Introduction

While ATI has had a string of successful product launches in the high-end segment of the graphics market, most recently with the arrival of the Radeon X1950 XTX a month ago, ATI has definitely struggled to compete with NVIDIA at the $100-$200 price point in the past 12 months. A year ago ATI’s primary mainstream offering was the Radeon X1600 XT, ATI’s first shader model 3.0 GPU for the mainstream segment.

The Radeon X1600 XT had pretty good specs on paper: ATI outfitted its RV530 GPU with 12 pixel shaders and it was clocked at 590MHz core. Running alongside the GPU was a speedy memory subsystem clocked at a blazing 690MHz, and the board was available in a wide variety of configurations (including AGP), but in performance tests it just couldn’t keep up with its initial competitor, the GeForce 6800 GS from NVIDIA.

It also didn’t help that the ATI cards the X1600 XT was supposed to replace, ATI’s X800 GT/GTO, were also faster than the X1600 XT in most benchmarks.

ATI Radeon X1950 Pro

Both cards are CrossFire-ready

Because of the Radeon X1600 XT’s lackluster performance, ATI was basically forced to reduce its price down to around $150, that’s about $100 less than what ATI had anticipated before launch. Even with the reduced price, ATI still had a tough time competing with NVIDIA, particularly once the GeForce 7600 family was launched in March 2006.

With the launch of the GeForce 7600 GT, ATI rushed the Radeon X1800 GTO into service to do battle with the new NVIDIA card. The GTO had a wider 256-bit memory interface, making it a more capable challenger to the 7600 GT, but early benchmarks with the 7600 GT showed it more than held its own against the GTO.

Radeon X1950 Pro and the X1950 XTX

The Radeon X1900 GT and X1950 Pro

In more recent weeks, the Radeon X1900 GT has trickled down to the $200 price point. With its 36 pixel shaders, 8 vertex shaders, and 256-bit memory interface, the X1900 GT has more than enough horsepower to compete against NVIDIA’s latest $200 offering, the 20-pixel shader GeForce 7900 GS. In our tests we found each won their fair share of benchmarks, without an outright winner.

But the Radeon X1900 GT is far from being a cost effective solution for ATI at the $200 price point, its R580 GPU is the same chip found in more expensive Radeon X1900 XT/XTX cards, and keep in mind that the Radeon X1900 GT is a card that initially debuted at $300. As you can imagine, selling the X1900 GT for $200 isn’t going to keep the bean counters in ATI’s accounting department happy for long.

In order to really compete with NVIDIA at the mainstream price point of $200, ATI needed a more economical solution, and they needed one in a hurry. This is where the Radeon X1950 Pro comes in…

The X1950 Pro looks massive in comparison to the 7600 GT

Radeon X1950 Pro and GeForce 7900 GS from EVGA