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Radeon X850 XT Platinum EditionProduct type: Graphics card
Manufacturer: ATI
Website: www.ati.com
MSRP:  549 USD
Seek best price for products of this type.

The Prologue
Hey everyone, so last month ATi introduced a couple of new cards. All of them in the high-end range where one is ATI's new flagship and where another is in the middle of that high-end range. Confusing ? No, not at all... It is getting more confusing for the end-user; the consumer with an average knowledge of graphics cards will run into that question marker as there are so many friggin models you can choose from these days. See, 4-5 years ago when I was writing reviews things were way more clear. You had a low, mid and a high-range product to choose from. Now we have in all these ranges about 6-8 products to choose from, each with their own specifications and price tag. Features, specifications versus that pricetag equals performance and performance is what this game is all about. ATI knew this as well, they partly invented this game. And if you want to be the leader with the best reputation in the business you need to have a flagship that can beat the competition. Always have the fastest card, that's what a graphics card manufacturer always has in the back of his head. Not because it sells to much, hell no. Only a few percent of the market is actually in that high-end range. But to have the fastest product with the best feature set, that's what makes a reputation and that's what will sell the rest of your products.  You are confused aren't you ? Let's place the high-end product range in a table to be able to understand what is going on:

With that in mind as stated ATI launched two new products, the really lovely Radeon x800 XL and the x850 XT PE. We finally have both reference products from ATI in our lab, which makes us wonder how many samples actually are available and with that in mind how long it'll take to see them in the stores. Bare in mind, originally the plan was to get them in stores before Christmas. This review will handle the Radeon x850 XT PE and next week we'll handle the x800 XL.

Exciting times in the graphics industry you ask? You betcha. It's never been any different though, yet it is more and more difficult for us journalists to test these cards. When I received the x850 I immediately got a flashback to last year. We've seen a plague of driver optimizations from manufacturers. It wasn't too long ago that a rather big discussion in the industry that a image filtering technology called Trilinear filtering was optimized by NVIDIA with the help of a mixture of filtering technologies (Brilinear). ATI remained clear of such questionable "tricks"... until the x800 launch, that is as we learned they where doing something similar. It started with their Radeon 9600 Pro series. Nobody noticed it yet it's there alright and now merged into the x800 and x850 series. The newer CCC (Catalyst Control Center drivers) recently showed new options to actually disable these optimizations in a somewhat same manner NVIDIA's ForceWare drivers allow. It's quite funny that a year and a half ago optimization were to be considered an absolute shame but they now are completely accepted and considered to be normal. The good thing here is that image quality wise the Series 6 from NVIDIA and x800 now are roughly the same, take two computers equip one with a x800 and the other with a 6800, look at a screenshot from both PC's and you cannot see the difference with the naked eye. Speaking as a journalist I have to admit that the so called optimizations made our job very hard as you cannot compare oranges with apples eh?

With that being said, let's start up this review beginning with a small overview of ATi's new premium flagship; the Radeon x850 XT Platinum Edition!