ATi launches their next-gen graphics cards

The Safehouse Network News

By Ruccus

Wed, 5 Oct 2005, 09:53:00

Today ATi launched their X1300, X1600, and X1800 series of cards, and previews have shot up across the web.

All of the cards announced today are built on a 90nm manufacturing process, allowing for high clockspeeds (the lowest core clock on the four new cards is 500mhz) and smaller die sizes. So without further adieu, here are several of the previews:

The Tech Report
AnandTech
Guru3D
HardOCP
ExtremeTech
Beyond3D (tech preview; no benches)

A few comments from the previews:

"At the very high end of the market, the Radeon X1800 XT is indeed a worthy competitor for the GeForce 7800 GTX. In Direct3D games, the X1800 XT is usually faster than the 7800 GTX. Unfortunately, ATI's weak showing in OpenGL games keep the X1800 XT from capturing the undisputed heavyweight title... ...The Radeon X1600 XT confounds me. Admittedly, our test suite was best suited for high-end graphics cards, and the extensive use of antialiasing and anisotropic filtering probably hurt the X1600 XT's standing in our results. Still, this card lists for $249 and has 256MB of memory onboard, which is territory where I'd expect to be able to use high-quality edge and texture antialiasing in current games. Only in select cases can the Radeon X1600 XT keep pace with NVIDIA's like-priced offering, the GeForce 6800." - The Tech Report

"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." - Guru3D

"The bottom line is that the Radeon X1800 XL and X1600 XT compete very well with what NVIDIA has out there. They do not offer any large performance increases, but they do add a few quality improvements that may be beneficial to gamers... ...There do seem to be a lot of “ifs” and that is simply because there are no mass amount of games out there pushing the features like HDR and dynamic branching that these video cards support. These features are very forward-looking and HDR is just now truly being realized but is still very much in its infancy. Right now, all we can say is that the ATI X1000 series video cards compete well with their equally MSRP-priced competition. What is going to be best for the future though is yet to be seen. If we want to make an educated guess, we could say the X1000 series has more potential with its ability to do HDR with AA, and it possibly has much faster dynamic branching performance. It all comes down to the game content developers and what features they put into their games." - HardOCP