XFX RMA Service. 7950GT as good as 9500GT?

Well... it is 24 pixel shaders VS
32 'CUDA Cores' (nMarketingTerm).

In theory, the lower performance of the memory bus should limit the 9500gt, but that doesn't mean everything.
 
i say the 9500gt is way faster, isnt it basicly a 8800gt? i have a 7900gt and i know its at least 100% slower than a 8800gt.
 
A while back I had a 7800gtx and an 8600gt, there were nearly equal in performance. I would say that the 9500gt would be close to the same speed as your old card.
 
JaYp146 said:
No sir. More like an 8600GT.
Click to expand...

hear hear.

The 8800gt has a 256bit bus, and 112 shader cores.
The 9500gt has a 128bit bus and 32 shader cores.
A 9600gt has a 256bit bus and 64 shader cores.
A 7950 has a 256bit bus and 24 pixel pipelines (pre-dx10 had seperate pixel and vertex shaders).
 
I feel like youre owed an 8800 series card minimum. 9600GSO would be sweet.

When my Ti4200TD Died Asus sent me a 5900Ultra. It's not really a comparable speed issue. It's that I paid 179.99 for my card which was a special edition so they owed me a similarly valued card.
 
you couldnt give me a x5xx series card and have me still take your company seriously from there on out... they should atleast give you an 8800 somthing....
 
What was the 7950 XXX on release? $350? $400? I think, like others, that they owe you an equally-valued card in return. The 9500 GT is a limp-wristed, office-user card. That's a really weak offer - I wouldn't accept it. Either another 7950 XXX, or something that will make your investment worth on the card. After all, you didn't pay hundreds of dollars at one point for a card with a good warranty to have it break, then have them send you a $50 card in return! Imagine, you turn in your broken, under-warranty Corvette, they don't refund your money, and they give you a new Cobalt in its place...

What does the language in their warranty state?
 
Equal performance is what they're going for not equal value... Although if you buy a high-end card from a couple years ago they tend to give you a higher-end card today. Like if you had an 8800GTX die, they'll give you a GTX260 or GTX280 most likely... even though it performs equivalent to a GTS250 basically.
 
The 9500GT doesn't seem to be equal in performance though. :( They shipped it already.
 
Kinda weird. Just a few days ago I was putting together a computer with some spare parts I had laying around. I had a 7950GT 256MB GDDR3, and 8600GT 256MB GDDR3, and a 9500GT 1GB GDDR2.

I was testing all 3 cards in World of Warcraft. The 7950GT and 9500GT pretty much had identical results at any resolution with 0 to 4xAA. That kinda surprised me. However my 8600GT beat them both by 10 to 15%.

And I think the 9500GT would have done better if it had GDDR3 memory instead of GDDR2 (which the XFX your getting does).

So I think he'll be okay. He's not really getting a big upgrade. But I think he's probably getting something of equal or maybe even slightly better performance.
 
Put it this way. If they offered me an identical replacement 7950gt or a 9500gt I'd take the latter.
 
I love how people use their warranties to try and leverage an upgrade. Especially for a 4 year old card.
 
The 9500GT is inferior to the 7900GT.

The 9500GT has less of a texture fill rate, about half-the memory bandwidth on the GDDR3 version and about 1/4 as much memory bandwidth on the GDDR2 version.

You got ripped off, send it back.

A 7950GT should be worth at least a 9600GSO512.
 
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-graphics-card,2464-8.html

Without in depth review/comparisons I would say they're being fair as warranty does say similar performance rather than similar value. It probably just depends on what they have on hand.

Edit: Your card isn't old enough for a guaranteed upgrade because they still do have similar stuff on hand :p Or bad timing that they received similar cards and managed to fix them up.
 
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JaYp146 said:
No sir. More like an 8600GT.
Click to expand...

It's faster than a 8600GT. The performance is sanwiched right in-between the 8600GT and the 8600GTS (the latter is is actually a good competitor for the 7950GT in newer shader-intensive games). See how the 8600GTS beats the 7900GT by 4fps? That's the margin you'd expect from 7950GT versus 7900GT at that resolution.

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/nvidia_geforce_9500_gt_performance/page4.asp

I'd say you got a *tiny* bit shortchanged, but only because the next step-up is the 9600GT, and they're not about to give you that. As long as you got GDDR3, it won't fail you.
 
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lloose said:
I love how people use their warranties to try and leverage an upgrade. Especially for a 4 year old card.
Click to expand...

I have to agree. And people wonder why these companies don't like to offer lifetime warranties: they have to keep track of complex logistics to make sure they have the right replacements in-stock, and on top of that they have to deal with whiny customers who worry about a %10 performance difference.

In the graphics cards market, things change rapidly, and the measure of what was once a top card doesn't really matter anymore a few years later.

At the time pf the 7950GT purchase, the best cards were texturing monsters with shaders bolted-on. Today, the importance has flipped in-favor of the SP, with TMUs outnumbered 5 to 1 on-up to 20 to 1.
 
from looking at the specs i'd say the 9500GT is lower than your 7950GT,

just looking at raw numbers

7950GT has 44GB/s memory bandwidth and 24Mpixels/s fillrate

the 9500GT has 25.6Gb/s memory bandwidth and 8.8Mpixels/s fillrate
 
H-street said:
from looking at the specs i'd say the 9500GT is lower than your 7950GT,

just looking at raw numbers

7950GT has 44GB/s memory bandwidth and 24Mpixels/s fillrate

the 9500GT has 25.6Gb/s memory bandwidth and 8.8Mpixels/s fillrate
Click to expand...

The fill rate you're quoting deals with ROPs, not shader ops. The 7950GT has 16 ROPS, while the 9500GT has 8. But since both cards will be overpowered by modern games, you'll be shader-limited, so the ROPs don't matter.

Let's look at those specs combined:

7950GT:

44.8 GB/sec
Shader Operations: 13200 MOperations/sec
Pixel Fill Rate: 8800 MPixels/sec
Texture Fill Rate: 13200 MTexels/sec
1100 MVertices/sec

Combined pixel/vertex ops/s: 14,300

9500GT:

Shader ops (combined vertex and pixel): 44,800

This is why the 9500GT is competitive in games, despite the reduced memory bandwidth.

Still think I'm nuts? Then I guess we all imagined it when the 7600GT beat the 6800GT in almost all benchmarks, and even came close to an Ultra. This is despite the fact that the 6800 series has the lead on ROP power and memory bandwidth. It happened because the extra ROPs were unnecessary, and because the increase in shader use meant the memory bandwidth needs dropped.
 
H-street said:
from looking at the specs i'd say the 9500GT is lower than your 7950GT,

just looking at raw numbers

7950GT has 44GB/s memory bandwidth and 24Mpixels/s fillrate

the 9500GT has 25.6Gb/s memory bandwidth and 8.8Mpixels/s fillrate
Click to expand...


The 9500GT certainly lacks in memory bandwidth and fillrate. But it seemed very competitive with my simple WOW test against the 7950GT. So I am assuming those 32 stream processors on the 9500 help keep it competitive against the only 24 shader processors on the 7950GT.

9500GT is pretty low end today, but the 7950GT is over 3 years old now. Seems like a fair replacement to me.
 
I would say the performance is about equal, however the 9500gt is a perfectly good card to throw in for a htpc or a hand-me-down pc, that would not be used for heavy gaming.
 
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