BFG GeForce 7800 GS OC AGP review
As we mentioned earlier in the week during our review of Galaxy's GeForce 7600 GS part, the AGP interface may no longer be the slot du jour amongst computer hardware and graphics enthusiasts, but that doesn't mean it's dead just yet - There are still reams of perfectly good, relatively high performance AGP-based systems out there, many of whom are coming to that inevitable crossroads where they need a little new GPU loving to brighten up their gaming experiences.
It seems that NVIDIA have understood this requirement a little better than ATI - Although they haven't bridged or otherwise translated any of their highest end G70 or any G71-based parts to AGP, they have instead created an entirely new SKU, the GeForce 7800 GS, to sit pretty at the top of the AGP performance pile. It is such a part that we shall be looking at today, in the form of BFG's factory overclocked GeForce 7800 GS OC part. If you're after a big boost to graphics performance on your AGP system, read on.
GeForce 7800 architecture
Unusually, despite its relative age now, we're actually yet to properly cover the G70 architecture which powers the GeForce 7800 GS in a review. So, although I'll keep it brief, there's no time like the present. Much like its successor, G71, G70 in its full form is made up of 24 pixel pipelines (or six pixel quads), matched up with sixteen ROPs, eight vertex shaders and utilises a 256-bit memory bus. Unlike G71, which was shrunk to the 90 nanometre process, G70 is manufactured using 110 nanometre. The only SKU which uses this full configuration of the core is the GeForce 7800 GTX, together with reference core and memory clocks of 550 and 850MHz respectively for the little-seen 512MB part, and 430 and 600MHz respectively for the 256MB variant. Below this SKU comes the GeForce 7800 GT, which loses a single quad of fragment pipelines (giving it 20 in total) and one vertex shader alongside a core clock of 400MHz and memory clocked to 500MHz on the reference part.
The part we are looking at today, the GeForce 7800 GS, is further reduced in comparison to the GeForce 7800 GT, losing a further quad of pipelines and another vertex shader. This leaves it with a grand total of sixteen fragment pipelines (or four fragment quads) and six vertex shaders. Reference clocks for this SKU weigh in at 375MHz on the core and 600MHz for memory - Of course, BFG's offering in a factory overclocked one, so let's now move on to look at what it has to offer.
You can see the entire feature set of the GeForce 7800 GS below.
- CineFX 4.0 Architecture
- Full DirectX9 Support
- DirectX9 Shader Model 3.0 Support
- Vertex Shader 3.0
- Pixel Shader 3.0
- Internal 128-bit Floating Point (FP32) Precisions
- Unlimited Shader Lengths
- Up to 16 textures per pass
- Support for FP16 Texture Formats with Filtering, FP32 without
- Non-Power of two texture support
- Multiple Render Targets
- NVIDIA High Precision Dynamic Range Technology
- Full FP16 Floating Point Support throughout the entire pipeline
- FP16 Floating Point Frame Buffer Support
- Intellisample 4.0
- Up to 4X, Gamma Adjusted, Native Multi-sampling FSAA with rotated grid sampling
- Transparent Multi-Sampling and Super-Sampling
- Lossless colour, texture, z-data compression
- Fast Z Clear
- Up to 16x Anisotropic Filtering
- UltraShadow Technology
- NVIDIA SLI Support
- NVIDIA Pure Video Technology
- Adaptable Programmable video processor
- High Definition MPEG2 and WMV9 acceleration
- Spatial Temporal de-interlacing
- Inverse 2:2 and 3:2 pull-down (Inverse Telecine)
- 4-tap horizontal, 5-tap vertical scaling
- Overlay color temperature correction
- Microsoft® Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) supports multiple video windows with full video quality and features in each window
- Integrated HDTV output
- Advanced Display options
- Dedicated on-chip video processor
- nView Multi Display technology
- Single and Dual-Link TMDS Transmitter
- Digital Vibrance Control 3.