Just as Nvidia usher in this generation's graphics cards in the form of the GeForce 7800 GTX, we are now set for the card's little brother. If you just can't summon the cash for the coveted graphics board then maybe the 7800 GT will be more to your liking.
Nvidia launched the 7800 GTX just over a month and a half ago with a price tag of $449. Now a 'slightly' slower version will soon be introduced at a reduced price, without sacrificing that much of the card's power. The GT equivalent of Nvidia's recent beast was showcased at Quakecon today.
With the introduction of GT-flavour 7800s, the 6800 series is also set to take a price drop.
With the 6800 Ultra still a little overpriced at between four and five hundred USD, the introduction of the 7800 GT will either push the 6800 Ultra way down in price or out of the market. With the line of G70 parts, we don't see a fundamental feature set expansion from the previous 6 Series parts. Moving from the GeForce 4 to the FX series, DX9 was first introduced, and the 6 Series brought SM 3.0 real programmable shader performance and native PCI Express. Without offering extremely compelling new features, the spotlight will shift to pure performance, cost, and power/heat. Rounding out the high end, the 7800 GT fills in the performance gap between the 7800 GTX and the 6800 Ultra.
In our minds, there is really no reason for NVIDIA to release any more consumer desktop parts based on G70 when the NV4x series takes care of the rest of the line up very well. Perhaps it would be possible to release a faster passively cooled card based on a very low clock speed part with more pipelines than the current low end for the Home Theater PC (HTPC) crowd who demand silence along side performance. Other than that, the mobile space is the only other segment we see really yearning for G70 power. Until performance is increased beyond the 7800 GTX, it will be hard for us to see a reason for a new desktop 7 series part.
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