Introduction

Everyone must surely remember the introduction of the GeForce 7900 GS a month and a half ago by NVIDIA. At the same time NVIDIA also announced another card that would replace the GeForce 7900 GT. The GeForce 7950 GT bring graphics horsepower with a faster core clock and a whopping 512MB of memory while delivering exceptionally smooth frame rates at maximum settings. The GeForce 7950 GT is capable of supporting HDCP, but it is up to the card maker to install the crypto-ROM that is needed to decode the HDCP signals. What this means is that you will see GeForce 7950 GT cards on the market that do and don't support HDCP.

Make no mistake this isn't a dual-GPU accelerator like the GeForce 7950 GX2, and except for the kind of similar naming the suffix just mentions GT and that means a single core video card. In fact the GeForce 7950 GT, for those of you wondering, is the successor to NVIDIA's now discontinued GeForce 7900 GT. As with all popular products there is a time that a refresh is required to stay on top of the competition and that is exactly what NVIDIA had in mind. Their popular GeForce 7900 GT gotten a bit beaten by the recent Radeon X1900 series, so what the heck NVIDIA just released a faster version going by the GeForce 7950 GT name.

Right after ATI's product refresh rejuvenating their entire graphics card series, NVIDIA moved in fast and furious to tweak their performance series lineup. With a wide performance and price berth between the GeForce 7600 GT, GeForce 7900 GT and GTX, the launch and introduction of the GeForce 7900 GS and GeForce 7950 GT has definitely helped a certain extent to bridge the gap. These new offspring are practically based on the GeForce 7900 GT with just a few tweaks, the original variant would soon cease to exist. The GeForce 7950 GT takes over the spot of the venerable GeForce 7900 GT graphics accelerator.

For the most part, the specifications of the GeForce 7950 GT directly resemble those of the high-end GeForce 7900 GTX. Unlike the GeForce 7900 GS which has one of the pixel shader quads and one of the vertex shader units disabled, the GeForce 7950 GT has the full 24 pixel shader pipelines and 8 vertex units of NVIDIA's high-end chip design. It's also clocked a bit higher than the GeForce 7900 GS, but a better way to think of it is as a down-clock of the GeForce 7900 GTX.

Main Features

• GeForce 7950 GT (G71 at 550MHz)
• 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 memory (1.4GHz)
• Memory Bandwidth of 44.8GB/s
• PCI Express x16 Compatibility
• High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) Compliant
• DirectX 9.0c, OpenGL 2.0 and Shader Model 3.0 Support
• Multi-GPU SLI Bridge Interconnect Support
• H.264 Playback with PureVideo Engine

We don't think there is much more to say about the G71 graphics processor at this point. The most important thing to know about the G71 in this application is that it's not been neutered, spayed, or hobbled in the least with the GeForce 7950 GT, all of the relevant 3D graphics bits are working, including the 24 pixel shader processors and 8 vertex shader processors. The cooler used on the card is remarkably like the one on the GeForce 7900 GT, it is fairly small, not very quiet and only cools the actual GPU, not the memory.

With the GeForce 7950 GT accelerator, 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. That means you can rest assured that any GeForce 7950 GT should be able to play back HD-DVD and Blu-Ray movies when used with the right player software. The PCB is nothing we haven't seen before, NVIDIA asking that you connect up an external power connector when you use a GeForce 7950 GT, just as products required before it.

Beyond that, the GeForce 7950 GT is clocked just below the GeForce 7900 GTX, with the core clock speed of 550MHz and 512MB of GDDR3 memory humming along at 1400MHz. It is just trailing behind the GTX by around 100MHz on the core which is an improvement with the old GeForce 7900 GT accelerator. The memory used however is very similar, as both cards use the GDDR3 variant available from Samsung, Hynix or Infineon. So in the end NVIDIA is replacing the GeForce 7900 GT with a faster and better version that should be able to take up the gloves in a battle against the new ATI based products.