Then in January 2006 the Radeon 1900 XT and XTX models were released, R580, opening up a new can of performance. The X1900 had three times the average Pixel Shader units, 48 of them. The product was the high end offering, competing with the GeForce 7800 GTX 512 MB, yet priced similarly at an astounding $649 USD. A new record was set... the GPU had 380 million transistors. That was one sick (good!) looking card alright. It weighed nearly two pounds, but man... that thing was bloke stuff.

We now land at March 2006 CeBIT time and NVIDIA has just launched three new cards. The GeForce 7600 GT 256MB, GeForce 7900 GT 256MB, GeForce 7900 GTX 512MB.

Above you can see the GeForce 7900 GT 256 MB a.k.a G71, keep that in mind .. G71.

A 24 pixel processor + 8 vertex processors product with 304 million transistors clocked at 450 MHz and is armed with gDDR3 memory running at 1320 MHz (2x 660 MHz).

We are now in August 2006, and ATI is releasing a card with the most gorgeous cooling design one can think of. All hail the ATI Radeon X1950 XTX, I typed the card as Battlestar GallATIca. See I was already funny back then ;)

This all new Radeon X1950 XTX was a product that was somewhat lined up against the dual-gpu solution called GeForce 7950 GX2, a product which offers great performance for a really okay price.

So ATI figured .. hmm we can do better than that and even at a better price so they introduced the Radeon X1950 XTX to attack in Crossfire. Specifications for the Radeon X1950XTX and X1950 CrossFire where shortly after finalized with a 650 MHz core clock and an impressive 2 GHz effective memory clock.

The X1950 was pretty much the X1900 XTX (R580 graphics core) with a new cooler, yet with one very large advantage, it's memory. As anticipated, the R580 core still featured 16 pixel pipelines, but now had 48 Pixel Shader processors.

SLi and Crossfire were becoming popular. As such NVIDIA decided to make the first ever GX2 card, this is the GeForce 7950 GX2 with a price tag of roughly $599 to $650 USD.

The card had two G71 GPUs, ~300 million transistors each based on the then new 90nm fabrication process. The GPUs where clocked to 500 MHz each. The board was armed with one Gigabyte of gDDR3 memory, more precisely 2x512MB at 600 MHz per GPU. Unprecedented at the time. It was also the era where NVIDIA tried to do its first quad GPU rendering, but failed miserably at it (at the time) due to many OS restrictions.