The XXX Edition of the GeForce 7950 GX2 means you receive a card preoverclocked by default, so there's no need for you to overclock manually. Two huge benefits come from this, the first being your overclocking is covered by warranty. Secondly, these cards have been pre-tested by XFX to see if they actually can take a high overclock, something which is always a bit of a gamble with a regular card. The downside is you pay premium price for a little extra operformance.

Here's a thought. Since we know XFX is testing these cards manually, the "regular" versions likely will not overlock as well as they did not pass the Extreme Edition or XXX qualification. So what's overclocked then? Basically two things. First being the graphics core as it's running at a sweet 570 MHz (500 on reference design). The second important factor is obviously the framebuffer, a.k.a. memory, which normally runs at 2x600 MHz and now is running at 2x775 MHz. Not bad eh?

Today's tested GeForce 7950 GX2 with 1024MB gDDR3 memory is available as we speak and actually in pretty good volumes, keeping the prices level where they should be. Today's product will carry a MSRP of 699 USD and with that price we are finally back at an unfortunately too high price level.

You're at Guru3D.com, we're going to make this card sweat as we launch our entire benchmark suite at this graphics card to monitor its performance at several image quality settings. Of course you'll see the usual technology overview, photoshoot, overclocking experiences and finally my verdict.

What's inside the XFX bundle?

What is a shader ?

What do we need to render a three dimensional object; 2D on your monitor? We start off by building some sort of structure that has a surface, that surface is being built from triangles and why triangles? They are quick to calculate. How's each triangle being processed? Each triangle has to be transformed according to its relative position and orientation to the viewer. Each of the three vertices the triangle is made up of is transformed to its proper view space position. The next step is to light the triangle by taking the transformed vertices and applying a lighting calculation for every light defined in the scene. At last the triangle needs to be projected to the screen in order to rasterize it. During rasterization the triangle will be shaded and textured. Graphic processors like the GeForce series are able to perform a certain amount of these tasks. The first generation was able to draw shaded and textured triangles in hardware. The CPU still had the burden to feed the graphics processor with transformed and lit vertices, triangle gradients for shading and texturing, etc. Integrating the triangle setup into the chip logic was the next step and finally even transformation and lighting (TnL) was possible in hardware, reducing the CPU load considerably (GeForce 256). The big disadvantage was that a game programmer had no direct (i.e. program driven) control over transformation, lighting and pixel rendering because all the calculation models were fixed on the chip. And now we finally get to the stage where we can explain Shaders. Vertex and Pixel shaders allow developers to code customized transformation and lighting calculations as well as pixel coloring functionality. Each shader is basically nothing more than a relatively small program executed on the graphics processor to control either vertex or pixel processing.

Now then, our usual blurb: What are the major advantages of the Series 6 and 7 products? Well, feature wise we are looking pretty much at the same technology we have known for almost two years now. What you need to remember is that any Series 6 and 7 graphics card can achieve what a modern game expects from it. Obviously the keywords over the past couple of years has been "Shader technology." It really changed the way we look at games from a graphical point of view. It allows the game programmers to take games to a next level in both a visual and performance terms.

As always, that's the point where we land and quickly discuss Shader Model 3.

Talking about Shader Model 3

If you program or play computer games or even recently attempted to purchase a video card, then you will have no doubt heard the terms "Vertex Shader" and "Pixel Shader". The step from 2.0 to 3.0 was a small one and most Shader Model 2.0 games can easily be upgraded to Model 3.0, which can bring more performance to that gaming experience. DirectX 9 was recently updated and we are going to see more and more support for 3.0 Shaders.

Is SM 3.0 technology a huge visual advantage over 2.0? Nope, not even the slightest bit. Yet any technological advance is always welcome and preferred over a previous generation's development. What you need to remember about Shaders is that they can and will be used only in several critical places where it can give a performance boost, and graphics cards are all about performance my friends. Both ATI and NVIDIA now offer Shader Model 3 support in their new products - in the GeForce 6 Series and newer from NVIDIA and for ATI their X1800 series and newer.

Talking about HDR

Another big trendy implementation that will bring games closer to a movie like quality experience is HDR. Both ATI and NVIDIA have been focusing extremely hard on HDR. They put a lot of money into their technology to support HDR in the best possible way and they should as it's just a fantastic effect that brings so much more to the your gameplay experience. HDR is something you all know from games like Far Cry, it's extremely bright lighting that brings a really cool cinematic effect to gaming. This effect is becoming extraordinarily popular.

Some time ago, Valve released a new HL2 level in the form of Half Life 2: Lost Coast as a tech demo. Go download it as it'll show and amaze you with what HDR can do. The difference is obvious. HDR means High Dynamic Range. HDR facilitates the use of color values way beyond the normal range of the color palette in an effort to produce a more extreme form of lighting rendering. Typically this trick is used to contrast really dark scenery. Extreme sunlight, over-saturation or over exposure is a good example of what exactly is possible. The most simple way to describe it would be controlling the amount of light present in a certain position in a 3D scene.