The information on the nVidia GeForce 7800 Gtx videocard, earlier leaked out, seems to be valid. Tweakers.net have got hold of the G70-core official specifications and these appear to be the same as the specs in the rumor: 0,11µ-core with a core speed of 430MHz, 24 pixel pipelines and 8 vertex shaders. Nvidia renewed the shaderarchitecture in the G70-core, bringing CineFX to version 4.0.
The performance in games which use Shader model 3.0 will are considerably improved, says Nvidia. They claim that – with the use of certain shaders – the performance increase could be as high as 2 times, when compared to the NV45, particularly thanks to a new design of the texture Units. More specifically HDR-effects (high dynamic range) with 64-bits floating point textures.
It is said that Unreal Engine 3.0 will use a lot of these effects to render lights more realistically. According to our information the card will be approximately 50% faster than the GeForce 6800 ultra, and score between 18,000 and the 20,000 points in 3DMark03.
Beside better performance, the GeForce 7-series will also deliver better image quality than the current generation. With what Nvidia calls Intellisample 4.0; a number of relatively small improvements have been introduced in the field of anti-aliasing (AA) and anisotropic filtering (AF). Also the video decoder is tweaked for better performances and quality.
Furthermore Nvidia claims that the new architecture is compatible with Longhorn.
Most likely Nvidia is talking about “Windows Graphics foundation (version 1.0)â€, which means – among other things – that the chip can do multithreading.
The card - which the slogan gets "Full Throttle Graphics" - will be shown at Computex (31 May up to 4 June) by Asus and MSI, but it is unclear if nVidia will announce the new chip there too. Earlier rumors about Nvidia’s official accouchement spoke of 22 June.