NVIDIA GeForce Go 7950 GTX Preview

The enthusiast gaming notebook has become an extremely viable and desirable alternative to today's desktop systems, which in-part explains why the mobile segment is one of the fastest growing in the PC industry. The latest crop of high performance notebooks are an engineering marvel of sorts, as they come dangerously close to providing the same levels of performance without the excessive bulk and heat associated with a full desktop system. Over the course of the last year in particular, we have witnessed the notebook gain further ground on desktops with the arrival of new processors and NVIDIA's SLI multi-GPU configurations on the notebook platform. As such, we now have the ability to run extremely potent CPUs, multiple flagship GPUs, and other enthusiast-class hardware without the need for a 700W power supply or some obnoxiously loud cooling solution.

Today, NVIDIA takes the notebook platform yet another step closer to enthusiast desktop performance with the launch of the new GeForce Go 7950 GTX. As the company's new flagship mobile GPU, this graphics chipset offers unprecedented performance for the notebooks without sacrificing the features and functionality a notebook demands. Going through the specifications, it is hard to not be impressed by NVIDIA's latest mobile creation. 

NVIDIA GeForce Go 7950 GTX Specifications
Flagship Performance Crammed Into a Notebook
NVIDIA CineFX 4.0 Shading Architecture
Vertex Shaders
Support for Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Vertex Shader 3.0
Displacement mapping
Geometry instancing
Infinite length vertex programs

Pixel Shaders
Support for DirectX 9.0 Pixel Shader 3.0
Full pixel branching support
Support for Multiple Render Targets (MRTs)
Infinite length pixel programs

Next-Generation Texture Engine
Accelerated texture access
Up to 16 textures per rendering pass
Support for 16-bit floating point format and 32-bit floating point format
Support for non-power of two textures
Support for sRGB texture format for gamma textures DirectX and S3TC texture compression

.Full 128-bit studio-quality floating point precision through the entire rendering pipeline with native hardware support for 32bpp, 64bpp, and 128bpp rendering modes


API Support
.Complete DirectX support, including the latest version of Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0
.Full OpenGL support, including OpenGL 2.0


64-Bit Texture Filtering and Blending
.Delivers true high dynamic range (HDR) lighting support
.Full floating point support throughout entire pipeline
.Floating point filtering improves the quality of images in motion .Floating point texturing drives new levels of clarity and image detail .Floating point frame buffer blending gives detail to special effects like motion blur and explosions


NVIDIA Intellisample 4.0 Technology
.Advanced 16x anisotropic filtering (with up to 128 Taps)
.Blistering- fast antialiasing and compression performance .Gamma-adjusted rotated-grid antialiasing removes jagged edges for incredible image quality
.Transparent multisampling and transparent supersampling modes boost antialiasing quality to new levels
.Support for normal map compression
.Support for advanced lossless compression algorithms for color, texture, and z-data at even higher resolutions and frame rates
.Fast z-clear


NVIDIA UltraShadow II Technology
.Designed to enhance the performance of shadow-intensive games


NVIDIA Digital Vibrance Control (DVC) 3.0 Technology
.DVC color controls
.DVC image sharpening controls


Advanced Display Functionality
. Dual integrated 400MHz RAMDACs for display resolutions up to and including 2048x1536 at 85Hz
.Full NVIDIA nView multi-display technology capability


NVIDIA PureVideo Technology
.Dedicated on-chip video processor
.High-definition H.264, MPEG2 and WMV9 decode acceleration
.Advanced spatial-temporal de-interlacing
.Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
.High-quality video scaling
.Video color correction
.Microsoft Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) supports multiple video windows with full video quality and features in each window


Composited Desktop Hardware Engine
. Video post-processing
.Real-time desktop compositing
.Accelerated antialiased text rendering
.Pixel shader-driven special effects and animation

Advanced Engineering
.Designed for PCI Express x16
.Designed for high-speed GDDR3 memory
.Designed around MXM constraints
.Same Thermal, Power, and Space constraints as GeForce Go 7900 GTX


Operating Systems
.Microsoft Vista
.Windows XP/Windows XP 64
.Windows ME
.Windows 2000
.Linux
.Macintosh OS X




The GeForce Go 7950 GTX:
Exposed



The GeForce Go 7950 GTX:
Rear-View


The GeForce Go 7950 GTX: MXM Module

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