90 nanometer low-k dialectic process
G71 chip
278 million transistors
24 Pixel Pipelines
8 Vertex Shader Pipelines
16 ROPs
HDR
16-bit FP Blending
128-bit Floating Point Precision
Up to 4x MSAA
Up to 8x AA (Mixed Mode)
Up to 16x AF
Pixel Shader 3.0
Vertex Shader 3.0

The 7950GT is based upon NVIDIA’s G71 chip. NVIDIA was the first video card manufacturer to introduce cards with Shader Model 3.0 functionality in the form of the GeForce 6800 series in 2004. 2005 saw the release of the second iteration of SM3.0 part, the 7800GTX, which increased the number of Pixel Pipelines to 24 and Vertex Shaders to 8 from 16 and 4 respectively.

The 7950GT supports all Pixel Shader 3.0 and Vertex Shader 3.0 features. The key differences between PS 3.0 and VS 3.0 include: longer Shader program lengths (512 versus 64), Dynamic Branching in the Pixel Shader, Indexable Constant Float Registers, instructions dcl usage- ps, loop- ps, endloop- ps, sincos ps, texdl –ps, and new registers for Input, Position and a Face Register. The key differences between Vertex Shader 3.0 and 2.0 include: Texture lookup, Indexable Output Registers, new instructions dcl samplerType- vs, texture instruction texdl-vs and a new register Sampler.

High Image Quality is important to me as a gamer and as a reviewer. One of the problems with modern games is that they often have lines or edges that are thinner than a pixel wide, causing aliasing (jaggies) to appear when gaming. ASUS’s EN7950GT can do up to 4X Rotated Grid Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing, and is more or less equivalent in IQ for the AA quality to the latest ATI cards. Another useful feature of modern graphics cards is anisotropic filtering.  AF enhances the IQ of textures of surfaces that are far way and at high angles with respect to the camera so that the projection of the texture appears like a trapezoid instead of a square. In other words the farther away textures look sharper (less blur).

High Dynamic Range lighting is another feature that has been introduced with modern video cards, starting with the 6800 series. The non-floating point hardware of the past could only render a range of lighting with a 255:1 contrast ratio, due to the integer precision. The advent of Pixel Shader 2.0 and 3.0 hardware brought floating point precision into the equation, meaning that lighting calculations could be done with a 65,535:1 ratio, meaning more natural lighting. HDR lighting is used extensively in games like Oblivion.

SLI stands for Scalable Link Interface. NVIDIA introduced their multiple GPU solution in 2004; four years after 3DFX went bankrupt. Two 7950GT cards can be installed in the same system to improve application performance. To install SLI, you need two of the same video card, an SLI motherboard, and a bridge to connect the two cards together. SLI owns the multiple GPU market, with over 90% of Steam multi-GPU users using SLI cards.