**official** 7950gtx Vs 8700gt

Ok I personally am getting sick of going through the forums and seeing constant threads comparing these two cards, there is a new one every two days and i think I have replied to every one. To get one thing straight the 8700 GT is a MIDRANGE CARD that is at the highest level of the midrange spectrum and is only held back by it's 128 bit bus.

edit: with the entry of the 8800M GTX, it is at the high end of the higest spectrum and is the most powerful mobile graphics card to date. finally with a 256 bit bus, it can handle the higest resolutions, AA, and AF much better than the previous DX10 king, the 8700GT

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8800m GTX

Manufacturer:NVIDIA
Series GeForce: 8000M
Codename: NB8E
Pipelines: 192 - unified
Core Speed: 500 MHz
Memory Speed: 800 MHz
Memory Bus Width: 256 Bit
Memory Type: GDDR3
Max. Amount of Memory: 512 MB
Shared Memory: no

DirectX: DirectX 10, Shader 4.0
Current Consumption: 35 Watt
Transistors: Million
Features: 1250 MHz Shader frequence, probably: PureVideo Technology (H.264, VC-1, MPEG2, WMV9 Decoder acceleration), HDCP-capable, PowerMizer 7.0 energy management (dynamic switching between performance and energy saving), HDR (High Dynamic-Range Lighting), designed for Windows Vista, Dual-Link DVI-D exits for resolutions of TFT up to 2560x1600, PCI-E 16x, OpenGL 2.1, Gigathread technology
Notebook Size: large
Date of Announcement: 19.11.2007

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7950gtx Specs

Manufacturer: NVIDIA
Series GeForce: Go 7000
Codename: G71M
Pipelines: 24 / 8 Pixel- / Vertexshader
Core Speed: 575 MHz
Memory Speed: 700 MHz
Memory Bus Width: 256 Bit
Memory Type: GDDR3
Max. Amount of Memory: 512 MB
Shared Memory: no

DirectX: DirectX 9c, Shader 3.0
Current Consumption: 45 Watt
Transistors: 278 Million
Features: HDR, Intellisample 4.0, UltraShadow II, PureVideo, CineFX 4.0, PowerMizer 6.0, Transparency Antialiasing
Notebook Size: large
Date of Announcement: 12.10.2006
Information: 90nm, 278 Mio transistors, MXM-Module
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8700 GT Specs

Manufacturer: NVIDIA
Series GeForce: 8M
Codename: G84M
Pipelines: 32 - unified
Core Speed: 625 MHz
Memory Speed: 800 MHz
Memory Bus Width: 128 Bit
Memory Type: GDDR3
Max. Amount of Memory: 512 MB
Shared Memory: no

DirectX: DirectX 10, Shader 4.0
Current Consumption: 29 Watt
Transistors: 289 Million
Features: Shader clock frequence 1250 MHz, PureVideo technology (H.264, VC-1, MPEG2, WMV9 decoding acceleration), MPEG2, WMV9 decoding acceleration), HDCP-capable, PowerMizer 7.0 power management (dynamic switching between performance and energy economizing), HDR (High Dynamic-Range Lighting), designed for Windows Vista, 16x full screen AA, 16x AF independent of angles, 128-Bit HDR illumination with AA, Dual-Link DVI-D exits for resolutions of TFT up to 2560x1600, PCI-E 16x, OpenGL 2.1, Gigathread technology
Notebook Size: large
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The following are a few definitions.


Memory Bandwith
Memory bandwidth is equal to the size of the memory bus multiplied by the speed at which the memory is clocked.

The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be able to handle large textures and anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. Not to say that you don't need a lot of memory bandwidth if you don't want to use these features, you still do. Memory bandwidth is important in nearly every part of graphics processing.

The amount and speed of the memory matter very little in comparison to the overall memory bandwidth. If you want a card with good memory, this number says it all.

Shader Operations
Pixel shaders are programs that are run on the GPU to add some visual effect to a scene. The number of shader operations per second indicates how quickly the card can perform these operations and, in turn, render a scene.

