The Nvidia GeForce 7800 GTX launched 20 years ago, today. Though its name and reputation may have faded over two decades, it was a ground-breaking achievement at the time from the green team. This Nvidia Curie architecture graphics card quickly gained a reputation with its HDR lighting, its leap in shader counts, the significantly improved efficiency over the prior generation, and its performance compared to ATI’s best Radeon R400 architecture cards.
As is the case nowadays, Nvidia lit the fuse of the new Curie line with a flagship, the GeForce 7800 GTX, whose birthday we celebrate in our title. Back then, Nvidia launched this model with immediate availability and an eye-watering (for the era) $599 MSRP. For your hard-earned cash you would get to enjoy the new G70 GPU, with 302 million transistors, and its 24 pixel and 8 vertex shaders, fabbed on a 110nm process. It also came packing 256MB GDDR3 VRAM and embraced SLI technology.
Later in 2005, when a 512MB version of the 7800 GTX was released, we crowned the updated 7800 GTX the “new graphics champion” after our extensive labs testing. Helping it along weren’t just a larger VRAM buffer, it also featured significantly boosted core and memory clocks. Nvidia’s newest flagship had also opened the doors to dual-card SLI configs with an enviable 1GB of VRAM. We also highlighted how the updated card was a solid response to ATI’s launch of the X1000 series of graphics cards, including the new X1800 XT.
You can see seven contemporary 7800 GTX 512MB models tested in our roundup, towards the end of 2005, too. That’s 43 pages of green-tinged nostalgia for you to take over your Sunday. Spoiler, Gigabyte’s 7800 GTX Turbo Force was the fastest solution out of the box.
Not surprisingly, GeForce 7800 GTX graphics cards are now only useful for retro builds or hanging on the wall like an old tech hunting trophy. While this GPU excels in titles of its peak era, official driver updates for the card came to a stop over a decade ago. That limits you to Windows titles build around APIs up to DirectX 9.0c.
Last but not least, the PlayStation 3’s Reality Synthesizer (RSX) chip is said to be based on the 7800 GTX (256MB) with some thoughtful modifications implemented by the collaborative Nvidia / Sony team.