ASUS EN7950GT video card review
Although we are all but at the eve of the launch of high-end DirectX 10 parts, from NVIDIA at least, the battle for sales between ATI and NVIDIA refuses to wane, particularly at those price points which are most attractive to consumers. One such price point which has attracted a lot of competition from both graphics IHVs is around the £200 mark, where we saw NVIDIA hold an early advantage courtesy of their GeForce 7800 GT part. From there, both companies have attacked this price point heavily, and continue to do so, with the launch of the GeForce 7900 GT, followed by the Radeon X1900 GT and X1900 XT 256MB, and now another refresh from NVIDIA courtesy of their GeForce 7950 GT.
Thus, our focus today is well and truly fixed on NVIDIA's G71-based refresh of their successful GeForce 7900 GT SKU, the GeForce 7950 GT. Our look at such a board comes courtesy of graphics and motherboard giant ASUS, and their stock clocked EN79050GT part - We take a look at just how much performance this clock-bumped core and memory adds to the already impressive abilities on offer via its predecessor.
GeForce 7950 architecture
Despite the use of the GeForce 7950 moniker here, previously only used with their dual-GPU GeForce 7950 GX2 boards, don't be fooled into thinking that this part follows the path trodden by that high-end SKU. Unlike the aforementioned board, the GeForce 7950 GT remains well and truly in single GPU territory, with just a single, fully featured 90 nanometre G71 core a la its predecessor, the GeForce 7900 GT. This means that we're looking at a GPU equipped with twenty-four fragment pipelines (or six fragment quads), sixteen ROPs and eight vertex shaders, and utilising a 256-bit memory bus.
The major differences between the GeForce 7900 and 7950 GT are two-fold. First (and no doubt thanks to falling memory prices) the GeForce 7950 GT comes complete with 512MB of memory, compared to the 256MB available with its predecessor. Secondly, both core and memory clocks have received a speed bump in the process, with a reference GeForce 7950 GT enjoying clock speeds of 550MHz core and 700MHz RAM, giving the board a 100MHz higher core and 40MHz higher memory clock over the GeForce 7900 GT. So, with those advantages on display for all to see, let's take a look at the board we have under the microscope today.
You can see the entire feature set of the GeForce 7950 GT below.
- CineFX 4.0 Architecture
- Full DirectX9 Support
- DirectX9 Shader Model 3.0 Support
- Vertex Shader 3.0
- Pixel Shader 3.0
- Internal 128-bit Floating Point (FP32) Precisions
- Unlimited Shader Lengths
- Up to 16 textures per pass
- Support for FP16 Texture Formats with Filtering, FP32 without
- Non-Power of two texture support
- Multiple Render Targets
- NVIDIA High Precision Dynamic Range Technology
- Full FP16 Floating Point Support throughout the entire pipeline
- FP16 Floating Point Frame Buffer Support
- Intellisample 4.0
- Up to 4X, Gamma Adjusted, Native Multi-sampling FSAA with rotated grid sampling
- Transparent Multi-Sampling and Super-Sampling
- Lossless colour, texture, z-data compression
- Fast Z Clear
- Up to 16x Anisotropic Filtering
- UltraShadow Technology
- NVIDIA SLI Support
- NVIDIA Pure Video Technology
- Adaptable Programmable video processor
- High Definition MPEG2 and WMV9 acceleration
- Spatial Temporal de-interlacing
- Inverse 2:2 and 3:2 pull-down (Inverse Telecine)
- 4-tap horizontal, 5-tap vertical scaling
- Overlay color temperature correction
- Microsoft® Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) supports multiple video windows with full video quality and features in each window
- Integrated HDTV output
- Advanced Display options
- Dedicated on-chip video processor
- nView Multi Display technology
- Single and Dual-Link TMDS Transmitter
- Digital Vibrance Control 3