Newer games are becoming increasingly shader intensive and this number is becoming more and more important.

Though it's not a perfect indicator of performance, all else being equal, a card with more pixel shader processing power will outperform a card with lower pixel shader power. As games get more and more shader dependent, cards with more shading power will pull farther and farther ahead of competing cards.

A perfect example of this phenomenon is the X1800 XT and the X1900 XTX. Both cards have nearly identical specifications, with the exception of shader processing power. The X1900 XTX has 3 times the shader processing power of the X1800 XT. This change alone is enough to make the X1900 XTX nearly twice as fast as the X1800 XT in shader-heavy games.


Pixel Fill Rate
Starting with the very first Voodoo 1, Pixel Fill Rate was 'king' when it came to describing video card 3D performance. This was before video cards did geometry processing, much less pixel shader processing. All a graphics card had to do back then was apply a couple of textures to a pixel and render it to the screen. And this is what pixel fill rate describes.

Starting with the GeForce 6 series, the number of Raster Operators got chopped down to make more room on the chip for pixel shader processors and pixel fill rate no longer scaled linearly with overall card performance.


Texture Fill Rate
The number of textured pixels the card can render to the screen every second. To render a 3D scene, textures are mapped over the top of polygon meshes. This is called texture mapping and is accomplished by texture mapping units (TMUs) on the videocard. Texture fill rate is a measure of the speed with which a particular card can perform texture mapping.


Memory Bus Type
In order to process 3D data as much as possible your video card has onboard RAM which typically operates much faster than your system RAM. This onboard video card RAM is connected to the GPU via the memory bus. This connection can be of varying widths depending on what GPU you have. Some GPUs support wider busses than others. Also, most cards support using memory over a smaller bus than the maximum supported by the card.

As a result, video card manufacturers often use cheaper memory with a lower buswidth than the maximum supported by the GPU. This is how you get 4 different versions of a video card with different memory buswidths. Since the buswidth is not heavily advertised (despite its importance), it's very easy to end up with a lower performing card than expected. So be careful.

On the card pages we first display the type of memory bus, and then the overall size in parentheses. The 'type' of bus refers to how the bus is broken up internally to better handle smaller chunks of data. For example the 7600 GT has a 64x2 memory bus, meaning it can process one 128bit chunk per clock, or two 64bit chunks. This segmenting makes the fetching of smaller chunks of data much more efficient since otherwise an entire clock cycle would be taken for a 64bit chunk


Texture Units
3D scenes are generally composed of two things: 3D geometry, and the textures that cover that geometry. Texture units in a video card take a texture and 'map' it to a piece of geometry. That is, they wrap the texture around the geometry and produce textured pixels which can then be written to the screen.

Textures can be an actual image, a light map, or even bump mapping.


Rastor Operations
Raster Operators (ROPs) handle several chores near the end of the of the pixel pipeline. ROPs handle anti-aliasing, Z and color compression, and the actual writing of the pixel to the output buffer.

Recently nVidia has been reducing the number of ROPs on their graphics cards as shading power gets more and more important. For example, the 6600GT had 8 fragment pipelines, but only 4 ROPs. However, in just about any modern game, far more than 1 cycle is spent shading each pixel. Thus, cards with the same number of ROPs as fragment pipelines would end up with ROPs sitting idle waiting for input.

The move towards fewer ROPs than fragment pipelines is a way gpu designers eliminate unneeded complexity from their chips without sacrificing performance. And less complexity means higher speeds and better yields will be attainable.


