Thoughts
This launch is hard one to figure, price wise, so matching up the SKUs on a price/performance basis is difficult for a number of reasons. MSRP can often fail to translate to the end-user retail price, and competitors will juggle their own pricing shortly after, and it seems like both might be true for these products. Let me have a go for you anyway.MSRP for NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX is $499-$649, GeForce 7900 GT is a $249-$399 part, with GeForce 7600 GT rounding out the range of new products at $199-$229 (with a $179 128MiB version, too). That puts 7900 GTX up against Radeon X1900 XT (~$499) and XTX (~$579), to which it spars decently on performance, but ultimately doesn't land a knock-out blow.
7900 GT mostly squares up to X1800 XL (~$299), which it dispatches easily (although not shown, stay tuned for its addition to our test results), beating its main ATI competitor on launch-day pricing.
Lastly, 7600 GT has no trouble versus X1600 XT (~$179) (again, look out for that soon, post-CeBit). So that leaves NVIDIA with two of its new SKUs very considerable on price/performance, with the GTX one you'd have to spend much more time pondering before wanting to pick one up.
NVIDIA's trouble is image quality, and IQ performance. ATI's latest Radeon parts - X1800 and X1900 - have better overall image quality available, and with better looking pixels always desirable when performance is the same, you'd have to really like 7900 GTX for other reasons to want to select it.
Then you just weigh up the price/performance versus IQ for the other two SKUs. In that respect they make a good case for themselves, with the 7600 GT especially standing out. At the resolutions most people play games, and the IQ levels available on the new products and their competitors, I can recommend 7900 GT and 7600 GT to you, dear reader.
G71 and G73 bring chip-level performance improvements to the products they create, allowing a leg up in top-end performance versus G70 and G71 products of the same ilk. Their next challenge is to bring possible IQ up by the same token, which we'll see over time but which isn't there right now.
It's clear that Vista, due out this year, played a part in NVIDIA's last Shader Model 3.0 gasps (and expect G71 and G73 to flesh out product ranges elsewhere over time, with a plain 7900 and GT 512 likely to appear at some point, and slower 7600 SKUs are just around the corner). They didn't go for absolute top-end performance with 7900 GTX, which if any faster might embarass their first D3D10 part scheduled for Vista's launch.
Availability should be good from launch day, NVIDIA hoping to hard launch all three SKUs world-wide, so if you want to pick one up be mindful of our cooler thoughts earlier in this analysis.
So, to sum up (finally), 7900 GTX replaces 7800 GTX 512 in terms of better price and availability for the same performance, but ATI offer better products in that space, leaving 7900 GT and 7600 GT as the two worth considering for purchase if you're shopping at ~$299 and ~$199 respectively.
So NVIDIA's new GPUs move their game on, but with Vista not far off, only G73 and 7600 GT really shouts loudest.
