Bit-Tech has compared the performance of three retail GeForce 7900 GTX video cards from ASUS, BFG Tech and MSI:

The GeForce 7900 GTX trades blows with the Radeon X1900XTX in our selection of popular titles, but doesn't deliver a knock out blow. In that respect, neither does ATI. NVIDIA has succeeded on a number of fronts, but we feel that they've missed out on at least one important feature in their move to 90 nanometres at the high end.

We feel that NVIDIA's hardware suffers from having lower realistically playable image quality - high quality anisotropic filtering is a given on the Radeon X1900-series cards, meaning that they are in a different league on the image quality front. If you're looking for the best-looking pixels in the business, you should be using an ATI Radeon X1900XT or Radeon X1900XTX. That's not to say that NVIDIA's filtering quality is outstandingly bad, it's just not as good as its competition.

There is also no FP16 HDR and antialiasing support in hardware either. However, we are sure that NVIDIA will encourage developers that take part in the The Way It's Meant To Be Played program to use alternate techniques in order to allow antialiasing to work at the same time as the implemented HDR lighting method.

On the plus side, NVIDIA has succeeded in shrinking the die to 90 nanometres and have released a product with a fantastic heatsink design that whispers away in the background. In comparison, the reference cooler that ATI and its partners have used on the Radeon X1900-series cards is sometimes whiney and loud under heavy load.

If you've got a GeForce 6-series or GeForce 7-series product and you're happy with the image quality that it delivers with either the quality or high quality driver settings, you'll be perfectly happy with the quality delivered by the GeForce 7900 GTX. However, there are some cases where the Radeon X1900-series - with high quality anisotropic filtering enabled - delivers noticeable image quality benefits.

Update: sorry, link fixed.