Gigabyte GeForce 7950 GT

For testing the Gigabyte 7950 GT, we used an Athlon 64 X2 4600+ processor on a DFI LANParty NF4 SLI-DR motherboard. We also used 2GB of Corsair DDR (TWINX2048-4400) and a 120GB Maxtor SATA hard drive. The Gigabyte 7950 GT was compared to a Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro, an XFX 7900 GT 550M Xtreme and an ATI Radeon X1900 XTX. Note that the XFX GeForce 7900 GT is overclocked (550MHz core / 1.63GHz memory), while the 7950 GT, X1900 XTX and X1950 Pro are not.

HotHardware Test System AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ Powered

Performance Comparisons with 3DMark06 v1.0.2 Details: http://www.futuremark.com/products/3dmark06/

3DMark06

Futuremark recently launched a brand new version of its popular benchmark, 3DMark06. The new version of the benchmark is updated in a number of ways and now includes not only Shader Model 2.0 tests but also Shader Model 3.0 and HDR tests as well. Some of the assets from 3DMark05 have been re-used, but the scenes are now rendered with much more geometric detail, and the shader complexity is vastly increased as well. Max shader length in 3DMark05 was 96 instructions, while 3DMark06 ups the number of instructions to 512. 3DMark06 also employs much more lighting, and there is extensive use of soft shadows. With 3DMark06, Futuremark has also updated how the final score is tabulated. In this latest version of the benchmark, SM 2.0 and HDR / SM3.0 tests are weighted, and the CPU score is factored into the final tally as well.

A GeForce 7950 GT with reference clock speeds, like the one we are testing here, will perform better than a 7900 GT with reference clock speeds but typically won't quite hit the performance of a reference 7900 GTX. Because the XFX 7900 GT sports a nice overclock, we expected it to go toe-to-toe with the 7950 GT in most tests. That's what we are seeing here in our first tests.