The last 6 years has seen a wonderful evolution of video cards and games that the video cards play. Simple, single pixel pipeline video cards have given way to multi-hundred million transistor video cards with capabilities that a TNT2 of 2000 would only dream of. Where there were once many companies making video cards (3DFX, Rendition, Bit Boys, 3DLabs, S3, Matrox, etc.), today there are two, NVIDIA and ATI.

NVIDIA and ATI design their architectures around major “inflection points”. The TNT2 was NVIDIA’s first card to fully support DirectX 6 with features like emboss bump mapping, multitexturing and more, it was an inflection point. The GeForce SDR and DDR cards were NVIDIA’s first foray into DirectX 7.0 compliance with features like Hardware Transform and Lighting, DDR memory, and other features making it their next inflection point. The next inflection point was the Xbox gaming console, the first chip to support DirectX 8.0 features including the Programmable Pixel Shader and Vertex Shaders.

With the advent of DirectX 9.0, NVIDIA wasn’t ready with their first chip, the 5800, for a variety of reasons. The delay, along with the release of the RADEON 9700 series, forced NVIDIA to take a second seat for much of the DirectX 9.0 inflection point. Performance, usable features and the rapid release of the 5800, 5900, 5950 series, had NVIDIA in a damage limitation mode for much of 2003. They planned to take the feature and performance leadership back from ATI with their next chip, the NV40.

The GeForce 6800 series launched on April 22nd of 2004, returning NVIDIA to the feature and performance leadership they’ve enjoyed historically. This chip was the first to fully support Pixel Shader 3.0 and Vertex Shader 3.0 functionality. NVIDIA refreshed their SM 3.0 parts with the 7xxx series that was released in May of last year. In between the launch of the 5800 and 6800 series NVIDIA launched the nForce4 SLI chipset, allowing two supported video cards to work together improving performance in games. Today, NVIDIA is taking their next step forward, with the launch of the GeForce 7950 GX2 series and I’m reviewing the EVGA version of that card.