The G71 was nvidia's top DirectX 9 GPU before the G80 came about. It was immensely scalable, and highly successful - pretty much every market segment has a card based on the G71.

The 7950 GT was launched in September of last year, to replace the 7900 GT which was subsequently replaced by the 7900 GS. Currently, the 7950 GT sits in the $260-280 segment, below the $450 8800 GTS. It comes with all 24 pixel shaders enabled, and full 256 bit memory.

On the ATI side of things, the closest competitor seems to be the 36-shader X1950 Pro. Price is close, memory bandwidth is close, but fillrate is a bit lacking compared to the nvidia parts. Let's have a quick look at the specs:

So on paper, everything is pretty close. Let's take a peak at how this reflects in 3DMark's capability tests:

As reflected in the paper specs, ATI falls far behind in pure fillrate tests. Of course, shader performance is what matters most these days, and will become even more important this year.

When it comes to shader performance, the Radeon 1950 Pro matches perfectly to the 7900 GT it was meant to compete against. Of course, in comes the 7950 GT, which has improved on shader performance over the 7900 GT.

Next Page: (The Test; F.E.A.R.)

Page 1: Introduction Page 2: The Specs Page 3: The Test; F.E.A.R. Page 4: Half Life 2 Page 5: Quake 4 Page 6: Oblivion; 3D Mark 06 Page 7: Warranty; Conclusion