Introduction

PowerColor X1950 Pro AGP card and box

PowerColor X1950 Pro AGP and the 6800 Ultra

It has been a pretty slow year for gamers with AGP systems. While the majority of the graphics market has continued to move at a frenetic pace this year, the rate of innovation on the AGP front has been significantly slower: while PCIe graphics performance has easily doubled in the past 12 months thanks to the recent introduction of the GeForce 8800, AGP graphics performance is at best, 20-25% faster than the GeForce 6800 Ultra and Radeon X850 XT PE cards of a few years ago. (And often times it’s much closer than that in many benchmarks.) Quite frankly, for the most part ATI and NVIDIA have left AGP users out in the cold.

The card that’s probably drawn the most ire from enthusiasts with AGP systems is arguably NVIDIA’s GeForce 7800 GS AGP. While the 7800 GS AGP sports the GeForce 7800 designation, it’s nowhere near as capable as the GeForce 7800 cards that preceded it, the GeForce 7800 GT and the 7800 GTX. For starters the GeForce 7800 GS AGP has just 16 pixel shaders. That’s 8 fewer shading units than the GeForce 7800 GTX, and four fewer than the 7800 GT. NVIDIA also disables two vertex shading units, leaving just six functional vertex shaders on the 7800 GS AGP. Texture address units (16) and ROPs (8) are down as well.

Finally, if all that wasn’t enough, the graphics core of the GeForce 7800 GS AGP runs 55MHz slower than the GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB at 375MHz. That’s also 25MHz slower than the GeForce 7800 GT, and just 25MHz higher than the GeForce 6800 GT.

As a result of all these changes, the GeForce 7800 GS AGP’s basic configuration shared more in common with the GeForce 6800 line than it did the GeForce 7800. This seemed to particularly upset AGP enthusiasts who already owned 6800 Ultra and GT cards. These users were hoping for an AGP upgrade that would deliver a substantial improvement over their current cards. Instead the GeForce 7800 GS AGP was tailored more for gamers who were coming from early DX9 cards like the Radeon 9x00 and GeForce FX series, as well as DirectX 8 and integrated graphics solutions.

Fortunately we can report that this isn’t the case for ATI’s Radeon X1950 Pro AGP: this card isn’t a cut down or detuned version of the PCI Express variant of the X1950 Pro. Feature-for-feature, nothing’s been changed. What does that equate to on paper? In case you aren’t familiar with the specs of the Radeon X1950 Pro, let’s provide a quick refresher.

PowerColor X1950 Pro AGP and Radeon X850 XT PE

PowerColor AGP board on the bottom, and the PCIe card up top

RV570 GPU

The Radeon X1950 Pro is based on ATI’s 80-nm RV570 GPU. RV570 sports 36 pixel shaders and eight vertex shaders, and runs at 575MHz core/690MHz memory. In PCIe form, the card also ships with integrated CrossFire support that’s built in to the GPU itself; ATI’s CrossFire master cards are no longer necessary. In our Radeon X1950 Pro Performance Preview article we found that the PCIe X1950 Pro was not only capable of outrunning the GeForce 7900 GS, in benchmarks like F.E.A.R., Half-Life 2 Lost Coast, and Oblivion, the card could even outdo the GeForce 7900 GT!

Top of the Powercolor card

Dual DVIs

With the debut of the Radeon X1950 Pro AGP, all this performance is now coming to the AGP platform intact. Again, as we mentioned earlier, ATI’s reference specifications for the X1950 Pro AGP call for the exact same minimum clocks of 575MHz core/690MHz memory. Board partners are also free to make tweaks to their X1950 Pro AGP cards if they wish. PowerColor’s Radeon X1950 Pro AGP card is one such example of this…