Recently Nvidia presented us with their most up-to-date graphics solutions meant to capture the affordable high-end gaming arena, which was previously dominated by its own GeForce 7900GT as well ATI-based boards selling in the $250 to $300 range.
These two new 7900 series graphics cards will fill in the gap left by current mainstream products, and those higher-end products that continue to be sold for over $400. The new 7900GS and 7950GT products are available already from a number of manufacturers and retailers, selling for approximantely $220 and $300, respectively. This puts the GeForce 7950GT as the logical replacement for the 7900GT, as it costs just a fraction more yet should deliver better performance.
While the GeForce 7900GT was a reasonably impressive product, I usually found the competing Radeon X1800XT to be a superior performer. We then received the slightly more expensive X1900GT, which to be honest did very little in ATI's favor. The X1900GT featured more pixel pipelines than the X1800XT, but at the same time it featured a lower core and memory clock frequency.
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The question to be asked now is how will this new GeForce 7950GT compare to ATI's Radeon X1900XT? On paper it would seem to be anyone's guess, yet that is exactly what we are here to find out today. However, before we do that let's just take a moment to meet the newcomer. Dressed in shiny silver packaging this Inno3D GeForce 7950GT means business, featuring a core clock of 550MHz and a memory frequency of 1.4GHz.
Furthermore, with 512MB of GDDR3 memory on a 256-bit bus, the 7950GT has plenty of memory bandwidth at its disposal. Features such as Dual DVI, VIVO and HDTV also add to this cards appeal. Unfortunately like the majority of Inno3D products, the GeForce 7950GT is nothing special to look at, as it sports a reference-like design. While the green PCB is rather painful, Inno3D has done a nice job in spicing this otherwise bland graphics card by whacking the all-aluminum Zalman VF700 over the GPU.
Current GeForce 7900GT cards are retailing for roughly $280, while the new 7950GT is said to cost between $300 and $350. The 7950GT core has been boosted by 100MHz for a total 550MHz. The memory frequency has been slightly increased from 1320MHz on the 7900GT, to 1400MHz for the 7950GT. Both feature the same amount of vertex and pixel shader units, and are designed using a 90nm process. The GeForce 7900GT was limited to 256MB of onboard memory, whereas the 7950GT features 512MB. Other than this there are no further enhancements found on the 7950GT, or in other words it is a mere enhancement of the 7900GT.