NVIDIA's GeForce 7950 GX2 & Forceware Rel. 90
Introduction and Related Information
In January of this year, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, NVIDIA and Dell jointly unveiled an ultra high-end gaming system equipped with a pair of specialized graphics adapters that were each powered by a pair of GeForce 7800 GTX GPUs and 1GB of memory. The final configuration consisted of two "cards", four GPUs, and a total of 2GB of graphics memory. NVIDIA dubbed the technology "Quad-SLI", and gave Dell an exclusive on the technology for a short period of time.
At the time NVIDIA didn't announce any plans to bring Quad-SLI to retail, but we all knew the day would eventually come. While that day is not today (technically), NVIDIA is laying the foundation for do-it-yourself Quad-SLI with the release of the new GeForce 7950 GX2. The GeForce 7950 GX2 is a refinement of the technologies employed in the first dual-GPU cards used in the original Quad-SLI design. The 7950 GX2 features newer GPUs and revised PCB designs that not only make the cards physically smaller, but more power efficient and ultimately more compatible with existing platforms. Though Quad-SLI may or may not be ready for prime time in the mainstream just yet, the GeForce 7950 GX2 is being targeted by NVIDIA as the fastest single graphics adapter on earth currently -- a single graphics adapter with dual GPUs.
|
|
;)
;)
;)
Click any image for an enlarged view
|
NVIDIA CineFX 4.0 Shading Architecture Vertex Shaders
Pixel Shaders
Next-Generation Texture Engine
64-Bit Texture Filtering and Blending
NVIDIA Intellisample 4.0 Technology
|
API Support
NVIDIA Digital Vibrance Control (DVC) 3.0 Technology
NVIDIA SLI Technology
NVIDIA UltraShadow II Technology
NVIDIA PureVideo Technology
Composited Desktop Hardware Engine
Advanced Display Functionality
Advanced Engineering
|
The GeForce 7950 GX2 is equipped with a pair of G71 GPUs. We've covered the features and specifications of the G71 in a couple of previous articles, so we won't go into detail again here. For a more comprehensive look at the main features of the GeForce 7 series, and some more details regarding NVIDIA's multi-GPU SLI platform as a whole, we recommend taking a look at a few of our recent articles...
- NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX / GT & 7600 GT
- NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB
- NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX (G70) Launch
- SLIAA / Forceware v77 Launch
- NVIDIA's PureVideo Technology
- NVIDIA's Multi-GPU Strategy: SLI
- NVIDIA nForce 4 SLIX16 Performance Showcase
We know that's a lot of reading, but the information and performance data in the articles listed above will give you all of the background and architectural details necessary to fully understand the new product being announced today. If you're unclear about anything on the proceeding pages, look back to these articles for more detail.
