[Pc_Support] nVidia G70 (GeForce 7800 GTX)

[Bryan J. Smith]

Well, nVidia has released a new series of video card.
What was previously known as the NV47 is no longer.
This baby is brand new, and actually little "conservative" in design.

I mean, it only takes up 1 slot, yet bests the 2 slot, supercooled and
overclocked GeForce 6800 Ultra.  At the same time, it spanks both the
6800 Ultra as well as ATI's R520 (Radeon X850) silly, let alone the 1
slot GeForce 6800GT.  And despite it's 302M transistors, it only uses
100W, typical of the 6800 series too.

Moving to a 110nm (0.11um) processes has helped.  And the 430MHz GPU and
600MHz DDR3 clock isn't really much beyond the 6800 Ultra (and even the
6800 Ultra Extreme was 450MHz).  There's clearly far more potential in
the design, and overclockers will rejoice once again.

But internally, the design is even more capable than before -- yet to be
tapped by new OpenGL 2.0 titles, or the much delayed even beyond NT 6.0
"Longhorn" release Windows Graphics Foundations (WGF 2.0, fka "DirectX
10").  Thank God nVidia's introduce of a GPU that was slower until
enabled with newer features (and even then it didn't always help enough,
especially on the lower-end cards) was a "fluke" left to the NV3x "FX"
series (especially the FX5200, FX5500 and the ultra-crippled
FX5700"LE"), and not repeated here.

Also included is new, _high_definition_ video in/video out (VIVO),
although nVidia's track record on video support is not the best.  They
seem to be much less interested in tying up transistor logic for this
than ATI, although such nVidia 2D interfaces aren't so proprietary
either (just the 3D, although ATI has been the same on 3D since the R300
series), giving Linux support a good probability of happening.

Some show-stoppers for some are the lack of even a planned AGP offering,
and DVI seems to be the requirement, or at least analog VGA (mini-DB15)
is not offered in the SLI setup right now.  This is clearly a "high-end"
board at $600+.  Although only 256MB is offered, which is curious given
the fact that a 512MB 6800GT/Ultra is now available.  Maybe that's
something for just the professional crowd.

It will be interesting to see when we might expect more entry level
cards of the 7000 series.  The Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) is going to ship
a G70 that is similar, although fabbed on a 90nm (0.09um) process --
possibly a little lower power and other limitations for its use.  I can
only assume that once the 6000 series goes by the wayside in 12-15
months, we'll probably see a low-end 7000 series for AGP with VGA for
legacy systems.

AnandTech review:  
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2451  

Tom's Hardware articles/reviews:  
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20050621/index.html  
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20050622/index.html  


-- 
Bryan J. Smith                                     b.j.smith at ieee.org 
--------------------------------------------------------------------- 
It is mathematically impossible for someone who makes more than you
to be anything but richer than you.  Any tax rate that penalizes them
will also penalize you similarly (to those below you, and then below
them).  Linear algebra, let alone differential calculus or even ele-
mentary concepts of limits, is mutually exclusive with US journalism.
So forget even attempting to explain how tax cuts work.  ;->