Nvidia Redesigns GeForce Graphics Card

Nvidia Corp. on Wednesday unveiled a redesigned graphics card that's meant to support film-quality visual effects in videogames.

The GeForce 7800 GTX is the new flagship of the Santa Clara, Calif., company's family of GeForce graphics processing cards.

The latest product has been redesigned to include a new programmable "shader architecture" that has twice the shading horsepower of the previous generation, Nvidia said. The rendering of color shading is closely tied to the realistic look of characters and background in videogames.

"With more than 300 million transistors, the GeForce 7800 GTX GPU (graphics processing unit) is the most advanced graphics processor ever built," Ujesh Desai, general manager of GeForce at Nvidia, said in a statement. "With this new graphics architecture, we are able to create a GPU so powerful that game developers can start to make their visions a reality, and real-time gaming can now rival offline film rendering."

While capable of rendering more realistic special effects, the GeForce 7800 consumes 50 percent less power than the previous version of the product, the company said. The new card's rendering engine, based on Microsoft DirectX 9 Shader Model 3.0, features a 128-bit floating-point core that helps provide film-quality visual effects, such as high-dynamic range lighting.

The add-in card is available now through major online retailers, and is also used in new systems from Alienware, Falcon Northwest, Velocity Micro and Voodoo PC.