**The following table compares all of the preceding definitions between these three cards.**


7950GTX / 8700GT/ 8800m GTX

Memory Bandwidth 44.8GB/sec/ 25.6GB/sec/ 51.2GB/sec

Shader Operations 13800/sec/ 40000/sec/ 156800/sec

Pixel Fill Rate 9200 Mpixels/sec/ 5000 Mpixels/sec/ 8000Mpixels/sec

Texture Fill Rate 13800 MTexels/sec/ 10000 MTexels/sec/ 28000 Mtexels/sec

Memory Bus Type 64X4(256 bit)/ 64X2(128 bit)/ 64x4(256 bit)

Texture Units 24/ 16/ 56

Rastor Operations 16/ 8/ 16
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Cost/Performance
Now the 8700GT is only $100 less than the 7950GTX, and even cheaper in some places(Hypersonic $46 and they are the same price at Eurocom). The best bang for your buck in this scenario would be the 7950GTX because for that small amount of cash you can be sure you can run all your games at the highest setting and resolution. But if you really want DirectX 10 than your best choice is obviously the 8700GT. Personally, I think waiting just a few more months for a real beast, basically a 8700GT with a 256bit bus, would be more cost effective and much more future proof than the 8700GT. But preference is preference.

Edit: The 8800 GTX is now top dog in DirectX 10, and makes SLI 8700GT setup obselete in terms a of raw power and power consumption. You can either get an 8800m GTX or two 8700m GT's at this price, but there is no point at all considering the 8800m GTX obliterates it in every bench mark. Sucks for any one who recently purchased such a laptop, but such is the pace of technology. The 7950 GTX will be discontinued soon i assume, and if your going to buy a gaming laptop, you should forget the 7950gtx or the 8700gt and bee line for the 8800m GTX if your budget allows(about $200-300 at most retailers for an upgrade)

8700GT Conclusion
Now as you can see the 8700GT destroys the 7950GTX in Shader Operations with almost 3 times the amount. In shader intensive games this is a defenite plus for the 8700GT, and I think is the future goal for DirectX 10, to have more with less. If your interested in more battery life this card can offer you that, as well as HD video decoding and a bunch more neat features including , of course, DirectX 10.

7950GTX Conclusion
But on the other hand the 7950GTX beats the 8700GT in every other aspect. It moves much more memory due to 256bit bus. This means the 7950GTX can handle larger textures, anti-aliasing, and anisotropic filtering much better than the 8700GT. The pixel fill rate is better on the 7950GTX but it has no effect on performance on cards after the 6000 series. As well as being able to handle larger texture files better, it can process them faster as well, but not much fatser than the 8700GT. Texture files are wrapped around geometry in 3D images, and needs units to process them. The 7950GTX has 24 of these texture units, and the 8700GT only has 16, 8 less. The 7950GTX has more rastor operations as well, which is the general direction for graphics cards. They will have less operations as they keep progressing, and it saving money and time for graphic card developers so in this sense it does not have any affect on performance.

8800m GTX Conclusion
Like said above, this is the most powerful mobile graphic card available, and in the review below it usually equals or is a bit less powerful than a 7950GTX SLI setup. Having over 150'000 shader operations, makes this card a power house for shader intensive games like oblivion, and crysis(even though it cannot do high settings well). Basically This can be compared to a 7950GTX SLI setup, plus it has directx 10. It makes the 8700gt or 7950gtx SLI setups pointless now as you can harness that power in one card at a lower price. It also consumes 9 less watts than the 7950GTX so it save a bit of power, but not too much in the long run.

Now I really hope this helps some people to understand the actual differences and maybe a bit more insight if they allready had the general idea. The 8800m GTX is the king for a while now. At this point in time it is the best card for gaming at maximum detail at the highest resolutions becuase of its superior memory bandwith and faster memory operations; and will always run anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering better than the 8700GT or the 7950 GTX. For extremely shader intensive games the 8800m GTX will perform very well, and the 7950GTX and 8700 GT will do well.

I am hoping I am not bursting anyone's bubble because the 8700gt is a good card, and it is a personal preference on which card you choose. I am just laying out the facts and the truth.

Here are also a few gaming benchmarks tested at many different resolutions The card at the top of every benchmark is the 7950GTX and the bolded green one is the 8700GT running in a Toshiba X205. http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=3085&p=7

EDIT the 8800m GTX review http://anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=3196&p=1

I would also appreciate any spelling errors or and anything I have said that is incorrect to be pointed out please and thanks

 

holy crap dude, that took forever to read

prefrence, its preference, in the 3rd to last paragraph is incorrect

 

ahh thank you, always had trouble with that word, i am only 17...and i comend you for toturing yourself to read all that

 

i think im the only one

 

haha im really starting to wonder!

