Looking back, the video card race between NVIDIA and ATI has usually meant a new chip once a year and a refresh once every six or so months. Usually the refresh has been the same chip with some minor tweaks and increased clock speeds when they’ve gotten better yields out of the design over time. Those of you who follow the industry however might have noticed that since NVIDIA released the first GeForce 6 cards in spring 2004 there haven’t been any refresh-products coming out. Instead NVIDIA choose to release SLI-support on their motherboards. It is easy thus to think that the new GeForce 7 chips are nothing more than a refresh product. As the name suggests though this isn’t the case. The GeForce 7 is a new chip with improvements beyond mere increased clockspeed.