ATI Radeon X1900 XTX review - Page 1

ATI's Radeon X1900 XTX

Company: ATi technologies
info: ATI.com
Price: $649 - USD

Drum roll - Laaadies and gentlemen heeeeeeere's the Radeon X1900 XTX! - end drum roll.

Hey friends, can you imagine it? A mere three months after ATI released the Radeon X1800 XT they again release a new high-end product, one that needs to match NVIDIA's GeForce 7800 GTX 512 MB version. The one card to rule them all? This youngest animal from the ATI clan, well beast of a brute actually, has been developed under codename R580 and was due to arrive for a while now actually.

With a "Dragnet" voice I should be saying now; "The story is true, the name has been changed to protect to innocent" (click here if you do not know that series/movie). R580 is a synonym for the Radeon X1900 XTX, XT, Crossfire and standard Radeon 1900 All-In-Wonder cards. And yes the story was indeed true. The X1900 has three times more, thus 48 Pixel Shader units, contained in that graphics core compared over the previous product, the Radeon X1800 XT.

See graphics chip architecture is a very parallel process, ATI decided instead of constantly increasing the sum of everything, to go for efficiency and maximize performance where you'll need it the most. Now the past year we have seen an incredible increase of Shader technology in most games. It boosts performance, image quality, effects and gives the game programmer a set of options that can draw cinematic magic on your screens these days. Therefore ATI decided to increase the number of Pixel Shader units inside that graphics core from 16 to 48 and with success. Oh and please, don't get confused here, it's 48 pixel shader units not to be confused with the cards sixteen "true" pipelines. These shader units are part of the pixel pipelines.

Today's product should be able to compete very well with that seriously unavailable GeForce 7800 GTX 512 MB, yet priced similarly at a manufacturer suggested retail price of $649 USD.

Of course, and do not get me wrong here, this product is aimed at the uber freaks like yours truly, because honestly who is willing to spend so much money to play games except a handful of Guru3D's staff members? But hey this is the high-end game, the game where the manufacturer can go wild and design the product everybody wants to have.

These cards are the pride and joy of the guys that design them, this is what it's all about for them. And yeah although I agree that everybody wants to have cards like we are testing today, very few of the consumers out there can actually afford one, let alone get two to setup in Crossfire mode. The new card is of course capable of all the latest features like HDR, high antialiasing options, Avivo functionality and some new stuff like fetch4 shadow map technology. We'll discuss it all in this article.

Right let's get this review started. On the next few pages we'll talk quickly about the new X1900 products (yes there are actually four of them), do a recap on the memory controller, talk features and specifications but most of all have a look at performance. You are visiting Guru3D.com so we have plenty of benchmarks and yes we'll compare this product to GeForce hottest, the 7800 GTX 512MB. Of course we recently introduced HD gaming resolutions at 19x12 so you'll notice some performance testing at such a level also.

You know what? Instead of naming this cards X1900 XTX they might as well have named it the X1900 XTC because it seems to be running on it. But hey, most of all, enjoy this article!