Conclusions
So let's see if we can sort this out. The GeForce 7950 GT and Radeon X1900 XT 256MB offer roughly equivalent performance. By my scorecard, the Radeon came out slightly ahead overall, but there weren't any really meaningful performance differences between the two cards in our testing. Both played the games we tried equally well at the same display resolutions and in-game quality settings, and both stumbled at approximately the same points when we tried to push them a little too hard.

And we should say right now that it takes a lot to push either of these cards too hard. With some of today's most graphically intensive and visually rich games, we had to get into strong degrees of edge and texture antialiasing, high quality settings, and oftentimes very high display resolutions in order to make these things sweat. For most of us whose monitor budgets don't involve monthly payments, buying a graphics card that costs this much right now is more about future-proofing than it is about just playing current games well.

Future-proofing in graphics cards is a tricky thing, though. These cards are late-model spins on existing DirectX 9, Shader Model 3.0-class graphics technology. They're notably cheaper, faster, and better than what was on offer for the same price a year ago—or even last week. Yet they're also closer to obsolescence than those cards were last year or last week. A new generation of GPUs is coming, likely timed to debut alongside Windows Vista and DirectX 10 late this year or early next. When those new GPUs arrive, they will bring new capabilities and probably set new standards for performance. I have my doubts whether it will matter much whether you paid $199 or $299 for your current-gen graphics card when you're trying to run games designed for these new GPUs. Both cards may be equally overmatched.

Given all of that, I think the GeForce 7900 GS at $199 and perhaps the Radeon X1900 GT, if you can find a similar price, offer more value if you must buy a video card right now. Going up to the $299-ish range will get you a better card, but each has its drawbacks.

The GeForce 7950 GT is a nice upgrade over the 7900 GS in that it has 512MB of memory, a trait that should help confer some additional longevity. However, I'm a little frustrated by some of the image quality limitations of the G71 GPU, and those frustrations start to matter once you get into the performance and price class of the 7950 GT. To name a few, the G71 lacks multisampled antialiasing modes in sample sizes over four; it can't do AA in combination with high-quality 16-bit FP lighting; and Nvidia's anisotropic and trilinear texture filtering algorithms are visibly inferior to ATI's. The R580 GPU in the Radeon X1900 XT is based on a newer design, and it shows.

The Radeon X1900 XT 256MB matches or outperforms the GeForce 7950 GT most of the time because its GPU is faster, even though it has less onboard memory. But ponying up that much cash for a card with 256MB of memory at this point in history looks like a risky move to me. The X1900 XT also gets demerits for its higher power draw while gaming and for shaky multi-GPU support. We ran into a couple of apparent CrossFire bugs in our testing, and the CrossFire scheme itself is simply more work than we'd like. In order to run an X1900 XT 256MB in CrossFire, you have to buy a much more expensive Radeon X1900 CrossFire card with 512MB of RAM, only to install it in your system and watch it deactivate half of that memory.

So long as you're not planning on upgrading to a multi-GPU setup down the road, the Radeon X1900 XT 256MB looks like a better value than the GeForce 7950 GT, all things considered. That judgment, though, depends on Connect3D and other ATI board partners coming through with X1900 XT 256MB cards priced at around $279, as we've been told to expect. At that price, the Radeon will undercut the 7950 GT by at least 20 bucks.

As for the two brands of GeForce 7950 GT cards that we've tested here, only one offers a really attractive alternative to the Radeon X1900 XT 256MB. We love BFG Tech's quality, service, and best-in-the-industry support, but they shouldn't have accepted Nvidia's cooling solution for the 7950 GT. It's just too loud. XFX was right to go with another solution, and they get copious style points for having the guts to go passive. At $329, the XFX GeForce 7950 GT 570M Extreme lists for nearly 50 bucks more than the expected price of the Radeon X1900 XT 256MB, but for that price you get a card with 512MB of memory, a copy of a GRAW, and one heckuva conversation piece in that cooler. That combo might just be enough to tempt me away from the Radeon.