What you should find disturbing is the fact that the 7800 GS and 6800 GT are indistinguishable in terms of pixel shader and vertex shader units. Keep in mind that one of NVIDIA’s main design goals with the current 7800 series CPU was to greatly increase their performance per watt. The 6800 series cards were simply getting too hot to handle you might say and NVIDIA recognized this. NVIDIA also wanted to bring shader density to the forefront with the 7800. So, with the 7800 we got a more efficient GPU in terms of power used, which allowed NVIDIA to lay down more transistors (300+ million Vs. 225 million) while at the same time greatly broadening the pixel pipeline..



Link: HardOCP