[H]ard|OCP reviews ASUS EAX1950 Pro video card
On October 17th of 2006, only five months ago, ATI launched the ATI Radeon X1950 Pro. This new video card and GPU brought us X1950 series performance for a price that won't break the bank at $199 MSRP. To enable this ATI cut the pixel shader processors down to 36 from 48 in the X1950 XTX. They also lowered the GPU frequency to 575 MHz from 650 MHz in the Radeon X1950 XTX and the memory frequency was lowered to 1.38 GHz. ATI kept the memory bandwidth the same with a 256-bit data path but cut the memory capacity in half to 256 MB.
All the important DirectX 9 and ATI specific features are still intact in the X1950 Pro. There is full DirectX 9 shader model 2.0 and 3.0 support with the capability to run antialiasing with HDR, native 10-bit color processing and full HDCP support. These features are noteworthy because the competition for this video card, the NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GS GPU does not support antialiasing with HDR and 10-bit color processing natively. The Radeon X1950 Pro also introduced ATI's native CrossFire support utilizing a connector atop the video card and the elimination of the master card nonsense... [read more]