 

not so fast there, buddy! lol haven't read it ALL, but will here in a little bit. good job, man! thanx for ur time

 

well nvm crimson your not a lone wolf anymore, hahah no problem at all, i really hope this clears ALOT of the confusion and such on these two cards.

 

+Rep sad to say but those threads will never stop only go down in number great nonetheless though!

 

ask chaz to put em together

 

Yes this should be stickied it is a truly Great giude have fun with your new rep!

 

thanks everyone for your positive feedback

 

A guide written for graphics cards novices! This is a great reference that deserves to be stickied with the other guides on this forum.

 

concur on the stickiness part!

 

can i concur too?

 

Also consider cost / performance.

I did a quick check and made a similarly configured laptop to check the price.

The other systems noted in the anandtech benchmark are:

ABS (7950GTX): $2800
Alienware M9750 (7950GTX): $3100
Asus G2P (X1700): $2100
Asus A8JS (7700): $1400
Dell M1710 (7950GTX): $3700
Toshiba X205 (8700m): $2200

And none but the X205 have the HD-DVD drive...

 

htwingnut you can pickup a clevo M570 with the same specs except 7950gtx for $2100.

 

http://www.sagernotebook.com/product_customed.php?pid=10641&action=customize
$1899.00 w/7950 GTX

 

i added cost/performance section, thank you htwingnut

 

Thanks a million for writing this guide narsnail, you just earned yourself a sticky. For a little while I'm going to keep it as a standard sticky and not a link in the index sticky. People need to see this.

 

Finally. Hopefully, the 8700M GT vs 7950GTX threads will diminish. Definitly +rep.

 

Yay this makes me happy

 

Excellent explanation. I see you did not mention that the 8700M-GT is advertised with a dual rank 128 bit bus.

 

Very nice guide! but can you say WALL OF TEXT. Ha im just joking, to explain this in the detail you did, that much writing is required. If i was buying a gaming notebook anytime soon this would be my reference of choice!




At Chaz, cmon this gets stickied after 2 pages but mine isn't yet!

 

maybe yours just sucks

 

@ odin, the memory bandwidth difference between the 8600gt and the 8700gt is about 3 gb/s. I did not think it was necessary to mention this because it really does not make a significant difference comparing those two cards, so the 8700gt is pretty much a reworked 8600gt with a couple of tweaks to make it faster.

 

Did you save this as a file on your computer? Its like a keeper I mean you probably spent half a day on this...

Sooo you mean my future computer is going to suck? *crying* but I thought that... *sniff* Ill just wait until mid december and if by then no freakin card makes its appearance ima go ahead for the 8700gt

 

bout two hours actually i knew what i wanted so i ignored everything around me and just did it cuzz i was so anoyyed by constantly having to post in the useless threads that were constantly being started


aslo the XPS m1730 is coming out ?November? so there is supposed to be a better card release with it so lets cross our fingers

 

i thought it was coming out in october.

 

i dont know i was jus throwing that out there...can anyone confirm when it is coming out?

 

It's release date has been pushed back, so no one knows for sure. I don't think they're even accepting preorders yet. Supposedly it will have some sort of 8700M-GX2. There were rumors of an 8800M-GT release with it, but personally I think that's doubtful.

 

Fantastic guide, really gave me some insight into a matter which has been bugging me for weeks.

 

Narsnail,

I would trust you with my millenium falcon any day... you seem to know exactly what you are talking about!

I wish you had posted this thread a month ago before i shelled out for my X200... such is life.

Let's hope some kick a*se drivers come out that will allow me to o'clock my 8700m up to lightspeed where it belongs.

Maybe the 8x00m cards will come into there own when we have mature drivers, along with more dedicated dx10 titles (bring on Crysis!).

 

Sorry but this really got to me. The 7950 GTX was announced October 2006 not december. Nice thread, I'm also tired of seeing 7950 vs 8700 threads. + Rep.

