My thoughts on G70

I've been waiting for a while to speak freely about NVIDIA's G70, or the GeForce 7800 GTX as it is now called. The GPU itself represents a major turning point in NVIDIA's history, it marks the end of NVIDIA's shader replacement in drivers introduced in the NV3x days. With the G70 generation, I think NVIDIA will finally be able to leave the dark days of the GeForce FX behind them; they had a very successful run with the GeForce 6, and all indications are pointing to something similar with the G70 line.

This card isn't for everyone, obviously it is priced at $600 and these days you can build a pretty decent system for that price. But at the $600 price point, there are some users who are willing to shell out that sort of cash - believe it or not. The 7800 GTX is a high resolution performer, if you were going to buy the highest end card out today and money is no object, this is the one to get.

A year from now it will be trounced once more, by something faster, and probably more expensive - but that's how the story goes at this price segment.

Quite possibly the most impressive part of it all is the availability of cards today. As I mentioned while I was at Computex, the first board shipments were ready by June 10th. And not just to OEMs and system builders, but to the channel too; you can go out and buy this card on the day it launched, amazing, it's like I've almost forgotten what that feels like. I remember when more products were launched that way; although NVIDIA has definitely paper launched a fair amount in the past, if they keep on top of this sort of launch schedule kudos to them.

The H.264 "support" has me a bit worried; I hope this isn't another PureVideo. ATI was able to demo hardware accelerated H.264 decoding on R520 at Computex, and they aren't even shipping the GPU. NVIDIA not only launched G70 but also has it in mass production and widely available, yet we have to wait until the end of the year for H.264 decode acceleration? Even for just a demo? Some proof that it works? Hmm...

Other than that, I think NVIDIA has done a great job this time around if you look at the segment they are targeting. Obviously the real question will be, who is more competitive at the lower price points and that remains to be seen. It's a good first blow by NVIDIA; R520 will have to be pretty strong to compete, but also keep in mind that ATI has a little more work to do this generation as they move to PS 3.0 support. NVIDIA took the hit on their transistor budget back with NV4x; ATI waited, so they will have to take that hit now, which may make the competition pretty close.

Just some thoughts, now it's time to fly - more later.