NVIDIA's Tiny 90nm G71 and G73: GeForce 7900 and 7600 Debut
by Derek Wilson on March 9, 2006 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Final Words
Even though we didn't test as many games as we usually do, there is quite a bit of data to digest. On the high end, the 7900 GTX generally performs around the X1900 XT and X1900 XTX. This isn't a blow out victory for either NVIDIA or ATI as far as performance goes, and it looks like we have some very good competition here.
In general, SLI edges out CrossFire in most cases. Under F.E.A.R., Quake 4 and BF2 at high resolutions, SLI shows a larger performance increase than CrossFire. Splinter Cell does do a good job of showing the potential of Crossfire, but as of now we don't see as many games scaling as well with CrossFire as they do with SLI.
While the 7900 GT generally spent its time at the bottom of our high end tests, remember that it performs slightly better than a stock 7800 GTX. This puts it squarely at or better than the X1800 XL and X1800 XT. We didn't include these cards as ATI seems to be backing away from the X1800 lineup with the exception of the X1800 GTO that we were unable to obtain for this launch. As the X1800 GTO looks like a cut down X1800 XL, we can certainly expect the 7900 GT to outperform it as well.
The 7600 GT does quite a good job of splitting the performance difference between the 6800 GS and the 7800 GT. NVIDIA is hoping that we will concentrate on how well the 7600 GT does in comparison to the X1600 XT, but unless the price of the 7600 GT falls to about $150 really fast the comparison isn't really fair. The 6800 GS already performs better than the X1600 and can be found for about $170. It's clear the 7600 GT needs to be positioned against a faster offering from ATI such as their upcoming X1800 GTO. With the X1800 GTO poised to come in at between $250 and $300, we would expect it to compete more with the 7900 GT which will come in somewhere between $300 and $350. The next step up in ATI's lineup after the X1600 XT will be the X1800 GTO, so we need to take that into consideration when looking at the 7600 GT (even though it should be less expensive than the ATI part).
The bottom line here is that it all comes down to price. With the close competition at the high end, we still really don't recommend the X1900 XTX which generally comes in between $580 and $650. In order for the 7900 GTX to really look good compared to the X1900 XT, we will have to push below the $500 mark. NVIDIA has positioned the 7900 GTX as a $500 part, but we can already find X1900 XT cards for about $475; with the tight competition, we would really like to see NVIDIA take advantage of their cost saving die sizes and bring prices down.
The NVIDIA solutions use less power, generate less heat, and are cheaper to produce, but what matters in the end is the performance the end user gets for the price he or she pays. Yes, the 7900 GTX performs on par with the X1900 XT and XTX. With ATI's additional features, will NVIDIA's street prices be low enough to entice gamers? We'll have to wait and see.
Even though we didn't test as many games as we usually do, there is quite a bit of data to digest. On the high end, the 7900 GTX generally performs around the X1900 XT and X1900 XTX. This isn't a blow out victory for either NVIDIA or ATI as far as performance goes, and it looks like we have some very good competition here.
In general, SLI edges out CrossFire in most cases. Under F.E.A.R., Quake 4 and BF2 at high resolutions, SLI shows a larger performance increase than CrossFire. Splinter Cell does do a good job of showing the potential of Crossfire, but as of now we don't see as many games scaling as well with CrossFire as they do with SLI.
While the 7900 GT generally spent its time at the bottom of our high end tests, remember that it performs slightly better than a stock 7800 GTX. This puts it squarely at or better than the X1800 XL and X1800 XT. We didn't include these cards as ATI seems to be backing away from the X1800 lineup with the exception of the X1800 GTO that we were unable to obtain for this launch. As the X1800 GTO looks like a cut down X1800 XL, we can certainly expect the 7900 GT to outperform it as well.
