NVIDIA's GeForce 7950 GX2 & Forceware Rel. 90

Name: NVIDIA's GeForce 7950 GX2 & Forceware Rel. 90
Brand: NVIDIA's

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, June 05, 2006, 08:00 AM EDT

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.

NVIDIA's GeForce 7950 GX2: Features and Specifications

Double Your Pleasure...

Click any image for an enlarged view

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

64-Bit Texture Filtering and Blending

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

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

NVIDIA Digital Vibrance Control (DVC) 3.0 Technology

DVC color controls
DVC image sharpening controls

NVIDIA SLI Technology

Patented hardware and software technology allows two GPUs to run in parallel to scale performance
Scales performance on over 60 top PC games and applications

NVIDIA UltraShadow II Technology

Designed to enhance the performance of shadow-intensive games

NVIDIA PureVideo Technology

Adaptable programmable video processor
High-definition MPEG-2 and WMV9 hardware acceleration
Spatial-temporal de- interlacing
Inverse 2:2 and 3:2 pull-down (Inverse Telecine)
4-tap horizontal, 5-tap vertical scaling
Overlay color temperature correction
Microsoft Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) supports multiple video windows with full video quality and features in each window
Integrated HDTV output

Composited Desktop Hardware Engine

Video post-processing
Real-time desktop compositing
Accelerated antialiased text rendering
Pixel shader-driven special effects and animation

Advanced Display Functionality

Dual integrated 400MHz RAMDACs for display resolutions up to and including 2048x1536 at 85Hz
Dual DVO ports for interfacing to external TMDS transmitters and external TV encoders
Full NVIDIA nView multi-display technology capability

Advanced Engineering

Designed for PCI Express x16
Designed for high-speed GDDR3 memory

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...

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.