years, DirectX has gone through many iterations culminating with DirectX 9.0 in 2002. DX9 was the first API to have two different Shader Models, 2.0 and 3.0. ATI's RADEON 9700 Pro was the first Shader Model 2.0 card released in 2002. Shader Model 3.0 hardware didn't arrive till April of 2004 with the 6800 series from NVIDIA.

Modern games like Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, Tomb Raider Legends, Oblivion and Prey use Pixel and Vertex Shaders throughout. Oblivion uses Pixel Shaders in all of the surfaces and water. You immediately notice the beautiful use of shaders in the architecture, the facial animation, the sky and other areas of the game. NVIDIA teamed up with Eidos to use advanced Pixel and Vertex shader effects in a demo available on www.nzone.com.

SLI connector

Two 7900GTX 512MB cards

SLI stands for Scalable Link Interface. 3DFX was the first company to introduce the idea of using two video cards to improve performance in games. NVIDIA reintroduced the idea in 2004. To enable SLI, simply install a SLI-ready motherboard, insert the two video cards, the bridge and install the Forceware drivers. SLI is enabled by clicking a popup or by NVIDIA's Control Panel applet. SLI can nearly double the performance of a single card in certain situations. NVIDIA also introduced two new Anti-Aliasing modes with SLI, SLI 8x and SLI 16x improving image quality.

One thing that ATI SM 3.0 cards can do that NVIDIA cards cannot is High Dynamic Range Lighting+Multisample Anti-Aliasing at the same time in most games. Some games like Half Life 2 Episode 1 and Serious Sam 2 use a method of HDR that allows NVIDIA cards to do both at the same time, but Oblivion looks best on an ATI card because of this. To work the combo you need the Chuck driver off ATI's website install it and you can enable HDR+MSAA. Hopefully NVIDIA will have a fix for this as well and make their card as appealing as the ATI card.