The Verdict(s)
AMD ATI Radeon X1650 XT
Alright. I must say that I'm really pleased with the progress that ATI has made. The new 80nm products really pay off. In case of the X1650 XT I must say, in some scenario's performance almost doubled up thanks to the extra Pixel Shader units, and that's really good as FINALLY AMD/ATI has a product that can compete with the 7600 GT from NVIDIA. I just hope it's not to little too late as NVIDIA is prepping the GeForce 8600 already. It's slated for launch in quarter one of 2007, yes that's approximately 2 months away for a DX10 and backwards compatible mid-range product. So you definitely need to keep that in mind. With that being said though there's really not a negative thing I can say about the 1650 XT. It's a really good performer for an even nicer price. Whilst missing in the benchmarks I did do some quick direct comparisons with the 7600 GT and the Radeon X1650 XT seems to perform on-par or slightly better than a GeForce 7600 GT. Crossfire however is another thing. As explained, with Crossfire we had a good number of issues. Far Cry had massive texture corruption so I had to skip it completely and we had COD2 crashing often as well. Weird, but it's the way it is. The rest of the titles were working fine though. Also if you are thinking about X1650 XT in Crossfire you need to realise that two 1650 XT cards would only give you slightly better performance over a single X1950 Pro.
Also, I would like to see ATI integrate game performance profiles in their drivers. I'd like to choose per game features like AFR. So that's more of a hint towards ATI.
ATI's or should I say AMD's Radeon X1650 XT right now is a competitive product. It's suggested price at $149 means value for money. You play all your games at 10x7 or 12x10 with 4xAA and 16xAF, and that's value. The card performs well and I do have to say that I really like the new Native CrossFire support, it works easy and is the way it's meant to be used. Strangely enough the biggest issue at the time of writing however is mass availability. The product is not yet available in large quantities. The cheapest price I could find for one X1650 XT was roughly $145.42 so that's pretty okay yet needs to come down a bit as for that money you might as well chip in 30-40 bucks extra and pick up a GeForce 7900 GS or RADEON X1900 GT. But once prices settle at sub 140 bucks, it'll be a great deal until the next generation mid-range products will kick in early next year.
AMD ATI Radeon X1950 Pro
Loving it! For roughly 210 USD this 256 model can be bought and that is very good performance for the money.
The X1950 Pro manages to position itself above the GeForce 7900 GS and even is darn close and sometimes faster than the GeForce 7950 GT. The difference can be explained by the 36 Pixel shader cores on the Radeon card, obviously the more shader intensive games will benefit from it greatly which most games these days are. So that is very impressive performance.
Playing games at 1600x1200 with high IQ settings enabled is simply not at all an issue, everything plays silky smooth in terms of way above average framerates. You just do not need to compromise on image quality which is great. Do look a little outside the box though and realize the card is more than just am item to play games with. It's also a media encoder and accelerator as well. This means your CPU does not have to decode a HD movie, nope your graphics card will do that for you and with the new AVIVO functionality you can bet it's at very high quality. The card is H.264 at 1080P ready. Fantastic stuff if you decide to hook up the card to a HD screen for example, that's magic on your screen man. Stability then. Okay this might be a refresh product, but not once did we experience a hiccup in the form of a crash or even freeze, impressive. The Radeon series come with a rock-solid driver package, they are well developed (although BIG) and working fine. The Radeon X1950 Pro is from A to Z a very enjoyable product which you'll love and nurture.
In general...
The two products as reviewed today are all based on the newer 80nm fabrication process and they show off some good results. Power consumption is at an all-time low (for a graphics card) and that's why I'm also convinced that GPU temperatures are good, as likely the internal voltage of the core is lower than previous generation products. Last but not least I have to applaud ATI for finally making an "SLI" like bridge connector which can be found at the top of the card. That's a big thumb up from me for exactly that. It shows that colossal companies definitely listen to you guys, and that's very respectable in my book.
This is Hilbert signing off,
ATH+++
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