So if you had $300 US to spend of a high-performance graphics card for gaming what would you purchase? As I see it the two latest options at the moment are either the GeForce 7950GT or Radeon X1900XT, both of which retail for around the $300 US mark. Each graphics card features its own unique advantages and while both can come fitted with 512MB of onboard GDDR3 memory, the similarities stop there. At this stage I see the biggest advantage for the Radeon X1900XT is availability, as this product has been available for quite some time now. The GeForce 7950GT on the other hand has only very recently been released or announced for that matter, so supplies are tight.

Furthermore, because the Radeon X1900XT is already very well established, there are a number of impressive options out there featuring tweaked core and memory frequencies, along with updated cooling solutions. For the next few months the majority of GeForce 7950GT cards being released will most likely be quite bland and probably won’t offer much in the way of fancy cooling setups. That said, XFX has already released a neat little GeForce 7950GT graphics card which has been designed to operate in complete silence, thanks to a passive heatsink. That said there are obviously decent 7950GT solutions out there.

On paper the Radeon X1900XT actually looks like a more impressive product, featuring 3 pixel shaders on each pipeline allowing for a total of 48 pixel shader units. The reason ATi did this was because they expected upcoming computer games to be much more pixel shader intensive that existing ones. So while the new GeForce 7950GT features 24 pixel pipelines, the Radeon X1900XT features 16 pixel pipelines or technically 48. Both graphics cards feature a single texture mapping unit and 8 vertex mapping units.

The GDDR3 memory of the Radeon X1900XT is also clocked 50MHz higher while the G71 core of the 7950GT operates 75MHz slower than the R580 of the X1900XT. The end result is a 1.6GB/s memory bandwidth advantage favoring the Radeon X1900XT. The specifications of the GeForce 7950GT have clearly been boosted from that of the 7900GT and while in essence this new graphics card is just an overclocked 7900GT, it does come with 512MB of onboard memory. Furthermore, you are not paying a ridiculous price premium for the added performance of the 7950GT.

Therefore, while the GeForce 7950GT has successfully bridged the gap between the 7900GT and 7900GTX, it has also brought some much needed competition to the Radeon X1900XT. The GeForce 7900 series has done battle with the Radeon X1800/1900 series time and time again, and in the past I have leant towards the GeForce 7900GT. When it came time for the Radeon X1800XT (256MB) to take on the GeForce 7900GT things went the way of the green team! Although both products produced similar performance at a similar price, I went with the 7900GT at the time simply because of its overclocking abilities.

Today, the new and improved GeForce 7950GT will step up to take on the Radeon X1900XT which has now well and truly replaced the X1800XT. The Radeon X1900XT is however a far superior product, so the task ahead of the 7950GT is not going to be easy. The GeForce 7950GT is in a good position to take on the Radeon X1900XT as it is basically an overclocked 7900GT with 512MB of memory, or on the other hand an underclocked 7900GTX. Which makes you wonder, can the 7950GT overclock to 7900GTX specs or has NVIDIA used up all the available headroom in creating the 7950GT? Let’s find out...