NVIDIA's AGP Only GeForce 7800 GS

Final Words

With the Radeon X850 XTPE holding the top spot on AGP hardware up until now, NVIDIA hasn't had a solid high performance AGP showing since the power hungry 6800 Ultra. With prices on the aging, high-end 6 series parts absurdly high, it is quite nice to see an AGP 7 series part show up with good performance, lower power requirements, better features and a friendlier price tag, at about $300. Even though the X850 XTPE is generally faster than the new NVIDIA part, the price tag is a little steeper as well, at about $400. This leaves ATI holding onto a claim for the fastest AGP solution out there, but the feature set of the 7 series part is a bit more refined than that of the venerable X850.

Along with high performance (for an AGP system), the 7800 GS brings a more efficient architecture to the platform. With the math revisions and added features of the 7 series, per clock and per watt performance is increased over the 6 series parts. Transparency AA might not be very performance-friendly on newer games, but older titles and CPU limited games will certainly benefit from enabling it. Other features, like SM3.0, are also an advantage, as most of the ATI AGP hardware still doesn't support this. It remains to be seen what ATI will do in response to this move by NVIDIA, but the fact that there are AGP versions of the X1600 available indicates that ATI hasn't completely pulled out of the platform yet.

We aren't quite sure how to call the availability aspect of this launch quite yet, and we await your input on the subject. Certainly, the ideal situation is for everything to happen at exactly the same time, around the world for every launch, but there are limits to what is possible. On the one hand, NVIDIA has arranged for their launch to include hardware in brick and mortar rather than just online, but on the other hand, we can't buy it today. Please let us know what is important to you, as I'm sure NVIDIA are interested as well.

For now, we can certainly conclude that the 7800 GS is a worthy AGP part. We will take a further look into performance with the BFG and EVGA versions of the 7800 GS if there is any interest.