By now you've seen the release from Nvidia on their new GPU codenamed the G70. This represents, among other things, a change in their naming conventions from the old NV series. And that's a good idea - because the G70 is a really new design, and as such deserves a new name.

The GeForce 7800 GTX is, as of now, the king of the hill. That's normal in this see-saw kind of market where ATI trumps Nvidia, and then Nvidia trumps ATI. Obviously, Nvidia is the one on top right now.

The GeForce 7800 GTX features blazing amounts of parallelism, and those of you who have read any of my other dribble know that I love parallelism. To begin with, it has eight parallel vertex processors. Each one of those puppies has two 32 bit floating point processors, plus a bunch of caches to quickly buffer things up. This means data flows as smoothly as possible, eliminating hiccups and page breaks.

The setup triangle data points, with all of their lighting information, get clipped, z-culled, and sent off to the pixel shaders for what Tony Tamasi, Nvidia's VP of Technical Marketing, lovingly calls "pixel polishing." And polished they get, being conveyed to 24 pixel shaders. Each of those has two 32 bit floating point processors plus a fog ALU and two min ALUs, in addition to the floating point pre-fetch and texture caches. There's a lot of processing going on here, and that explains most of the 302 million transistors crammed into this wonder.

Speaking of which... Nvidia has a wonderful comparison related to that number. As it turns out, 302 million transistors are more than in the original Xbox GPU, the PS2 GPU, the ATI Game Cube Flipper chip, the Game Cube Gekko chip, the Xbox Pentium CPU, the PS2 emotion engine CPU, and the Athlon FX 56 CPU - combined !

Isn't that fun to quote?

Nvidia got their parallelism act together on the GeForce 7800 GTX, and have dropped the clock of the processors back to 430 MHz (while running 600 MHz GDDR.) They did not do that just to give overclockers something to play with; they wanted to allow the device to run cooler for the sake of the rest of the world.

The board draws a nominal 350 W, uses one card slot, and contrary to all the speculation and rumors, only one external power connector - like all other modern high end graphics boards. Nonetheless, I can see the water and glycerin pipes running through a neon lit case now, and the MHz meter jumping between 600 MHz and the rated spec - mind you, not that we're suggesting one should do that...

The GeForce 7800 GTX comes with a whole bag of tricks, including a new, almost free, multi-sampling anti-aliasing technique they're calling transparent super-sampling. This enhancement can make the chain link fences in the opening scenes of Half Life 2 look like, well, real chain link fences, and not just a bunch of disconnected dots.

And here I'd like to make a point. The first person I told this looked at me like I just fell off a turnip truck and said, "Who the heck looks at chain link fences in a shooter?" Well no one of course and that's the whole point - you don't look at them and you're not distracted by them as you play. If you're busy looking at how good the water is, then you're not playing the game and you might as well be watching reality TV.

The other nifty stuff that the 7800 brings include the ability to do clever texture mapping tricks like lighting and pseudo normal calculation with just two 2D maps, known as relief mapping. This gives you really bumpy surfaces for walls and cobblestoned streets, with shadows that follow lights like they should - but at a much lower computational load than if you did real ray tracing (which we will be doing one day not too long from now.)

The next neat trick is to employ 32 bit component color, which allows a high dynamic range of lighting. Wazzat? Well that's what lets you have a really bright light in a room without it swamping out all the detail in the room. Your eyes have high dynamic range, which is why you can look at a full moon and think it's bright (when in fact it's about as bright as a parking lot lit with a flashlight with weak batteries) and also be able to look at a cloud on a sunny day and see the detail in it, which is 1000 times brighter than the brightest monitor you ever saw.

This terrific high dynamic range is useful for many games, such as making sure the scenes don't get washed out if a bright light is in them or too dark to see if there isn't enough light. Of course, the 7800 it will only enjoy its place of glory for a brief time until the crowd of enthusiastics, and their followers, are distracted away by the next bright shinny thing, the new ATI card.