In January 2007, Connect3D released their version of the ATi Radeon X1950 Series. Today we picked up our sample, the Radeon X1950 Pro CrossFire Certified Graphics Card with 256mb of GDDR3 and PCI-E interface. With the release of the new ATi 2900 Series, the X1950 is not the best ATi video card one can buy, but it's definitely far from being the worst. With stiff competition from NVIDIA and the release of the new ATi cards, I've been anticipating large prices decreases like we've seen in the past, however this has yet to materialize.

     So what does the X1950 Pro have to offer? How about 384 transistors, up to 48 pixel and 8 vertex shader processors, 256-bit 8-channel GDDR3 memory interface, PCI Express x16 bus interface, and much, much more. When looking over the specifications and trying to digest all these numbers your nose may begin to bleed, but it all comes down to raw performance. The 256mb version of the X1950 Pro may not be the "best" X1950 in Connect3D's lineup, but it's still incredibly fast.

     Without diving into all the confusing techno-babble, let's take a quick look at the Features and Specs, we'll show you some close-ups of the video card and then run some tests with it plugged into our EVGA 680i motherboard. So where's the seventeen pages of specs leading up to the tests? WHO CARES!!! If you want to be board to tears you can always read the PDFs published at AMD. If you want to see some real results, come hang out with us. After all, it's not about how it's made or why it's made. It's really all about how it performs.

Specifications

Features

384 million transistors on 90nm fabrication process
Up to 48 pixel shader processors
Up to 8 vertex shader processors
256-bit 8-channel GDDR3/GDDR4 memory interface
Native PCI Express® x16 bus interface

Ring Bus Memory Controller
512-bit internal ring bus for memory reads
Fully associative texture, colour, and Z/stencil cache designs
Hierarchical Z-buffer with Early Z test
Lossless Z Compression (up to 48:1)
Fast Z-Buffer Clear
Optimized for performance at high display resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions

Ultra-Threaded Shader Engine
Support for Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 programmable vertex and pixel
shaders in hardware
Full speed 128-bit floating point processing for all shader operations
Up to 512 simultaneous pixel threads
Dedicated branch execution units for high performance dynamic branching and flow
control
Dedicated texture aGDDRess units for improved efficiency
3Dc+ texture compression
- High quality 4:1 compression for normal maps and two-channel data formats
- High quality 2:1 compression for luminance maps and single-channel
data formats
- Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL® 2.0

Advanced Image Quality Features
64-bit floating point HDR rendering supported throughout the pipeline
32-bit integer HDR (10:10:10:2) format supported throughout the pipeline
2x/4x/6x Anti-Aliasing modes
2x/4x/8x/16x Anisotropic Filtering modes
High resolution texture support (up to 4k x 4k)

Avivo™ Video and Display Engine
High performance programmable video processor
- Accelerated MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264 decoding (including
DVD/HD-DVD/Blu-ray playback), encoding & transcoding (optional soft DVD player and
appropriate optical hardware required)
- DXVA support
- De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
- Motion compensation, IDCT, DCT and colour space conversion
- Vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
- 3:2 pulldown (frame rate conversion)
Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
HDR tone mapping acceleration
- Maps any input format to 10 bit per channel output
Flexible display support
- Dual integrated dual-link DVI transmitters
- Dual integrated 10 bit per channel 400 MHz DACs
- 16 bit per channel floating point HDR and 10 bit per channel DVI output
- Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, colour correction, and colour space
conversion (10 bits per colour)
- Complete, independent colour controls and video overlays for each display
- High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all outputs
- Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
- Xilleon™ TV encoder for high quality analogue output
- YPrPb component output for direct drive of HDTV displays
- Spatial/temporal dithering enables 10-bit colour quality on 8-bit and 6-bit displays
- Fast, glitch-free mode switching
- VGA mode support on all outputs
Compatible with ATI TV/Video encoder products, including Theater 550

CrossFire™
Multi-GPU technology
Four modes of operation:
- Alternate Frame Rendering (maximum performance)
- Supertiling (optimal load-balancing)
- Scissor (compatibility)
- Super AA 8x/10x/12x/14x (maximum image quality)

System Requirements
PCI Express® based PC is required with one x16 lane graphics slot available on the motherboard. For CrossFire™ configurations two x16 slots are required
Connection to the system power supply is required (adapter not included)
450-Watt power supply or greater recommended (assumes fully loaded system) For CrossFire™ configurations a 550-Watt power supply is required
512MB of system memory
Installation software requires CD-ROM drive
DVD playback requires DVD drive and decoder software (not included)

Operating Systems Support
Windows® XP
Windows® XP x64 Edition
Windows® Media Center Edition 2005
Windows® Vista

Display Support
DVI-I connector for digital CRTs or flat panels
VGA connector (DVI-I – VGA Adapter) for analogue display
Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions and refresh rates
Dual Link DVI-I for high-resolution digital displays
Digital Displays (Connected by DVI) up to 2560x1600
Analogue Displays (Connected by VGA) 2048x1536
TV-out
- SDTV (analogue): 480i 525i
- HDTV (analogue or digital): 480p 720p

DISPLAY MODES: FEATURES
Resolutions, colours and maximum refresh rates (Hz) for 256, 65K and 16.7M colours
2D DISPLAY MODES
Monitor Resolution Hz
640x480 200
800x600 200
1024x768 200
1152x864 200
1280x1024 160
1600x1200 120
1920x1080* 16:9 120
1920x1200 100
1920x1440 90
2048x1536 85
2560x1600 60
MAXIMUM 3D RESOLUTIONS
65K colours 2048x1536
16.7M colours 2048x1536
1.07 billion colours 2560x1600

* 16:9 aspect ratio monitors are supported on 1920x1080 and 848x480 on Windows® XP, Windows® 2000 and Windows® ME. The complete list of resolutions depends on the driver.