 

However, the debate is still all over the Internet...including from the horse's own mouth!

and if that's official brief that come out from Nvidia to the industry...,
they had better make it happen one way or another...
http://translate.google.com/transla...-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=t02&sa=N

 

So what i'm getting is that they are very similar, and have thier strengths and weaknesses. But since the 8700GT has only 128bit, it will suffer at higher resolutions, but outperform the 7950GTX at lower resolutions..

But the real question is whether it's worth the extra $$ to get the 7950GTX, especially when the 9700mGT is right around the corner, (probebly this spring) and you can use the money you saved not getting the 7950 and buy that card as an upgrade... that's what I'm doing..

Anyway, my sager 5790 with an 8700GT should be at my front door in a few hours so i'll be running it in every game you could possibly think of. Probebly WIC, TF2, CS:S, DiRT, BIOSHOCK etc etc...

Hey, does anyone know if FRAPS works with DX10 yet? my version of FRAPS won't work in anything DX10. Not even Xfire works in DX10

 

well it wont out perform it at lower resolutions, look at the link in the guide and you will see it sometimes out peforms the 7900gs at lower resolutions, but anything above 1280x800 it starts to fall behind.

 

Great article Narsnail
its nice to remind people that while it performs a little slower than the 7950 its still a good card.

I am still impatiently waiting for a 256mbit bus card, but I also have no money now, so that upgrade is gonna have to wait *sniff*

 

We were getting so many 8700M vs. Go7950 questions that I made this a sticky for the time being. Your thread is already sticked (basically) - just look in the General Index Sticky and yours is #2.

You should never plan to upgrade the video card in any notebook you get, even if it is a Clevo. Look at the older D900Ts - they could only go up to a Go6800/X800 before Clevo did a motherboard revision which allowed support for a Go7800GTX and so on. People without that newer motherboard revision were out of luck. You don't know if that is going to happen with your ntoebook or not. The bottom line is spend the money on the best available for your budget at the time and plan to stick with it for the rest of the notebook's life.

 

Keep in mind that the Anandtech scores for the m9750 are for SLi

Great thread, all I'm waiting for is a shootout between the two in SLi (Alienware - October, Dell XPS 1730 - whenever it finally comes out...) since dual 128bit cards see a bigger GAIN in performance than two 256bit cards.

 

They do, however, have a XPS m1710 with a go7950GTX.

 

Its in the anandtech thingie... and its way overpriced, you can have TWO 7950GTX's in the Alienware for the same price you get ONE in the Dell...

 

o i know, sucha rip off, its outdated tho and being replaced so lets hope it will be a better deal in the future

 

Nah, it's an XPS lol

 

hahah yea i guess ur right, tho they just hada half off coupon for the 7950gtx upgrade...so it reduced the price by 200 if you got that upgrade.

 

I am a bit curious as to the source or sources for your findings?

Nars, are you basing your opinions solely on Anand's results?
(he's a fine guy, but makes his share of human mistakes.
For instance, my x205-9349 outperforms his x205-9359 at stock clocks
and 3dmark06 gives him 200 points for one step of a processor!)

Do you own an 8700GT or 7950GTX?

The 8700GT performs for me within 5-10% of the 7950GTX results I have seen up to 1280x1024 when both are tweaked in DX9 benchmarks. (3dmark06 especially)

I'd love to see more reproduceable and comparable benchmarks and less guesswork and theorycraft.

Can we get some non-SLI 7950GTX reproduceable game timedemo benchmarks that aren't 3dmark06?

Some other 8700GT owners' results would be best as well.

Let's do it both OC'd and stock and list the OC reached and GPU temp after the benchmark.

Frankly, I think Anand ran this on ancient drivers and without patching Vista.
Also, the 8700GT seems born to OC... cool as a cucumber even when OC'd by 25-30%+.

