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Introduction - A New AGP Performance Powerhouse

The AGP market has been left in a state of slow decay by our beloved graphics card houses. Left to fend for ourselves, we AGP users have seen release after release of PCI-Express-only cards whizzing by, with not a peep from either ATI or NVIDIA about AGP versions of their latest workhorses -- until now, that is.

While PCI-Express is admittedly a much better bus design, not only due to the sheer bandwidth available but also because of the flexibility in graphics card configurations (SLI, Crossfire, or just a boatload of regular cards driving more monitors than you can shake a stick at), the AGP market still commands a majority -- 55% in fact, as reported recently by The Inq. Completely ignoring half of the consumers out there is not a good business plan by any measure, and we're happy to report today that NVIDIA has stepped up to the plate, and is offering an AGP incarnation of their latest graphics architecture.

This new card is being dubbed the "GeForce 7800 GS", and as the name suggests, it makes use NVIDIA's G70 GPU. As it so happens, the 7800 GS GPU is the lowest-end in the series, but it represents the highest end part that one will be able to get for the AGP platform. For those not familiar, the 7800 GTX snags the crown, and the 7800 GT rounds out the middle in this series (both PCI-E parts). The following table compares the basic technical specs between the three G70 GPUs now out in the wild:

We can see that when going from the 7800 GT PCI-Express to a reference 7800 GS AGP, NVIDIA has dropped the core clock speed by 25 MHz, bumped up the memory clock speed by 50 MHz (100 MHz effective), reduced the number of vertex and pixel shader pipes, and very surprisingly, cut the amount of ROP pipes to half. Doing some rough calculations, we can expect a reference GeForce 7800 GS to take about a 15-20% performance hit when compared to the 7800 GT. Please note that the sample sent to us by BFG Technologies belongs to their "OC" line-up, which enjoys slight bumps in core and memory clock speeds, as well as snazzier blue PCB and cooling systems -- those are the numbers you see in brackets.

At an MSRP $100-$150 cheaper than the GeForce 7800 GT and about the same price range very close to that of AGP X800XT/XL cards, this card could very well be a winner among the AGP-using populace who wish to have a taste of a modern GPU architecture without throwing away their hard-earned cash on both a new PCI-e motherboard and video card.

The GeForce 7800 GS AGP sample sent to us is made by BFG Technologies, Inc. It is representative of a full retail boxed product, and these things are ready to ship starting today. Once again NVIDIA has executed a flawless launch, with products from licensees available on launch day. BFG is usually at the forefront of NVIDIA product launches, and this time is no exception. We'd like to thank them for providing us with GeForce 7800 GS AGP sample.