90 nanometer low-k process
178 Million Transistors
12 Pixel Shader Pipelines
5 Vertex Shader Pipelines
400MHz Core Clock speed
800MHz Effective Memory speed
DirectX 9.0c
Pixel Shader 3.0
Vertex Shader 3.0
HDR
SLI
SLI AA 8XS, 8X 16X
Vertex Texturing

The 7600GS is based upon NVIDIA's G7x architecture that was introduced in June of 2005. The key features of the G7x series includes Transparency Anti-Aliasing, increased MADD performance, dual ALUs per pixel pipeline and more. NVIDIA introduced their first 90 nanometer process parts earlier this month with the 7900GTX and 7900GT cards. NVIDIA does a mainstream and a value version of ech of their video cards and with the 7600GS is the mainstream chip of the lneup.

NVIDIA went a slightly different route with their 90 nanometer offerings. While ATI decided to nearly double the transistor count from their last generation to the 90 nanometer generation, NVIDIA's transistor count actually decreased in the high end from the 7800GTX to the 7900GTX from 302 million to 278 million. The 7600GS has 178 million transistors. NVIDIA's 90 nanometer parts use less power, run faster speeds and require less cooling than the cards they replace.

7600GS has 12 Pixel Shader Pipelines and 5 Vertex Shader Pipelines. This most closely follows the 6800GS series from last year. With a core clock speed of 400MHz and memory speed of 400MHz on a 128-bit bus, the EVGA 7600GS has a maximum fill rate of 4.8 Gigapixels a second and a memory bandwidth of 12.8GB/second. It should be an interesting comparison against the X1600XT which is priced similarly but has a higher clock speed.

With the announced delay of Microsoft Vista till January, the key inflection point of vidro cards is Microsoft Pixel and Vertex Shasder 3.0. Key features of SM 3.0 include nearly unlimited shader program lengths, vertex texturing, back face register for two sided lighting, multiple render targets, FP16 blending and more. Every video card sold today with the exception of some straggling X800GTOs.

SLI stands for Scalable Link Interface. The idea of multiple video cards working together to increase performance in games and applications first surfaced in a company called 3DFX back in 1997 with the Voodoo 2. Sadly, 3DFX is all but a memory today, having gone bankrupt in 2000. NVIDIA introduced their SLI in November of 2004. Most multi-GPU setups today are based on NVIDIA's SLI, with a recent survey on Steam showing 90%+ of multi-GPU setups being NVIDIA based.