nVidia 7300

[NuclearCrap]

I bet most of you ppl have never heard of the 7300, it's pretty interesting though.

Clear your mind. I'm going to ask you a simple question and you should give the first answer you think of, without taking any time to consider your answer. Ready?

Name one NVIDIA graphics chipset. Quick!

The chances are that many of you will have said 'GeForce 7800 GTX'. Many more might have said '6800 Ultra'. The reason for that is that these top-of-the-range cards receive a lot of press, despite the fact they retail for hundreds of pounds / dollars and relatively few people buy them compared with the total market.

I would bet an entire sheet of bit-tech case badges that not one of you shouted out 'GeForce 6200 with TurboCache!" Am I right?

It's called the 'halo effect': make a lot of noise about a highly desirable, range-topping product and get customers interested. It doesn't matter than 99% of them go home with a lesser model - there is usually a greater profit margin in the low and mid-range products than the top-of-the-range. Capture their hearts with the 2.0 litre turbo Focus RS and they go home with the 1.4 litre and some free floor matts, happy that their new car looks a bit like the one zooming around snow-laden forests in the World Rally Championship.

The same is true with graphics cards. With NVIDIA's previous generation, everyone lusted after GeForce 6800 Ultra SLI but many settled for a more economical 6600 GT. Even entry-level customers could claim to have a 'GeForce 6' by spending less than US$100 on a GeForce 6200 TurboCache. It was DirectX 9.0c compliant, supported Shader Model 3.0 and utilised PureVideo to make video super spangley.

Having moved on to and successfully launched both the GeForce 7800 GTX and GeForce 7800 GT, it was time to revamp their highest volume card and introduce something new at the entry level.

GeForce 7300 GS

The GeForce 7300 GS is that card - NVIDIA's replacement for the GeForce 6200 TurboCache. This change is evolutionary more than revolutionary. There are, of course, new features for the 7300 GS (more on those later) but since NVIDIA jumped from GeForce 6800 to 7800, it stands to reason that this new card would be known at the GeForce 7200.

In fact, we have seen corporate branding which suggests 7200 was considered, but later changed to 7300. Naturally, we drew a blank when we quizzed NVIDIA on this - they instead hinted that a 7200 might well exist at some point in the future, though we doubt this will prove the case.

The most obvious reason for the change was to make the 7300 GS sound a little more than just the 6200 equivalent for the GeForce 7 family. We will find out if that is true, but let's start with the physical layout.


The card is available in two flavours: a full-size PCB featuring VGA, DVI and TV-out (above), and a half-height PCB that drops the aging VGA D-sub and makes do with DVI and TV-out only (below).

As befitting their low-cost role, the card are quite plain. No ridiculous external power connectors here and the GPU requires only a very simple single-slot heatsink & fan to keep it cool. In fact, we have been told to expect passively cooled models from various board partners so the GeForce 7300 GS may prove popular with Home Theatre enthusiasts and low-noise zealots alike.

Let's find out what's under the hood...

[NuclearCrap]

Page 2

Features
The GeForce 7300 GS core has four pixel pipes, three vertex shaders and two pixel output engines/rasterisers. The core clock is 550MHz - up from the 300 / 350MHz that the 6200 TC was clocked at. The latter's DDR1 memory goes in the bin in favour of the faster DDR2, which is clocked at 800MHz DDR though the 64-bit memory interface will still handicap performance somewhat.

Initially, you will be able to buy the 7300 GS with either 128MB or 256MB of on-board DDR2 memory - a far cry the 6200 TurboCache's 32MB / 64MB initial configurations. Much like the GeForce 6200, the GeForce 7300 GS utlilises TurboCache technology, and will use a certain amount of system RAM to offer a larger frame buffer.

For example, in a 512MB system, the 128MB card will use 128MB of system memory to give a virtual 256MB frame buffer. If your system has 1GB of memory, the 256MB 7300 GS will use another 256MB to seamlessly present games with a 512MB frame buffer. This is the maximum possible - having 2GB of RAM will make no difference to the graphics card.

There was, of course, the standard GeForce 6200 too, which was based on NV43 with one quad of pixel shader units disabled. Those cards ended up using 256MB of memory, with some partners shipping cards with a crazy 512MB onboard. This was clearly a marketing ploy, because you're not going to require 512MB of dedicated texture memory for gaming any time soon, and certainly not in the timeframe that the GeForce 6200 GPU would still be able to compute more than fives frames per second.

The GeForce 6200 TurboCache didn't support FP16 blending, a requirement for High Dynamic Range (HDR) Rendering, but it wasn't really fast enough to make use of it either. GeForce 7300 GS is quoted to be around twice as fast as GeForce 6200 TurboCache, so it makes some sense to include support for FP16 blending and filtering in the Pixel Shader. It won't be as fast as a GeForce 7800 but better to run slowly than not at all for lack of hardware support.

The pixel shader also features the same improvements that were found in GeForce 7800 GTX. NVIDIA spent a great deal of time optimising and improving the throughput in each pixel pipeline. This means that they're able to do more work every clock cycle with the same number of pixel pipelines.

Where the high-end is concerned, there are limitations on die size, so it's not always easy to implement more pipelines because each pixel pipeline can cost millions of transistors. At the low-end, the main limitation is packing as much performance as possible into the smallest space - this is ultimately a transistor limitation too.

