Right, it's time to wrap up this review. And in forward .. my apologies .. this won't be a small conclusion. Did you grab that coffee already ?

Phew .. so much to test and write yet so little time. I didn't even had the chance to test and explain the new AA modes. Ah well. It'll have to do for this article I'm afraid. In upcoming manufacturer and reseller reviews from this site we will definitely spend more time and post results on the several AA modes. If you cant wait then be sure to visit a couple of colleague sites as a lot of samples have been distributed to the press.

With the time that I had available I tried to bring you guys a decent enough overview and hopefully detailed enough summary of the X1000 series of cards that have been launched today. Well I did my best and hope you got a good impression of the enw series. I still owe you the results on overclocking capabilities yet the beata drivers did not allow an overclock.

Anyway, during our tests we stumbled into a bug here and there. Riddick performance was way beyond what it's supposed to be, also at one point Doom 3 rendered a black screen once, a reset fixed this though. And we did see abnormal performance for the X1600 XT with Doom 3 and 4xAA and 8xAF enabled. This test had to be done with the only beta drivers available. Despite the minor mishaps I must admit that I am extremely impressed with the performance and features of the entire range. Let me walk you through the products one by one.

The X1800 XT is a beast, really. It's big, it's fast yes it is the new flagship in the graphics card arena. NVIDIA has been de-crowned on a pure performance level, period. But, the green friends definitely do not need to worry that much though. My experiences clearly showed that both the 7800 GTX and X1800 XT each give and win a little and feature wise both cards are roughly the same. But from an overall point of view at this time things look slightly better for the X1800 XT. The two slot design looks cool, but I really would have preferred to see a single slot solution.

The Radeon X1800 XL is impressive, but not as impressive as the GeForce 7800 GT is. Often the score is close to the competitors card yet for some reason at several tests falls behind in performance quickly up-to a level where it was close to the Radeon X850 XT series of cards. Now don't get me wrong, that's still really lovely performance. Yet you can pick up an x850 XT for under 350 USD these days. It might be driver related though. The drivers we had available were beta and what I understand from the driver team not at all optimized just yet for the new cards.

The Radeon X1600 XL then, a very striking series. For the money that is going to be one kickass mid-range product ! For the money you have to pay this card will bring the most performance. It's the new GeForce 6600 GT and can be compared to it from a performance and feature level, in most cases it definitely was faster though. It offers heaps of features and functionality for a fair sum of money. This series can be a big hit as the performance it offers is rather good.

The Radeon X1300 Pro, again something very notable. For not a lot of money ATI lifted the performance close to NVIDIA's standard 6600 when we talk solely about gaming. Not bad at all huh? Also bare in mind that this could make a very excellent HTPC card. Good stuff for the budget user.

So, once the small driver bugs have been smashed and the driver team can focus on optimizing the games for this specific product then scores will go up even further. Bare in mind though that you'll need a beast of a processor for the high-end series to get the most out of your graphics card (AMD 64 3500+ or Pentium 3.6 GHz minimum recommended), also a very sizable sum of money is needed to be able to buy this card. But hey, that's the high-end game. Although 550 bucks for the high-end flagship I think is a little hard to swallow.

Is there anything to dislike ? Ehm, no not really. Except the fact that the product range really should have been launched earlier, also the X1800 XT for example will be in the stores a couple of weeks away from launch date. The transmission gate issue put ATI's X1000 release back for a long time. Also a slight remark about our Riddick results. It's once again an OpenGL title that is performing rather poorly. I just ran an extra test and noticed similar behavior with Return to Castle Wolfenstein which is also an OpenGL game. I don't know what it is with ATI drivers and OpenGL but here somehow often are performance issues. Will Riddick performance be fixed? Yeah very likely as it is a popular title. At the ATI presentation we presented the performance issues to the ATI team. Despite the fact that most titles are written for DirectX, ATI really does need to focus and spend more time on OpenGL development.

Now then, that being said I like to ask you something. When you look at the new X1000 series from a gamers point of view I really do need to ask you to look outside the box a little. And I really do mean not just to look at gaming performance here. Think about other functionality, the media playback/encoding/decoding functions. HDTV, media center, Dual-link DVI, HD gaming, offloading the CPU for playback, H.264 or whatever decoding process you need... this product is capable of it. The new AVIVO implementation seems to be very promising and the Catalyst driver team is working hard on some very exciting stuff for us enthusiast consumers. Among it a three second loading version of the Catalyst CP driver suite, with the help of a software wizzard. I'm not sure that'll be a success but hey, Terry Makedon and his Catalyst driver development team are full of ideas for sure. How about dual-core driver support where the second CPU handles off-load vertex processing and shader compling ? It's all in the works. Yes, things certainly do look good; and again do not underestimate the importance of the multi-media trend that is very up and coming. Videocards play an extremely big role in that.

Okay, I should really wrap this up. From a professional point of view I must say that the architecture is looking extremely promising. Is that ring based memory controller intriguing or what? Everything was made for (and there it is again) efficiency throughout the pipeline up-to the final design for one very good reason, so you can do more with less. That efficiency is hard to measure with a high-end product though. But once a product is somewhat more limited you can get the most out of it. Over the coming months you will see a lot of reviews based on manufacturer reviews. You will see that these products are really exciting and do not disappoint. As shown we have them all in our possession yet I returned Monday evening late with the boards and barely had a day to write this review. Combined with the X1800 XT issue I stumbled into this is all I can offer you at this time. I had to make an ad-hoc decision what to review first and figured you guys definitely wanted to read about the flagship product. What a bummer that our sample was not working properly eh?

Allow me to make my closing comment on the X1800 XT as I spend a lot of time going second base with it and pretty much the flagship cards is what we all love here so much at Guru3D.com. I can tell you this about the X1800 XT: if you have a X1800XT in your machine it'll bring a smile to your face equivalent to spotting Christina Aguilera's nipple piercing that first time you notice it. You know it is fun, intriguing, controversial and you definitely want to play games with it. She's high-end, not cheap though yet undeniably a genie in a bottle. Whether I was rambling about the card or Christina here is a choice you get to decide ;)

Special thanks to Andrzej and Chris for 'hooking' us up with all the samples and their ceaseless support.

** October 06 - Power consumption test added on page 5
** October 06 - Mislabeled X1300 Pro with X1300 XT, of course it is Pro !!
** October 15th - Added Doom 3 scores with AAMemMapSwitch for x1800 XL
** October 15th - Added Radeon X1800 XT performance results