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

The GeForce 7900 Series, Continued

Although there is no change to the amount of physical units compared to the previous design, Nvidia has optimized how they can perform.

"We changed the ROP performance as well as reconfigured some of the pipelines to make sure the card was more optimized over G70," Nvidia said.

And this is design tweak is coupled with much higher clock speeds afforded by the 90-nm process. The vertex shaders run asynchronously to the rest of the core as G70 did but at 700 MHz versus a 470 MHz clock speed. The G71 core runs at 650 MHz versus the G70's 470 MHz speed and is even 200 MHz faster than the GeForce 7800 GTX 512 core.

Nvidia also upped the memory speed compared to the GeForce 7800 GTX, which ran at 600 MHz. To utilize faster GDDR3 modules than in the previous reference design, Nvidia is able to achieve speeds of 800 MHz using a 256-bit wide bus.