The 7600 GT does quite a good job of splitting the performance difference between the 6800 GS and the 7800 GT. NVIDIA is hoping that we will concentrate on how well the 7600 GT does in comparison to the X1600 XT, but unless the price of the 7600 GT falls to about $150 really fast the comparison isn't really fair. The 6800 GS already performs better than the X1600 and can be found for about $170. It's clear the 7600 GT needs to be positioned against a faster offering from ATI such as their upcoming X1800 GTO. With the X1800 GTO poised to come in at between $250 and $300, we would expect it to compete more with the 7900 GT which will come in somewhere between $300 and $350. The next step up in ATI's lineup after the X1600 XT will be the X1800 GTO, so we need to take that into consideration when looking at the 7600 GT (even though it should be less expensive than the ATI part).
The bottom line here is that it all comes down to price. With the close competition at the high end, we still really don't recommend the X1900 XTX which generally comes in between $580 and $650. In order for the 7900 GTX to really look good compared to the X1900 XT, we will have to push below the $500 mark. NVIDIA has positioned the 7900 GTX as a $500 part, but we can already find X1900 XT cards for about $475; with the tight competition, we would really like to see NVIDIA take advantage of their cost saving die sizes and bring prices down.
The NVIDIA solutions use less power, generate less heat, and are cheaper to produce, but what matters in the end is the performance the end user gets for the price he or she pays. Yes, the 7900 GTX performs on par with the X1900 XT and XTX. With ATI's additional features, will NVIDIA's street prices be low enough to entice gamers? We'll have to wait and see.
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redlotus - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
Where the heck is the X3: Reunion rolling demo benchmark? I was all geeked when AT reviewed it and said "it will make a fine addition to our round of benchmarks." Well then when the heck are you going to start using it? I have yet to see it being used for any of the articles posted since the review.DerekWilson - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
We really will be including X3 in our benchmarks ^_^;;The benchmark does take quite a long time and we needed to optimize our performance testing in order to make sure we could get the article up for the launch.
As I have mentioned, we will be doing a follow up article, and I will look into including the X3 demo.
Thanks,
Derek Wilson
5150Joker - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
Check out these discrepancies with Anandtech's review, boy has this site been going downhill lately:From your older review:
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/ati%20radeon%20...">http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/ati%...0x1900%2...
Then today's review:
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/7900%20and%2076...">http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/7900...%207600%...
How did the XTX Crossfire lose 11 FPS with a very mild bump in resolution? Worst yet, their editors didn't even mention which drivers they used for their review.
Cygni - Friday, March 10, 2006 - link
Wow, its like numbers change with different motherboards, chipsets, and driver revisions. ALRET THE PRESS!
Spinne - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
That is really odd. I'd expect the numbers to swing a little, but 11 fps is 25% of 44fps. Could they be using different benchmarks? Atleast they aren't simply using the numbers from the X1900 review and are actually retesting stuff.DerekWilson - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
We retested with an updated motherboard (RD580) and an updated driver (CAT 6.2).We used the same test for F.E.A.R. (the built in performance test).
I'm not sure why performance would drop in this case.
DerekWilson - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
I've been looking into this, and we also are now using F.E.A.R. 1.03 rather than 1.02 which we used last time.I retested the x1900 xtx crossfire and got the same results. I'm really not sure what happened with this, but I'll keep poking around.
munky - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
FEAR is one game where the x1900's have had a big lead over the 7800's, and your results from today just done make sense. How does a x1900xtx get 59fps at 1280x1024, when the gtx512 also get 59 and the 7900gtx ges 63? Comapare it to the results from another site - http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2006q1/geforce-7...">http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2006q1/geforce-7.... At 1280x960 they place the xtx at 57fps, the 7900gtx at 46, and the gtx512 at 44, which are more inline with the results I have seen before.DigitalFreak - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
There is a known bug in the current drivers that causes a performance drop with the 7900GTX in FEAR. Check our HardOCP's preview, where they use the updated driver from Nvidia. FEAR scores are the same or higher than the 1900XT(x)DerekWilson - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
We went back and updated our performance numbers with the afore mentioned driver fix.NVIDIA released it to the press late in the weekend, but we felt the performance increase was important enough to retest with the new driver.
I haven't read Scott's article at the Tech Report yet, so I don't know what driver he used.