 

They tried again with new drivers http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=3085&p=7

 

its not an opinion first of all. those are all facts. i got the definitions and the comparison table from www.gpureview.com look yourself if youd like. i knew about all of the memory bandwidth issues and such before but i wasnt sure abotu the shader operations and the rest. Even if it was SLI, the two cards below it the 7900gs and the 7900GTX performed above the 8700gt, so im sure the 7950GTX would perform above those two cards. and fabarati just supplied us with a new benchmark with new drivers, and the same results again.

and if you can find a better benchmark let me know, because that is the best one I and other members could find and is tested on ALOT of games. Also I would like to point out that in the game benchmarks, as soon as anti aliasing is applied, the framerates on the 8700gt PLUMMET. Quake 4 at 1280x800 runs at almost 100fps with 0AA and with 4AA it drops to 60. Almost half. that is not the only game where this is evident aswell.

Also I do not care what your 3dmark scores are they are worthless as I have constantly stated over and over again. The 8700gt performs better than the 7950gtx in 3dmark05 and that does not even remotely compare to real world performance.


also please do not take this as a direct attack at you or your laptop, i know I would be irritated if I felt that way and someone was ripping up on something I just spent alot of money on.

 

The facts are the ones listed from nvidia's charts and the numbers directly taken from them.
The opinions are the ones on which is more price/performance effective and your recommendations especially because they are based on ONE very flawed review. I think perhaps its time you looked up "fact" and "opinion" at webster or whatever site or sites you will trust.

The key difference here is "reasonable proof".
You have only the single review and some very ill-documented comparisons from that review.
This is not a personal attack... this is simply all I can gather from your post to back up your statements; which remain opinions as long as you do not bring the proof to the table.

And Anand STILL cannot match my inferior system with his benchmarks...
Did he uninstall the bloatware? Did he update DX? Did he patch with the hotfixes?
I didn't see it in the comparison... and all of those made as much difference for my 8700GT as using the newer drivers.

Anand's results are inferior to mine even in stock settings and I have a lesser version of the x205. It follows that pretty much anything he ran will have inferior results because he forgot to update properly to actually take advantage of the 163.44 drivers.

A lot of tests is NOT better than a few good ones. Note in my previous post I actually wanted to pull this thread into real comparisons of actual 8700GT and 7950GTX users with optimized and reproduceable benchmarks.

Right... and Anand testing without proper Vista patches is a better indication?
I actually HAVE an 8700GT and can actually run benchmarks...
We are discarding my real results for your second-hand information?

Are you seriously pushing my results aside because you found one other person who could produce lower scores? I compared a standard test with a standard test... I realize the 3dmark06 test has limitations, but it's the same for everyone and Anand's is lower than my stock results AND HE HAS THE SUPERIOR VERSION OF THIS LAPTOP.
His results are so far off as to not come anywhere near the performance he should have, and thus those benchmarks are not an actual indication of the 8700GTs capabilities.

I am perfectly willing to run benchmarks that are not 3dmark06... but they must be reproduceable.

If this laptop sucked, I'd be the first one to say so and would have returned it.

I want an honest representation of the reality of the laptop and card I purchased because my experience says your opinions are misleading for the readers who may base their purchases on your now stickied thread.

You got the stats right... and thus the thread is useful... but you based your performance evaluation on a review that wasn't complete, and even when completed wasn't indicative.

Let's complete the thread with REAL results.
Put your ego away, and you cannot hurt mine...


Find someone with a 7950GTX and let's do some benchmarks/timedemos.

Anyone got a few good tests we can run?

 

KernalPanic, I'm not sure I understand your argument correctly, but tell me if this is right. You agree with the specs of both cards listed, and the definitions and everything, right? However, you disagree with the Cost/Performance section? That section (and I'm summarizing here) seems to say that unless you need the added features of the 8700M-GT, then the 8700M-GT isn't worth the money if you can get a 7950GTX for only $50-$100 more. Personally, I'm not sure why you disagree with that, for (while it may be opinion), it seems like a very reasonable conclusion.

Now, I understand you disagree with anandtech's tests, as I do as well, however the validity of those tests don't seem to have very much bearing on the conclusions reached by narsnail. If I'm misinterperting you, please correct me, but I fail to see which part of the conclusion in the post you disagree with, or why.

 

as odin said, i just threw in the review, and i did not take it into account in my guide at all.