Introduction

Point of View was established in 2000 and is based in Europe, or Holland to be exact. Their graphics card line up is NVIDIA exclusive, but they offer computer cases, power supplies, mice and custom cooling as well.

Today we take a look at the Point of View 7900GTX, which is based on the current high end chip from NVIDIA, the G71. The 7900 Series was introduced during CeBIT this year, and has replaced the old 7800 Series line up. Let's take a look at the technical specs of the two generations:


The first thing that becomes apparent is the difference in clock speed. Keep in mind that even the very rare 7800GTX 512 was running at 550 MHz, still 100 MHz short of the 7900GTX. On the other hand, while memory clocks have been raised to 1.6 GHz (800 MHz DDR) compared to the normal 7800GTX, the 7800GTX 512 has memory running at 1.7 GHz (650MHz DDR). Even though 1.1ns memory is used on the 7900GTXs which are based on the reference design, the voltage supplied to these chips has been reported to be only 1.8V instead of the usual 2.0V. So even though the memory chips are capable of 1.8 GHz at full voltage, you will not find any cards offering that speed.

Another important improvement is the move to the 0.09 micrometer manufacturing process. This means NVIDIA can produce more cores on a wafer, thus reducing the overall price of the GPU. A GPU that was previously 333mm² is now 196mm², but not all that is due to the new process. NVIDIA also made a lot of the changes to the die itself, as can be seen by the lowered transistor count of 278 million, down around 24 million from the 7800GTX. By going with 0.09 micrometer, NVIDIA has managed to bump the speed up considerably to 650 MHz, while keeping the same thermal envelope as the 7800GTX 512 at 550 MHz.

Packaging

The packaging of the graphic card is actually fairly small compared to other manufacturers like MSI or ASUS. Once opened I was shocked that such an expensive and heavy card was held up by two card board pieces and nothing else. Other manufacturers use exact card board folds or even foam cut outs to hold the valuable card in place and thus protect it from bumps or even drops during transport. Under the graphic card you will find the accessories. As you can see, there is quite a bit hidden inside that small box.

The contents of the box are:

• Point of View 7900 GTX
• One DVI to VGA Converter
• PCIe to Molex power cable
• Composite cable
• S-Video cable
• Input cable
• Point of View Customer Card
• Printed user manual
• Point of View Driver Disk (Forceware 83.91)
• Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow (Offical game Website)
• Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (Offical game Website)
• Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 (Offical game Website)

The card comes with three full games, that is well above average. But according to Point of View, this "extreme game bundle" is optional, so make sure to check for the sticker on the packaging or ask your online retailer if you will get the games as well. Point of View only includes one DVI to VGA Converter but, while it may be true that most users will have a DVI driven LCD panel, there may still be quite a few gamers sticking to their dual CRT setup, requiring two DVI to VGA Converters.

The Customer Card is basically a registration card, which gives the user the 3 year warranty as stated on the sticker of the box. It reads:

Additional warranty coverage - should your retailer ever cease to exist we will take over the guarantee for the remaining warranty time of your registered product

Many retailers in Europe only give you a one year warranty on your purchase, but will most likely not "cease to exist" within that one year. I would assume that Point of View will take over the remaining two years.

Specifications

According to NVIDIA:

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

• Delivers true high dynamic-range (HDR) lighting support
• 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
• Transparent multisampling and transparent 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 GeForce-based graphics cards to run in parallel to scale performance and enhance image quality on today's top titles.
• Quad SLI technology enables SLI support for four GPUs, providing mind-blowing performance and image quality at extreme resolutions

NVIDIA® PureVideo™ Technology

• Dedicated on-chip video processor
• High-definition H.264, MPEG2 and WMV9 decode acceleration
• Advanced spatial-temporal de-interlacing
• Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
• High-quality video scaling
• Video color correction
• Microsoft® Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) supports multiple video windows with full video quality and features in each window

Built for Microsoft® Windows Vista™

• Third-generation GPU architecture built for Windows Vista
• Delivers best possible experience when running Windows Vista 3D graphical user interface
• New OS supported by renowned NVIDIA® Unified Driver Architecture (UDA) for maximum stability and reliability
• NVIDIA® PureVideo™ technology delivers high-quality VMR pipeline for best-in-class video for Windows Vista

Advanced Display Functionality

• Dual integrated 400MHz RAMDACs for analog display resolutions up to and including 2048x1536 at 85Hz
• Dual-link DVI capability to drive the industry's largest and highest resolution digital flat panel displays up to 2560x1600
• Integrated HDTV encoder provides analog TV-output (Component/Composite/S-Video) up to 1080i resolution
• Full NVIDIA® nView® multi-display technology capability

High Speed Interfaces

• 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
• Built for Microsoft Windows Vista
• 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