ATI X1950 Pro



ATI's X1950 Pro is based on their RV570 GPU. Basically: 36 shader processors (12x3), 8 geometry pipelines and 12 ROP's. The core speed is being kept at 575MHz (reference design), and the memory is finding itself at 1380MHz. Besides the lower power consumption compared to RV580 the X1950 Pro supports dongle-less Crossfire, something that looks very familiar to nVidia's SLI technology.



A second processing chip we can find on the X1950 Pro is ATI's Rage Theater. In fact ATI gave the choice to the vendors whether they want to add this chip or not. Both HIS and Powercolor graphic boards used in our review came with the Rage Theater processor. The ATI Rage Theater chip is used for creating high quality video in- and output. You can find more info on AMD/ATI's site.



The main GPU is based on unified shader processors. By this we mean that there are no longer individual pixel and vertex shaders. The 'unified' shaders have the possibility to work as a vertex shader, or as a pixel shader, all of that completely dependant of what scene has to be rendered. This will certainly improve performance since there will be no shader processor doing 'nothing'. Only in the later introduction of the G80 we see NVIDIA choosing for the same approach in graphic processing.

NVIDIA 7900 GS



Sparkle's 7900GS is using the NVIDIA G71 video processor, a die shrink of te G70 in other words. The G71 has been well used (on NVIDIA's 7950GT for example) on other products going from mid to the very high end. This time NVIDIA is not using the full potential of the G71 cores: with 20 out of 24 vertex shader, and 7 out of a total of 8 pixel shaders, the 7900GS will be significant slower then the 7950GT we reviewed before. Not only that, the core and memory speed has also been lowered to 450/1320 MHz.

	GeForce 7800GTX	GeForce 7900GS	GeForce 7900GT	GeForce 7950GT	GeForce 7900GTX
Productionprocess	110nm	90nm	90nm	90nm	90nm
Pixel pipelines	8	7	8	8	8
Vertex pipelines	24	20	24	24	24
ROP's	16	16	16	16	16
GPU core clock	430 MHz	450 MHz	450 MHz	550 MHz	650 MHz
Memory clock	1200 MHz	1320 MHz	1320 MHz	1400 MHz	1600 MHz
Amount of memory	256Mb	256Mb	256Mb	512Mb	512Mb
Memory bus width	256 bit	256 bit	256 bit	256 bit	256 bit

ATI vs NVIDIA

	HIS X1950Pro IceQ 3 Turbo	PowerColor X1950 PRO Extreme	Sparkle GeForce 7900 GS
Cooling	IceQ 3	Arctic Cooling	stock
GPU / Process	RV570 / 80nm	RV570 / 80nm	G71 / 90nm
GPU clock	620 MHz *	600 MHz	450 MHz
Memory clock	1480 MHz	1400 MHz	1320 MHz
Shader Units	36	36	20
Geometry pipelines	8	8	7
ROP's	12	12	16
Memory	Samsung 1.4ns 256Mb bit GDDR3	Samsung 1.4ns 256Mb bit GDDR3	Hynix 1.4ns 256Mb bit GDDR3
Amount of memory	256Mb (8x64Mb)	256Mb (8x64Mb)	256Mb (8x64Mb)
DirectX version	9.0C	9.0C	9.0C
Vertex and Pixel Shader version	3	3	3
Native Display Quality	10-bit	10-bit	8-bit
Anisotropic Filtering	All stage Trilinear (16X)	All stage Trilinear (16X)	1st stage Trilinear (16X)
Full (HQ) Anisotropic Filtering	Yes	Yes	No
Maximum MSAA	12X Temporal	12X Temporal	4X
Adaptive AA	6X	6X	4X Transparency AA
Always on FSAA Gamma correction	Yes	Yes	No
HDR + AA	Yes	Yes	No
3DC+	Yes	Yes	No
FP16 Blending	Yes	Yes	Yes
Dual Link DVI	2	2	1
H.264 support	Yes	Yes	No
Dual GPU support	CrossFire	CrossFire	SLI
Bus Type	PCI Express	PCI Express	PCI Express

*Although HIS stated the core to be clocked at 620MHz, our monitoring tool shows us that it was actually clocked at 635MHz.

Let's find out who's how capable they are when it comes to gaming ->