Last week we looked at the extremely impressive GeForce 7900 GS. And during that week we also already let you know that NVIDIA announced two cards. The GeForce 7900 GS was a product targeted at the mainstream users with a fantastic price of $199. There is however a tiny gap in the market against ATI that needed to be filled, a product that competes with ATI's $299 priced Radeon X1900 XT 256MB. So NVIDIA released a $299 priced 512MB card, quite interesting huh? A new card for less money? Nah, don't be confused. Today's product is pretty much similar to a GeForce 7900 GT with 512MB memory and slightly higher clocks at a nice price tag of only $299. - Guru3D

NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GT 512MB PCI-E Roundup

I don't have a idea though as to why NVIDIA named this product the GeForce 7950 series. It was only two weeks ago when we checked Sparkle's Calibre P790+ graphics card, which is a GeForce 7900 GT with 512MB memory and is, up-to 20 MHz to be precise, completely similar to this GeForce 7950 GT. Well, it must be marketing then, product differentiation folks! So remember, the product you see today is quite similar to a GeForce 7900 GT with 512MB with slightly different clocks. We'll take a look at the NVIDIA reference model and the versions from XFX and Point of View.

So then the GeForce 7950 GT. As stated previously, the same graphics processor as the GeForce 7900 GT yet clocked slightly faster. This is what the industry calls a refresh product. More of the same, yet a different configuration to adapt and address the market in a better way or to adapt towards competitor products. Why is it called 7950? Well it beats me but I do have an idea. The 512MB memory might be a reference to that. Take for example the GeForce 7950 GX2, it's a dual PCB, dual graphics core based product. If you rip the two boards from each other, what to you have?

So what you need to be comparing to the most is the GeForce 7900 GT 256MB video card. The big differences are, a 100MHz faster core clock, a 80MHz faster memory clock and obviously an extra 256MB of frame buffer. That's it! Other then that there are virtually no differences between both cards in terms of features or anything. It has 24 pixel shader processors, 8 vertex units, 16 ROP's; in short, this is the 0.09 micron G71 graphics core. Again, this is a refresh product. The entertaining part is, for roughly $300 you can get a lower segment high-end graphics card in your system and that's fascinating for sure.

Well then it's a little with dual feelings that I'm looking at the GeForce 7950 GT. Obviously this is a really nice product being sold at a fair price, nobody will deny that. But the reality is what we are seeing is not really that new at all. There have been many GeForce 7900 GT 512MB cards out on the market for a while now. They are in the exact same price range and due to their standard higher clocks often offer similar performance. There was a good reason why I included the Sparkle Calibre P790+ as I wanted to show you performance was pretty much parallel, a GeForce 7900 GT 512MB delivering same features and performance.