Com-Central.net

Shadow_Bshwackr · Posted: Fri Feb 03, 2006 10:24 am Post subject: Nvidia GeForce 7800 GS AGP...

AGP? Huh? Yep, there's still a lot of people running AGP class video cards out there and the mainboard/memory their using still has the 'horsepower' to run most anything they want, but one thing to note is, the games aren't going to let you stay with that old rig. Hmmm....could be this card might buy you some time....lol

Interesting article about how this card may be for you...

GeForce 7800 GS AGP boards are specified with 256MB of GDDR 3 at 600MHz (1.2GHz effective), endowing the 375MHz GPU with gobs of memory bandwidth with which to get the job done. Texturing rate on mainstream GeForce 7-series products is limited by memory bandwidth, so the apparent excess shouldn't go to waste. There are 16 pixel pipelines.

Since it's powered by a G70, the GeForce 7800 GS AGP gets some excellent additions to image quality and potential performance per clock (and Watt), compared to 6-series products like 6800 GS.

The G70 allows for transparency anti-aliasing, a rendering ability that allows the GPU to essentially push alpha textures through the antialiasing hardware for extra Z or colour samples outside of what they'd usually get, at a sub-pixel level. The resulting extra data allows the chip to draw alpha textures at higher IQ than normal. The G70's texture cache gets tweaked for better access performance when filtering, so the hit for applying IQ enhancing texture filtering is less than 6-series hardware.

The G70 is also better at issuing scalar instructions in its vertex units - of which there are six in the 7800 GS AGP - which I guess to be down to auto-vectorisation tweaks. Triangle setup is appreciably quicker than 6-series per clock and it's well known that the fragment hardware in the G70 will do an NV35-esque double MADD issue per cycle, 4D wide.

In easy to understand terms, the G70 takes a poop on NV40, clock-for-clock, especially when it comes to pixel shading. So even moderately clocked there's a lot to be said for it.

To read the whole article: Click HERE!

Shades · Posted: Fri Feb 03, 2006 7:19 pm Post subject: Re: Nvidia GeForce 7800 GS AGP...

Worth looking around, if you're thinking of going for one of those;
The AGP 7800-GS's have been out for a short while in the UK now, but the one in that review has the GPU running at 375MHz.
There's a BFG one on the market which comes pre-clocked at 400MHz, and an XFX one at 440 MHz.
All pre-clocked and tested.

[Edit: I have an AGP system but I wouldn't try to upgrade it via a better AGP card now. I'll rebuild this year but I will go PCI-e which means also changing the mobo, and while I'm doing that I'll get a better cpu as well. If I were to buy the AGP option, I'd only be delaying the inevitable because the 7800 is scraping the barrel of what remains of AGP now, and in another year there won't be many new releases that could run on it at all.]

[Re-Edit: Just had a quick chat with some techy friends about this and, while they agreed, they also said that for exactly that reason they're predicting the price of this card will tumble very quickly after release and it could even be withdrawn rather than go below a certain level. Some Swedish guy's already clocked one up to a GTX as well.]

Com-Central.net

Select Language

Login

`±`Recent Visitors

`±`User Info-big

Archive Revive
Username:
This is an archived topic - your reply will not be appended here. Instead, a new topic will be generated in the active forum. The new topic will provide a reference link to this archived topic.

Com-Central.net

Select Language

Login

±Recent Visitors

±User Info-big

`±`Recent Visitors

`±`User Info-big