90 nanometer low-K process
278 million transistors
192mm squared die area
16 ROPs
24 Pixel Pipelines
8 Vertex Shader Pipelines
DirectX 9.0C
Pixel Shader 3.0
Vertex Shader 3.0
HDR
MultiSample Anti-Aliasing
Anisotropic Filtering
Render To Texture
SLI

The 7900GT is one of NVIDIA's first chips to operate on the 90 nanometer process. NVIDIA decided to lower the power requirements and transistor counts from their previous card, the 7800GTX. The transistor count went from 302 million to 278 million in the transition from 110 nanometer to 90 nanometer. The 7900GT has a die area of 192mm squared, almost and is almost 1/2 the size of the die of the competition, the X1900 series.

Microsoft is due to release the Vista operating system early next year, along with Shader Model 4. In the meantime, all current video cards support Shader Model 3 including the 7900GT. Pixel and Vertex Shaders are small programs performed on pixels and vertices. Common uses of Pixel Shaders include shiny realistic looking water, armor or other surface. Common uses of Vertex Shaders include realistic looking facial animation.

One of the advantages of NVIDIA cards of the last few generations has been the ability to use two video cards to run simultaneously to improve performance in games. NVIDIA introduced their nForce4 SLI motherboard chipset in November of 2004 and all of their mainstream and high-end chips since the 6xxx series supports running in SLI mode. SLI gives the user the option of increasing the number of Anti-Aliasing samples from 8 to 16 with two cards. NVIDIA also says you can use one of the cards to run physics, but that isn't enabled by the drivers as of yet. ASUS's card is clocked at 520MHz for the core clock and 720MHz for the memory (effectively 1.44GHz). This is a 20MHz overclock for the core and 120MHz overclock for the memory compared to NVIDIA's reference card clocks. One thing to keep in mind when doing SLI mode is the clock speeds will be clocked at the lower card speed when a different card is utilized with this one.