EVGA e-GeForce 7600GS 512MB Video Card Review :: EVGA e-GeForce 7600GS Features

• G73 chip
• 12 pixel pipelines
• 5 Vertex Shader Pipelines
• 400MHz core clock speed
• 800MHz memory clock speed
• 256-bit memory interface
• 90 nanometer process
• DirectX 9.0c
• Pixel Shader 3.0
• Vertex Shader 3.0
• HDR
• SLI

The 7600GS is based upon the same G73 chip found on the 7600GT video card, just with lower clock speeds for the core and memory. The 7600GT has a core clock of 560MHz and a memory clock speed of 1.4GHz. The e-GeForce 7600GS 512MB has a clock speed of 400MHz for the core and 800MHz for the memory, a big difference necessitated by the target market of $149 video cards instead of $199.

G73 is a 90 nanometer process chip. When NVIDIA introduced the 6800 series in 2004, they were on a 130 nanometer process, meaning the cards ran hot, and required a external power connector for the mainstream and high-end versions of the card. The G73 has 178 million transistors.

The main push of video cards in the near future (2007) will be Windows Vista. NVIDIA calls the 7600GS Windows Vista ready. The 7600GS supports Shader Model 3.0 and should run the Aero Glass GUI very well. Windows Vista will introduce Shader Model 4.0 with unified Shaders, geometry Shaders and more. For now, virtually every video card on the market supports Pixel and Vertex Shader 3.0.

HDR or High Dynamic Range rendering renders lighting naturally. Early video cards were integer based lighting and limits the range of lighting to 255:1. The Floating Point processing on newer cards allows cards like the GeForce 7600GS a wider range of lighting calculations. 32-bit blending means that the card can render a scene with a contrast ratio of 65,535:1, meaning there's brighter brights, and darker darks.

One feature that ATI cards are capable of doing that NVIDIA cards are not is HDR with Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing enabled at the same time with floating point blending formats. Some game manufacturers support HDR+MSAA on NVIDIA cards by using alternate modes of HDR. ATI cards have a distinct image quality advantage in games like Oblivion where you can enable HDR+MSAA on a ATI card but not the NVIDIA card.

SLI connection

All NVIDIA cards are capable of running SLI (Scalable Link Interface) mode. This is a feature on NVIDIA cards that can nearly double performance in selected games that have a profile for them to run under SLI mode. The 7600GS has a SLI connector on the top of the PCB. Here you would attach the SLI Bridge from one card to another. Both cards have to be of the same family, in other words two 7600GS cards would work from different manufacturers.

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