DIAMOND X1950 Pro Video Card Review :: DIAMOND X1950 Pro Features

• 80 nanometer process
• 321 million transistors
• 12 ROPs
• 36 Pixel Shader Processors
• 256-bit memory bus
• 512-bit Ring bus memory controller
• 575MHz Core clock speed
• 1380MHz Memory clock speed
• DirectX 9.0c
• Pixel Shader 3.0
• Vertex Shader 3.0
• HDR
• Up to 6x MSAA
• Temporal AA
• Adaptive AA
• Anisotropic Filtering up to 16x

The X1950 Pro is based upon AMD's RV560 chip, which is a slimmed down X1950XTX chip with 12 instead of 16 ROPs (outputted pixels), 36 instead of 48 Pixel Shader Processors and the same number of Vertex Shaders as its bigger brother. The X1950 Pro is done on TSMC's 80 nanometer process with 381 million transistors.

Modern gaming graphics cards, with the sole exceptions of the 8800GTX (384-bit) and 8800GTS (320-bit) have been stuck on the 256-bit memory bus for a long time, since the advent of the RADEON 9700 Pro and Matrox Parhelia. ATI introduced a Ring Bus memory controller that runs at 512-bit internal bus bandwidth but 256-bit external. The memory bandwidth on the X1950 Pro is 44GB/second.

DirectX 9.0 was released in 2002 with the advent of the RADEON 9700 Pro. The RADEON 9700 Pro was the first AMD card to really out feature and outperform their competition by wide margins. The X1950 Pro has full support for DirectX 9.0c features including Pixel Shader 3.0 and Vertex Shader 3.0. Floating Point 32-bit per color component precision is present, allowing for accurate calculations in lighting.

AMD cards can do Full Scene Anti-Aliasing to help eliminate jaggies, or lines that are thinner than a pixel. AMD uses a semi-stochastic pattern to give the best possible image quality in their FSAA. The X1950 Pro can do up to 6 sample Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing, with up to 12 sample AA simulated with Temporal Anti-Aliasing. Normally transparent textures are not anti-aliased with normal MSAA. Adaptive Anti-Aliasing applies AA to transparent textures like heavy foliage and the spaces in between fences.

AMD cards are the only cards on the market besides the 8800GTX and 8800GTS cards from NVIDIA capable of doing MSAA+HDR at the same time. High Dynamic Range lighting allows the graphics card to display a wider range of color contrasts on a monitor. If you have ever seen a sky in an integer based game with a dull look you can thank the advent of HDR for making things look better.

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