Antics_
10-16-2006, 08:36 PM
On September 6th, 2006 NVIDIA unveiled a new lineup of GPUs based on GeForce 7 series technology. This new lineup included the announcement and launch of the GeForce 7900 GS and the announcement, but not hard launch, of the GeForce 7950 GT. Instead, NVIDIA decided to unveil the specifications on the GeForce 7950 GT at that time but were announcing that the video cards based on that GPU wouldn’t actually hit shelves until September 14th. In fact, they requested that everyone hold off on releasing evaluation analysis until September 14th since that is when the video cards were going to be available.
This was a bold and welcomed decision to actually want us all to wait until the product was actually a reality on the shelves. We’ve seen many announcements in the past where we have released reviews, yet we fail to see much product until weeks later. It seems that NVIDIA is very committed to the true nature of a “hard launch” and this is a good thing for everyone. Hopefully we will continue to see this trend with their next generation of GPUs.
The GeForce 7950 GT is the same G71 GPU that you will find as the GeForce 7900 GTX. It contains 24 pixel shader units, 8 vertex units and 16 raster operators just like the GeForce 7900 GTX. To meet the $299 price point the core and memory frequencies have been lowered from GeForce 7900 GTX clock speeds. The GeForce 7950 GT has a default GPU frequency of 550 MHz and a default memory frequency of 700 MHz (1.4 GHz DDR). The memory configuration however is equipped with 512MB of GDDR3.
At $299 the GeForce 7950 GT is in direct competition with the newly announced ATI Radeon X1900 XT 256MB video card. The ATI Radeon X1900 XT 256MB has the exact same specifications as the ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB video card except that the memory has been cut in half to 256MB. It sure will be interesting to see how these two video cards compare considering one has 512MB and the other 256MB. We will be sure to test on a 24” LCD at 1920x1200 where more memory can make a difference on video cards.
This was a bold and welcomed decision to actually want us all to wait until the product was actually a reality on the shelves. We’ve seen many announcements in the past where we have released reviews, yet we fail to see much product until weeks later. It seems that NVIDIA is very committed to the true nature of a “hard launch” and this is a good thing for everyone. Hopefully we will continue to see this trend with their next generation of GPUs.
The GeForce 7950 GT is the same G71 GPU that you will find as the GeForce 7900 GTX. It contains 24 pixel shader units, 8 vertex units and 16 raster operators just like the GeForce 7900 GTX. To meet the $299 price point the core and memory frequencies have been lowered from GeForce 7900 GTX clock speeds. The GeForce 7950 GT has a default GPU frequency of 550 MHz and a default memory frequency of 700 MHz (1.4 GHz DDR). The memory configuration however is equipped with 512MB of GDDR3.
At $299 the GeForce 7950 GT is in direct competition with the newly announced ATI Radeon X1900 XT 256MB video card. The ATI Radeon X1900 XT 256MB has the exact same specifications as the ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB video card except that the memory has been cut in half to 256MB. It sure will be interesting to see how these two video cards compare considering one has 512MB and the other 256MB. We will be sure to test on a 24” LCD at 1920x1200 where more memory can make a difference on video cards.