Did Nvidia do what it promised?

IN THE STORY ABOUT Nvidia's new 7800GTX yesterday, there were a few items left hanging. Most of those have now been answered in one way or another.

The first is the availability of the new cards. Many speculated that they would be in short supply, or worse yet, priced to the moon by speculators. A few calls and a couple of web searches shows that they are in plentiful supply and there is almost no gouging. Monarch has three cards in stock, two at the MSRP of $599, and one at $649, but it is a VIVO unit. You get a copy of the Star Wars Lego game with it though. Basically they are all over the place, and while there is no discounting yet, there is no gouging either. I wish all launches would go like this.

In a further encouraging sign, all the usual suspects released cards, and my inbox was flooded with press releases. Those include Chaintech and its AE78GTX. This was quickly followed by Albatron with the 7800GTX, no bonus points for guessing the GPU this card uses, and Point of View with its aptly named 7800GTX. 4 minutes later, the AOpen Aeolus 7800GTX-DVD256 release came in, but it was in German, so I can't tell you why it is special. Inno3D was last up with the same name as the middle two, a card called the 7800GTX. If you think writing is easy, you try and figure out something interesting to say about three cards with exactly the same name, and two others that have a different sticker on them but are otherwise the same.

What this means is that the current crop of 7800GTXs are all most likely based on the NVidia reference design. Some may worry about lack of differentiation, but as always that will come in short order, and more importantly, the current crop of cards are identical to a really good design. This means that you can't really go wrong with any of them.

Next is the abnormally low CS:Source test scores I got yesterday. It seems that NV cards ignore the 6xAA setting, meaning that the NV cards were effectively running without AA, giving them a huge advantage. The numbers between NV cards and driver versions are still relevant though, just not in comparison to the ATI X850XT.

Moving along to drivers, it seems that Nvidia launched a newer driver with the 7800GTX, Forceware v77.72. It is not WHQL certified yet, but it is a candidate, so certification should happen soon enough. I installed it on two machines and several cards without incident.

In closing, some people may doubt have lingering doubts about availability due to the past paper launches of product after product from every vendor under the sun in the graphics world. Here is a letter I got from someone who bought one at retail before the NDA went up. They really are out there. µ

I got my eVGA 7800 GTX yesterday at (name deleted to protect the guilty) in Burbank CA. Don't ask me how those NDA busters sold one a day ahead of launch but they did. Here are my results so far:

3d Mark 2003 = 16,180 {I remember when they said 10,000 was impossible} 3d Mark 2005 = 7,309 {I remember when my 5900SE scored 1,000} Aquamark 2003 = 72,328

SpecViewerPerf 8.1

SUM_RESULTS3DSMAXSUMMARY.TXT 3dsmax-03 Weighted Geometric Mean = 23.53
SUM_RESULTSCATIASUMMARY.TXT catia-01 Weighted Geometric Mean = 13.86
SUM_RESULTSENSIGHTSUMMARY.TXT ensight-01 Weighted Geometric Mean = 17.25
SUM_RESULTSLIGHTSUMMARY.TXT light-07 Weighted Geometric Mean = 11.04
SUM_RESULTSMAYASUMMARY.TXT maya-01 Weighted Geometric Mean = 27.38
SUM_RESULTSPROESUMMARY.TXT proe-03 Weighted Geometric Mean = 19.18
SUM_RESULTSSWSUMMARY.TXT sw-01 Weighted Geometric Mean = 17.31
SUM_RESULTSUGSSUMMARY.TXT ugs-04 Weighted Geometric Mean = 11.14