Conclusions
The GeForce 7800 GTX is a considerable performance advance over its predecessor, the 6800 Ultra. It's markedly faster in terms of pixel shader power, texel fill rate, and vertex throughput. The 7800 GTX is easily the fastest graphics card on the market now, dethroning the Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition. More importantly, the GeForce 7800 GTX makes high-dynamic-range rendering run at acceptable speeds in games like Far Cry and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, so the performance gains bring tangible benefits by making tasty new forms of eye candy possible in real time. And if you pair up a couple of 7800 GTXs in SLI, you can get nearly twice the peak rendering power. Some of those benchmark scores are still making my head spin.

The fact that the card comes with a quiet, single-slot cooler only sweetens the deal.

As for whether or not the GeForce 7800 GTX is a smart buy, that is another question entirely. The 7800 GTX is so powerful, not many current games are able to take full advantage of it. We threw some of the most graphically intense games around at it, at high resolutions with lots of edge and texture antialiasing, and at times, we were barely able to make it slow down. Yes, the 7800 GTX is grand progress on the semiconductor front, but do you want to pay $599 in order to fund GPU research and development? Or $1200 for the big prize of an SLI rig? You're certainly getting a lot of rendering power for all of that money, but not many apps will use it. Perhaps the bragging rights are worth it for some folks, but for playing today's games, I'd probably settle for a GeForce 6600 GT or a Radeon X800 XL. I'm cheap that way, I suppose.

At the end of the day, it's mighty hard to evaluate the 7800 GTX's prospects fully until we've had a look at the upcoming competitor from ATI. The world already seems to know that ATI's R520 will support Shader Model 3.0 and be built on a 90nm fab process. Until we know what mix of performance and . . . well, more performance the R520 offers, it's hard to say whether the 7800 GTX packs enough power to keep NVIDIA on top. We can say that NVIDIA is clearly in the lead now. Not only does ATI have to deliver the R520, but it also must successfully launch its CrossFire platform in order to keep up. Meanwhile, the 7800 GTX is available now. In pairs, if you'd like. ATI has its work cut out for it.