ATI and Nvidia's Same-Day Mega-Launch Mayhem

GeForce 7600GT

The midrange product debuting today is the GeForce 7600GT. G73 can be described as half of the G71 with the exception of the vertex shader count. The 178-million transistor processor contains five vertex shaders, 12 pixel shaders and eight Raster Operations (ROP) pipelines that can manage eight color and eight blend operations per clock. The GeForce 7900 or G71 has 16 ROP pipelines and can thus handle 16 color and 16 blend operations per clock.

The next obvious difference between the 7900 series and the 7600GT are the clock frequencies. The GeForce 7600GT operates with a 560 MHz core with vertex and pixel shaders running at the same frequency. The GDDR3 memory runs at 700 MHz but has a 128-bit bus width. This makes the available bandwidth 22.4 GB/s versus the GeForce 7900GTX available 51.2 GB/s.