Testing The GeForce 7900 GTX

The Testbed

The Graphics Cards

Medium Complexity - 15K Boulders

This is the exact recreation of NVIDIA's 15,000 boulder test.

The first thing ATI pointed out was that no matter how they tested, they could not replicate NVIDIA's results of 64.5 fps for the GeForce 7900 GTX SLI. They claimed that NVIDIA overclocked their SLI cards by at least 6% to achieve that score.

In any case, the ATI cards all trashed their equivalent NVIDIA cards. ATI was proud to point out that you can actually get better performance than the GeForce 7900 GTX SLI by pairing an X1900 XTX with a cheap X1600 XT card.

Low Complexity - 5K Boulders

This, ATI says, will simulate the kind of physics we will see in the first generation games.

Here, even the X1600 XT performed quite well. It was almost half as fast as the GeForce 7900 GTX. Again, the X1900 XTX and X1600 XT combo was faster, albeit just by a little bit, than the GeForce 7900 GTX SLI.

ATI slams the high cost of the NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX, saying that they are cheaper to make than the X1900 XTX or even the old GeForce 7800 GTX. So, NVIDIA is unnecessarily charging their customers for the GPU. ATI says it would be smarter for gamers to just buy the X1900 XTX and link it with a cheap X1600 XT will give it better performance than two GeForce 7900 GTX in SLI.

High Complexity - 30K Boulders

This, ATI says, will simulate the kind of physics we will see in the future games.

ATI claims this shows the superiority of their architecture. As physics complexity increases, the R580 architecture's advanced branching and huge processing power allowed it to far surpass NVIDIA's GPUs. Even the single X1900 XTX can almost match two GeForce 7900 GTX cards in SLI!

Generally, ATI says that their cards are at least 50% faster than equivalent NVIDIA cards. So, why waste your money on NVIDIA silicon when you can get more for less money? At least, that's their pitch!