To combat this, NVIDIA introduced some shader-based optimisations in the Pixel Shader, meaning that popular Shader instructions are processed much faster than was possible with GeForce 6200 TurboCache. Typically, the most popular Shader command is Multiply-Add (MAD) - this is recognised by the Pixel Shader and is processed much more efficiently than before - it'll take a single clock cycle to complete the instruction, rather than two or three as was the case with previous GPUs.

The 7300 will support high-definition video decoding with the upcoming 85-series driver, released in March (we suspect). This will enable not just the standard PureVideo features, but also H.264 video decoding in hardware - making for silky-smooth 1080p playback of high definition content.

[NuclearCrap]

Page 3

Interview
To find out more about the GeForce 7300 GS, we met with NVIDIA's European PR Manager, Adam Foat. Adam has worked for NVIDIA for four years, having previously worked at ELSA and 3DFX before that.



bit-tech: How would you describe the typical person you expect to buy a GeForce 7300 GS for their PC?
Adam Foat: The 7300 GS is not aimed at the enthusiast gamer. People who want to play Doom3, Half Life 2 and F.E.A.R. at high resolutions will buy a performance or enthusiast GeForce. The people who will buy this board are the mainstream users, people who want to play games, but also people who are into great video performance and features at a great price.


BT: OK, if we're not talking the hardcore First-Person gamer, what games would play well on the 7300GS?
AF: Chronicles of Narnia or Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth are probably the 2 biggest titles at the moment for the mainstream gamer. According to the Game Daily chart published on December 31, 2005, some of the Top 10 best selling PC titles are: Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, Sims 2, Civilization 4 and World of Warcraft. The Movies and Zoo Tycoon 2 are also popular titles from the Christmas Season. The new GeForce 7300 GPUs will deliver excellent performance on these games.


BT: What sort of gaming performance / resolution can we expect?
AF: This is an open ended question. It depends what game or application you are talking about. But this card will quite happily run at 1024 x 768 or 1280 x 1024 on some games.



LOTR: Battle for Middle Earth (top) and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (bottom)

BT: What would you say is the single best feature of this card?
AF: Personally, I would say it is the video capabilities. This board is capable of running H.264 video at 1080p. Very sweet for a Media Center PC. This card will be able to decode H.264, MPEG2 HD and VC1 at 1080p resolutions [that's 1920x1080 - Ed]. This is thanks to the dedicated video engine built within the chip and our PureVideo technology. That is a pretty amazing feature for a card that costs well under £100.


BT: How much will it cost me to add one of these to my HTPC?
AF: £69 inc VAT or there abouts. Have a word with our partners for their specific pricing.


Action Sci-Fi Thriller Serenity captured at 1080p. Click for full size (2MB)

BT: Is it true this card was going to be called the 7200 rather than the 7300? Does this card offer anything more than 6200 for GeForce 7 to justify the name change?
AF: Who said there wouldn’t be a 7200? I didn’t!

Editor's note: we have seen NVIDIA branding that uses the 7200 name. We can't imagine NVIDIA slotting another SKU below this one, so we suspect the move from 7200 to 7300 was to separate it from the GeForce 6200.


BT: How does the 7300 differ internally from the 6200TC?
AF: The 7300 has the same TurboCache technology as the 6200, but this time we have a 128 MB physical frame buffer on board, and can have support of up to 512 MB TurboCache frame buffer. It has 4 pixel pipes, 3 vertex shaders and brings all the G7x features into a mainstream solution.


BT: What is the US / UK street date for these cards?
AF: Early February.


BT: This is, ostensibly, a paper launch. Having launched GeForce 7800 GTX with immediate availability, NVIDIA raised expectations for graphics card launches.
AF: Yes, we have. And we will always do what we can to make this happen. However, Chinese New Year is a big selling season in China, similar to the Holiday rush in other regions. GeForce 7300 falls in to a segment that is very popular with Chinese consumers, so we want to create some excitement in the region with a new product offering in time for the holiday. The card is available today in Asia.


BT: How do you explain the fact that most partners do not even list the 7300 GS on their website 48 hours after launch, and there is no retail or online availability in Western markets this week?
AF: As I said before, we managed to get these cards first into Asia, the US and Europe will follow soon after.


Thanks to Adam for talking to us.



XFX is one of the first partners to release details of their GeForce 7300 GS board. It have opted for the half-height PCB yet has still managed to shoe-horn both VGA and DVI onto the back plate. The card is clocked at the default speed of 550 / 800MHz and features 256MB of on-board memory. You will see it described as "supporting 512MB" which requires at least 1GB of system memory to provide the 256MB of TurboCache memory.

XFX tells us that the first European stock is due next week, priced at 69 euros. UK pricing was unavailable at the time of writing.

Conclusions
We're looking forward to getting our hands on these boards once they arrive over here. The 7300 looks like it could be a great choice for both the budget gamer, and the home theatre enthusiast. Our esteemed Editor currently has his MCE box powered by a passive XFX 6200 TC, and he's chomping at the bit to get hold of a 7300. We'll let you know how he gets on!

Source: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/200...7300_gs/1.html

[Rockefella]

Yay, time to compensate!

[dimlight]

is the one in space real time gameplay??

[NuclearCrap]

is the one in space real time gameplay??

Read the description under the pic.

Definitely a movie if you ask me.

[bennywidag]

yer that sort of thing wouldnt be playable on my 7800GTX i dont think, let alone a 7300, its around the performance of a 6600gt btw people

[Roy Visser]

6200 turbo cache was one of the most worse cards around...