After the release of the Radeon X1900 cards, how can one expect their arch rival Nvidia to take a back seat? Thus the release of three GPUs by Nvidia which include The 7900 GTX, 7900 GT, and 7600 GT made on a 90nm manufacturing process unlike Nvidia previous 110nm process. So what's the big deal you may ask? Well for starters they feature vertex shader units, 24 texture fetch units, 24 pixel shader units (6 "quads"), and 16 raster operator units and are extremely affordable without compromising on the performance.
The GeForce 7600 GT has 177M transistors and 5 vertex shader units, 12 pixel shader units (3 "quads"), and 8 raster operator units and with a 128-bit memory interface. Thus new chips are smaller, less expensive, and clocked higher. Also all the cards sport an innovative and cost efficient design where transistor count has dropped from 302M in the case of the GeForce 7800 GTX to 278M for the GeForce 7900 GTX and 7900 GT.
This is what Nvidia had to say about their new line of cards ""Consider that there's two primary ways to make chip run faster at higher clocks: You can pipeline deeper (which uses more transistors) or simply use faster transistors (and maybe some custom high-speed logic). G70 is a fairly large chip and we had to spend more area (more transistors) to pipeline deeper to hit our frequency targets. With G71, we re-architected a number of units and we actually reduced chip area (and transistor count) while at the same time increasing frequency and performance. Simply put, with more time, our engineers are able to optimize the architecture, and that's what they did with G71."
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