The DIAMOND X1950 Pro is an interesting contrast to the other X1950 Pro from ASUS I reviewed recently. The card performs better in many respects, but as the cards are identically clocked, this could be due to the driver on the driver CD, as that's about the only difference the two cards share. The X1950 Pro is a good competitor to the 7900GT and beats out the intended competition, the 7900GS, outperforming it in virtually every benchmark. The DIAMOND card would be a easy Gold award if they kept their drivers updated more often (a trait, sadly that Diamond shares with its old company) and included a game with the card, but those points bring the score down to a Silver award.
In any event, with the advent of the GeForce 8800GTX and GTS and Microsoft Vista the choice between purchasing a new card today, or waiting for the next generation mainstream cards is a hard one. The way Vista and DirectX 10 works is if you have the hardware for Shader Model 4 and a game requires it, you'll need a SM 4.0 card to run the game to its fullest. If you don't have that hardware then you'll get lesser features and lower performance. One thing is for certain. NVIDIA launched the GeForce 8800GTX in November. It is likely AMD will launch the replacement for the R5xx series early next year followed a few months later by an R6xx mainstream part. NVIDIA's mainstream 8xxx will surely have the Image Quality and performance edge over today's mainstream cards. It's a choice every user has to make, due to Vista being a fundamental discontinuity in graphics requirements.
