The successor of the GeForce 6800 Ultra. nVidia codenamed this card G70 rather than NV50 (6800 Ultra is codenamed NV40). The 7800 GTX made quite some improvements in both performance and image quality.

I've created a short time-line about the G70:
22 February 2005
Some references to NVIDIA G70 show up in ForceWare 75.90 beta driver. G70 is the code-name for the GeForce 7800 (GT/GTX).

13 March 2005
Announcement of G70 probably next month.

9 May 2005
Rumor: G70 won't run hot. It's cooling system will be single-slot.

10 May 2005
ATi's R520 won't be available before Q3 of 2005. R520 is the codename of the chip for the Radeon X1800.

13 May 2005
Rumor: G70 will be launched during Computex (which was on 31 May to 4 June). G70 will be manufactured on 110nm by TSMC and twice as fast as the GeForce 6800.

18 May 2005
Possible specifications of the GeForce 7800 GTX are: 110nm by TSMC. 24 pipelines and 430MHz which create 10 gigapixels per second. This is 60% more than the GeForce 6800 Ultra. 43% more vertices can be processed: 860 million per second which might be caused by increasing the vertex shaders from 6 to 8. 256MB GDDR3 running at 700MHz (DDR1400) will be used.

26 May 2005
Specifications of the G70 are released. Those from 18 May 2005 are correct.

30 May 2005
TSMSC is already mass-producing the G70 chip.

5 June 2005
ATi R520 may be announced on 26 july. G70 probably on 22 June.

14 June 2005
3DMark05 score of G70: 7703 3DMarks.

16 June 2005
More 3DMark05 scores: an Athlon 64 FX-57 @ ~ 3GHz scores 7823 points. In SLI it does 13142.

22 June 2005
Official announcement of the GeForce 7800 GTX. > Read more