The GeForce 7800 GTX is a considerable performance advance over its predecessor, the 6800 Ultra. It's markedly faster in terms of pixel shader power, texel fill rate, and vertex throughput. The 7800 GTX is easily the fastest graphics card on the market now, dethroning the Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition. More importantly, the GeForce 7800 GTX makes high-dynamic-range rendering run at acceptable speeds in games like Far Cry and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, so the performance gains bring tangible benefits by making tasty new forms of eye candy possible in real time. And if you pair up a couple of 7800 GTXs in SLI, you can get nearly twice the peak rendering power. Some of those benchmark scores are still making my head spin.
techreport said:Yes, the 7800 GTX is grand progress on the semiconductor front, but do you want to pay $599 in order to fund GPU research and development? Or $1200 for the big prize of an SLI rig? You're certainly getting a lot of rendering power for all of that money, but not many apps will use it. Perhaps the bragging rights are worth it for some folks, but for playing today's games, I'd probably settle for a GeForce 6600 GT or a Radeon X800 XL. I'm cheap that way, I suppose.