7900 Collated Reviews Thread

oweneades · 9 Mar 2006 at 15:50

well on the only review I have looked at, (Guru3d) the 7900GTX seems to be faster. However Hilbert likes changing the colour key for each graph so I may be incorrect. (sometimes the 7900gtx is green and others its blue)

MR.B · 9 Mar 2006 at 15:55

BubbySoup said:
I think for single card users running at 1920x1200+, the choice is still pretty obvious, the X1900XTX is the card to go for.

Not for me, i have two 1920x1200 displays and just got the 7900GTX, it easily matches X1900XTX at that res, and has a more quiet fan.

no_1_dave · 9 Mar 2006 at 16:02

Yea, 7900 GTX is quicker & will be the one I go for

Very close though, very very close!

D.P. · 9 Mar 2006 at 16:04

Gibbo said:
Hi there

So whats the fastest? Who has best image quality?

7900GTX is the fastest, quitest, coolest, least power hungary. Perofrmance difference varies but seems to be around 10-15% faster in the omportant games/settings.

IQ, no discernable difference really, as before.

Goksly · 9 Mar 2006 at 16:07

D.P. said:
IQ, no discernable difference really, as before.

HardOCP still seems to think nvidia have much more shimmering issues. Oh and the X1900 series is cheaper than the 7900's - you seemed to miss that out

Up to £60 cheaper infact

BubbySoup · 9 Mar 2006 at 16:23

Yeah, and Anandtech shows a single X1900xtx beating out the 7900 in most stuff, only in dual card setups does the 7900 pull ahead.

testa12 · 9 Mar 2006 at 16:31

At 1280x1024, the 7900GTX is on par with the x1900XT. With better image quality on the x1900XT, this makes the x1900XTX clearly the better card.

The only question marks are over prices.

chovi · 9 Mar 2006 at 16:38

also, ati and the monthly drivers could easily improve things further, look at the latest with the nice increase in COD2! ....and of course the open gl improvements in the past. I have the x1900xtx and yes the fan can be noisy, but an £18 AC Accelero X2 (ive not installed mine yet) would cure this, and overall would still make cheaper than the 7900gtx. All things considered............im happy with what i have, and would recommend to anyone looking at a top end setup.

Jack Bauer · 9 Mar 2006 at 16:40

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/03/09/ati_and_nvidias_same_day_mega_launch_mayhem/

review on toms

shrek2 · 9 Mar 2006 at 16:59

I have just ordered one for £345 from somewhere else. Cant wait

HighlandeR · 9 Mar 2006 at 17:07

D.P. said:
7900GTX is the fastest, quitest, coolest, least power hungary. Perofrmance difference varies but seems to be around 10-15% faster in the omportant games/settings.

IQ, no discernable difference really, as before.

That was always gonna deserve a roasting on here

MR.B · 9 Mar 2006 at 17:09

testa12 said:
At 1280x1024, the 7900GTX is on par with the x1900XT. With better image quality on the x1900XT, this makes the x1900XTX clearly the better card.

The only question marks are over prices.

Better image quality my ass. And a more noisey fan aswell. Cleary the better card huh? lol.

Sin-Tex · 9 Mar 2006 at 17:12

Gibbo: The XFX 7900 GTX XXX Edition should be very good.

Has any of the reviews been done with overclocked cards.

The one by [H] Enthusiast was done with a card at normal 7900GTX speeds.
i.e. 650 core 1600 mem. But some of you will have noticed that The XFX 7900 GTX XXX Edition is clocked at 700 Core & 1800 mem. ( should be nice )

This is review page of bf 2, not bad but still done using none clocked version.
Would love to see it with the XFX XXX edition.
http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTAwMSwxMCwsaGVudGh1c2lhc3Q=

MR.B · 9 Mar 2006 at 17:19

Sin-Tex said:
.Has any of the reviews been done with overclocked cards.

eVGA GeForce 7900 GTX review. 690 MHz core and 1760 memory.
Deffinately the fastest in the benches at them speeds.

Goksly · 9 Mar 2006 at 17:37

MR.B said:
Better image quality my ass. And a more noisey fan aswell. Cleary the better card huh? lol.

Shimmering, Oh My!

