nVidia GeForce 7950 GT Test

7900 vs 7950 GT

The new 7950GT is based on the same 3D chip as all other 79xx cards, the G71. The technology in all the 79xx cards is identical, when the series first came out with the 7900Gt and the 7900GTX, the only difeerence between thos two cards was the amount of memory (256 on the GT, 512 on the GTX) and the clockspeeds. The 7900GT ran at 450MHz core and 660 MHz memry, where the GTX ran at 650MHz core and 800MHz memory. The new 7950GT ends up somewhere in between those two, the GPU runs at 550MHz, and the 512MB DDR3 memory has a frequency of 700MHz.

The cooler used on the card is remarkebly like the one on the 7900GT, it is fairly small, not very quiet and only cools the actual GPU, not the memory. The card sports two DVI connection, of which one is dual link. Thsi means displays with very high resolutions like the 30 inch widescreens are supported. As all current GeForce 79xx cards the 7950GT has an extra powerconnector at the back and the SLI connector on the PCB.

With the 7950GT nVidia announced that the card is HDCP compatible, something that the older cards are not. As Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are on their way, this is an important extra. However the utility from Cyberlink thatwe use to test this feature did not recognize the compatibility. As long as we do not have another utility to test this we can not comment on the HDCP compatibility of the 7950GT.

As all other cards in the 79xx family the 7950GT has full DirectX 9.0c compatibility and all PureVideo functions are available. A disadvantage of the card is the fact that it still does not support HDR rendering with FSAA, something that the ATI xseries does support.