Last summer, nVidia and ATI released their flagship products- the 6800 series and X800 Series. It’s been more than a year now and while nVidia introduced SLi to increase performance, ATI worked on optimizing a single card solution. With regards to SLi,  we’ve certainly welcomed the re-introduction of dual video cards working together for better performance but we don’t really see many games taking advantage of this technology. Like any “new” technology, it needs time to mature and surely, sooner than later, there will be a time when any high-end gaming system will be incomplete without a multi GPU solution. But at this point of time, almost all games give a much better price/performance ratio on a single graphics card.

With the introduction of the GeForce 7800 GTX today, we get the feeling that nVidia is about to sabotage the gaming world by introducing a card that not only works faster than any other card in almost every game but at the same time is capable of running in SLi mode. This means that you can get the fastest gaming card at the moment while nVidia continues to develop and work with game producers to make SLi work the way it should. And if they can achieve this soon, you can simply add a second GeForce 7800 GTX and continue to enjoy the best performance the industry has to offer. At least that’s what we think nVidia’s planned and we’ll find out how much of it is delivered with the GeForce 7800 GTX today.

The card is slightly bigger than the 6800GT	In case you didnt know, thats the back side

Unfortunately, we didn’t get a lot of time for this article- the GeForce 7800 GTX and information related to it arrived just a day before nVidia invited us to Paris to attend the launch. Thus, with the limited time we had, we focused our energy on benchmarking the product as that is what most of the people would like to see. That does not mean that we haven’t talked about the features and other new things that come with the GeForce 7800 GTX in this article, however, that information isn’t as comprehensive as we would’ve liked it to be. If need be, we will try to get into more detail in a later article.

Before we start the actual review, we would just like briefly discuss the presentation that we attended at Clacquesin in Paris. While Alain Tiquet, the Group Director for EMEA Marketing for nVidia opened the event, it was Dan Vivoli, the Executive VP of nVidia who basically went through the feature list of the 7800 GTX showing us demos of what the card is capable of. Also present were the developers for the game Starship Troopers and Mark Rein, the VP for Epic games who showed us how the next version of the Unreal Engine plays on nVidia’s latest hardware and also showed us a demo of Unreal Tournament 2007. After the event, we nVidia had lots of their partners such as ASUS, MSI and XFX show their 7800 GTX cards.