There you go, yes, I said it, “shimmering.” Specifically “texture crawling,” caused by either aggressing filtering or really bad LOD. I notice it using the Dell 2405FPW LCD. I believe the brighter contrast and crisper image coupled with the fact that the screen is just physically larger at a higher resolution all amplifies the problem and makes it extremely visible. I don’t notice it in all games, but there are a couple games in which it did negatively impact my overall level of gaming immersion. While this is another raging Green Vs. Red argument found many places on the Net, we have never specifically addressed it as we have never truly seen it impact our gameplay, but that is simply not the case with our 24” widescreen display.

We found in World of Warcraft there was horrible texture crawling on the ground as you walk through the game. It is most notable on coble stone or dirt paths through forests. Comparatively, texture crawling is much worse on NVIDIA GPUs than on ATI GPUs from our experience, but rest assured this is a problem that is present in both teams’ technologies. I noticed distinctly that moving from a NVIDIA-based GPU to the ATI Radeon X1900 XTX or XL very much reduced this “shimmering” problem in World of Warcraft as textures had less crawling. However, there was still some noticeable. Texture crawling is definitely worse on the GeForce 7800/7900 GPUs though. We were using the default driver settings for both NVIDIA and ATI.

We also noticed texture crawling in EverQuest II. Again on the ground, though this game wasn’t as bad as World of Warcraft. I didn’t really notice it or find anything distracting in games other than those mentioned above. It seems that World of Warcraft is the worst of them all when it comes to shimmering, and it was quite distracting on the large widescreen LCD.

What do we think about this texture crawling issue? We don’t like it and we hope NVIDIA makes some improvements with their filtering quality in their drivers soon. We are aware that you can force a higher mode of texture filtering by turning off some of their optimizations, but honestly we’d like the default filtering quality to simply be better without having to turn off optimizations by hand in their driver control panel. Be aware that some folks are much more alert to this shimmering issue than others, so if you have not seen it, I suggest you don’t go out and look for it.

Do understand that the reason NVIDIA leaves these harsh filtering optimizations on is two-fold. First, on smaller displays, it simply does not make a difference to the vast majority of gamers out there. Second, it gives NVIDIA based GPUs better benchmark numbers. And in the land of video card marketing, where the size of your ePenis score is king, you don’t want to give up a few benchmark points lest you have the other team waving their ePenis back at you.

If NVIDIA is going to leave these optimizations on by default in the driver, and they are well aware that these optimizations negatively impact your gaming experience on larger displays, that is the ruler we are going to judge them by. We will continue to point out filtering issues where we see them impacting our gameplay.

From HardOcp

TheMeekon · 9 Mar 2006 at 17:43

Goksly said:
HardOCP still seems to think nvidia have much more shimmering issues. Oh and the X1900 series is cheaper than the 7900's - you seemed to miss that out Up to £60 cheaper infact

But isn't its first 4 hours of release?!? I seem too remember the x1800xt been a wallet smashing £600 in its first week (correct me if i am wrong

)

Or are these prices set for a while? They always seem too be a lot higher in their first week or 2 of release.

welshtom · 9 Mar 2006 at 17:45

I hated the shimmering so much on my 7800gtx. had to sell it because i couldnt get on with it. It really is a poor effort from nvidia.

Tom

Goksly · 9 Mar 2006 at 17:46

Well people are talking about buying them now... so we use the prices they are at now?
I would be surprised if nvidia dont match ATI's pricing structure in a few weeks considering the die size - but then again we dont know how much R&D costs nvidia have pumped in. For all we know, they need to keep the prices high to make a profit :}
So er yeah - prices should slump, but by how much - only nvidia know :}

MR.B · 9 Mar 2006 at 17:46

Goksly said:
From HardOcp

Ok, so worser shimmering with nVidia hardware but better AA, especially with supersampling + transparent AA as the last 2 comparison pics show in the link i posted. I think that makes 'em pretty equal. So people should stop saying ATI have better image quality because they dont.

FreeStream · 9 Mar 2006 at 17:46

Well, looking at the games I play, at the res I play, my XT wins, esp clocked at over XTX.

Im happy

IQ is way way way better than my 6800U, plus the reviews still say about shimmering etc.

Conc