The 7800 GTX is built on a new core codenamed G70. It's manufactured at TSMC using their 110nm manufacturing process and weighs in at a whopping 302 million transistors which makes it the largest graphics chip ever manufactured.

While NVIDIA would probably like the world to think that the G70 is a completely new chip, it is in reality not much different than the NV40 that came before it. That's not necessarily a bad thing however, the NV40 is a very effective design and already supported SM3.0 so there was really not much need to change things a whole lot, especially when you consider how far ahead of the curve they are with SM3.0 offerings.

The primary difference between the G70 and the NV40 is the pixel pipeline configuration. While the basic layout remains the same, NVIDIA managed to squeeze in 24 "pipelines" as opposed to 16 on the NV40. Along with the pixel pipeline changes, NVIDIA also added 2 more vertex shader units to the G70 for a total of 8.

Specifications
	GeForce 7800 GTX	Radeon X850XT-PE
Core	G70	R480
Silicon Process	110nm	130nm low-k
Transistor Count (millions)	302	160
Core Speed MHz	430	540
Memory Speed MHz	600 GDDR3 (1.2GHz)	590 GDDR3 (1.18GHz)
Bus Standard	PEG x16	PEG x16
Bus Width	256bit	256bit
Pipeline Configuration Textures/Pixels/Z Samples (Per Clock)	24/16/32	16/16/16
Peak Memory Bandwidth (GB/s)	38.4	37.8
Pixel Fillrate (million pixels/sec)	6,880	8,640
Texel Fillrate (million texels/sec)	10,320	8,640
API Compliancy	DX 9.0c Shader Model 3.0	DX 9.0b Shader Model 2.0
MSRP ($US)	$599	$549

NVIDIA® CineFX™ 4.0 Shading Architecture

• Vertex Shaders
• Support for Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Vertex Shader 3.0
• Displacement mapping
• Geometry instancing
• Infinite length vertex programs
• Pixel Shaders
• Support for DirectX 9.0 Pixel Shader 3.0
• Full pixel branching support
• Support for Multiple Render Targets (MRTs)
• Infinite length pixel programs
• Next-Generation Texture Engine
• Accelerated texture access
• Up to 16 textures per rendering pass
• Support for 16-bit floating point format and 32-bit floating point format
• Support for non-power of two textures
• Support for sRGB texture format for gamma textures
• DirectX and S3TC texture compression
• Full 128-bit studio-quality floating point precision through the entire rendering pipeline with native hardware support for 32bpp, 64bpp, and 128bpp rendering modes

64-Bit Texture Filtering and Blending

• Full floating point support throughout entire pipeline
• Floating point filtering improves the quality of images in motion
• Floating point texturing drives new levels of clarity and image detail
• Floating point frame buffer blending gives detail to special effects like motion blur and explosions

NVIDIA® Intellisample™ 4.0 Technology

• Advanced 16x anisotropic filtering (with up to 128 Taps)
• Blistering-fast antialiasing and compression performance
• Gamma-adjusted rotated-grid antialiasing removes jagged edges for incredible image quality
• Transparency multisampling and transparency supersampling modes boost antialiasing quality to new levels
• Support for normal map compression
• Support for advanced lossless compression algorithms for color, texture, and z-data at even higher resolutions and frame rates
• Fast z-clear

NVIDIA® UltraShadow™ II Technology

• Designed to enhance the performance of shadow-intensive games

NVIDIA® SLI™ Technology

• Patented hardware and software technology allows two GPUs to run in parallel to scale performance
• Scales performance on over 60 top PC games and applications

NVIDIA® PureVideo™ Technology

• Adaptable programmable video processor
• High-definition MPEG-2 and WMV9 hardware acceleration
• Spatial-temporal de-interlacing
• Inverse 2:2 and 3:2 pull-down (Inverse Telecine)
• 4-tap horizontal, 5-tap vertical scaling
• Overlay color temperature correction
• Microsoft® Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) supports multiple video windows with full video quality and features in each window
• Integrated HDTV output

Composited Desktop Hardware Engine

• Video post-processing
• Real Time desktop compositing
• Accelerated antialiased text rendering
• Pixel shader driven special effects and animation

Advanced Display Functionality

• Dual integrated 400MHz RAMDACs for display resolutions up to and including 2048x1536 at 85Hz
• Dual DVO ports for interfacing to external TMDS transmitters and external TV encoders
• Full NVIDIA® nView® multi-display technology capability

Advanced Engineering

• Designed for PCI Express x16
• Designed for high-speed GDDR3 memory

NVIDIA® Digital Vibrance Control™ (DVC) 3.0 Technology

• DVC color controls
• DVC image sharpening controls

Operating Systems

• Windows XP/Windows XP 64
• Windows ME
• Windows 2000
• Linux
• Macintosh OS X

API Support

• Complete DirectX support, including the latest version of Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0
• Full OpenGL support, including OpenGL 2.0