Undoubtedly, gamers are the primary market for 3D graphics consumer cards. As with any other product, the faster the performance, the higher the price you must pay. Look at high end graphics cards such as ATI's Radeon X1900XTX and NVIDIA's GeForce 7900GTX - these cards are selling at about USD 450 to 600. Having finished the reviews of both cards, we find ourselves asking the question: how will these cards cope with newer games. NVIDIA seems more than happy to 'fix' everything with a driver update (Battlefield 2, Oblivion, Tomb Raider: Legend), much to the anguish of users. Users with ATI cards is somewhat better off - new games usually work right of the bat without any major (graphical) issues.



The key here is not just measuring frame rates be it minimum, average and maximum fps, but to see just how the card perform with heavier workloads - efficiency. For games, heavier workloads usually means higher resolution textures, which is memory related and loads of shader effects, which are fillrate related. So, what we're interested in is both fillrate and bandwidth efficiency of a graphics card. Today, we will be examing the GeForce 7900GTX from that perspective.

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