Galaxy GeForce 7300 GT GDDR3 video card review

While low-end graphics boards have been the favourites of system builders for some time now, thanks to their support for features that they are often too slow to use yet and large amounts of very slow memory - Features which really don't help end users in the slightest, but are invaluable to OEMs who are trying to tick off as many marketing check boxes as possible.

Travel to the really low-end in this day and age and you will continue to find parts that are anything but suitable for the vast majority of gamers, but thankfully the market for budget graphics boards is now much broader and takes in a wider price range, giving users the opportunity to find a cheap part that actually hopes to offer respectible 3D performance.  One such part that comes under this school of thinking is NVIDIA's GeForce 7300 GT, which hopes to offer the casual gamer decent performance without breaking the bank.

As we saw with their take on the GeForce 7600 GS however, NVIDIA AIB partner Galaxy have all but thrown away the reference GeForce 7300 GT design in order to provider a far cooler (in both senses of the word) and turbo-charged take on this part.  Today, we see how Galaxy's GDDR equipped GeForce 7300 GT shapes up.

GeForce 7600 architecture

Before you ask - No, I haven't made a mistake in the heading of this section... The GeForce 7300 GT is in fact based around the G73 core architecture seen on GeForce 7600 boards, and already covered in our Galaxy GeForce 7600 GS review.  Naturally, the part we are looking at today features G73 in a cut-down form to fit its target market - More specifically, minus one quad of pixel pipelines, giving it a total of two pixel quads (or eight pipelines), and with just four vertex shaders compared to five on GeForce 7600 boards.  The GeForce 7300 GT also has a cut down number of ROPs, down to four from the eight seen on true GeForce 7600 parts.

From a reference point of view, the GeForce 7300 GT features both core and memory speeds of 350MHz, with the 256MB of RAM on-board made up of GDDR2 modules.  As we've already mentioned, the part from Galaxy we are looking at today does away with those reference specifications well and truly, so read on to see how things have changed for the better in this souped up part.

You can see the entire feature set of the GeForce 7300 GT 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.




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