Well it was bond to happen Nvidia has put out a faster card then ATI, and honestly I am happy about this. I feel in the last few years ATI's products have declined in reliability. I have 2 cards sitting in a box that don't work from ATI. A 9800 where the heat sink just fell off and the card over heated. And a 9700 where the power connecter became loose and requires re soldering to work again. Both cards are not eligible for warranty repair.

So my friend Adit has just come up with some new specs. and again like before I am happy to see Nvidia now top Dog!

the GeForce 7950 GX2 has two cards in one, each running 512MB of GDDR3 RAM at 300MHz (600MHz effective), for memory bandwidth of 38.4 GB per second. This TOTALS to 1GB of GDDR3 RAM at 600MHz (1.20GHz effective), for total memory bandwidth of 76.8GB per second.

the Radeon X1950 XTX runs 512 MB of GDDR4 RAM at 1.0GHZ (2.0GHz effective), for total memory bandwidth of 64GB per second.

the Radeon X1900 XTX runs 512 MB GDDR3 RAM at 775MHz (1.55GHz effective), for total memory bandwidth of 49.6GB per second.

the GeForce 7900 GTX runs 512 MB GDDR3 RAM at 800MHz RAM (1.6GHz effective), for total memory bandwidth of 51.2GB per second.

basically the X1950 XTX is the same as the X1900XTX aside from the ram and ram speed, but the main reason to include the speeds is to show the "effective" speed difference.

*taken and abbreviated from the extreme tech article.

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so ATI released a new graphics card, the Radeon X1950 XTX.

the big thing about this card is that it uses a new GDDR4 specification for it's memory, which still stays at a 512MB specification, and it's core clock runs at 650MHz, and memory clock runs at 1GHz.

so, in the high-end video card market... the contenders are:
GeForce 7950 GX2 - $600
Radeon X1950 XTX - $450
GeForce 7900 GTX - $450
Radeon X1900 XTX - $375
*prices are listed as msrp.

all in all, and as unbiased as i possibly can be, i came to a list of
conclusions:
*links to the reputable websites where i got the information that led to these conclusions are listed below.

in a single video card setup (NON SLI/CROSSFIRE):
GeForce 7950 GX2 takes first place.
Radeon X1950 XTX takes second place.
Radeon X1900 XTX takes third place.
GeForce 7900 GTX takes fourth place.

*the 7950 GX2 does have 2x512MB memory, for a total of 1GB... and this card is technically two cards in one.
*the Radeon X1950 XTX and Radeon X1900 XTX consistently end up close to neck and neck at extremely high resolutions.

BEST PERFORMANCE - GeForce 7950 GX2
BEST BANG FOR BUCK - Radeon X1950 XTX
*in the ultra high-end market.

i don't yet know how a Radeon X1950 XTX CrossFire setup would compare to a GeForce 7950 GX2 SLI setup... although my opinion is that the GeForce 7950 GX2 SLI setup would win, mainly because it would technically be a quad-SLI setup.

here are links to the articles where i got my information from:
http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTE0NCwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2821
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,2007194,00.asp?kc=ETRSS02129TX1K0000532

Article written by +Adit Shah

To the left the ATI Radeon PCI Express X850. And to the right ATI Radeon PCI Express 1900XTX with a full 512 Megs of Ram, both cards make great game cards. Truly the ATI 1900XTX has a core speed of 650 MHz and a memory speed of 1.55GHz this GPU SCREAMS RAW POWER!