Quite frankly, gamers who insist on high frame rates would probably be better served by the Radeon X1900 XT. As it stands today, the All-In-Wonder X1900 doesn’t quite deliver the knockout punch in performance against its predecessor. Make no mistake about, flashes of brilliance are there (such as the aforementioned Lost Coast example with HDR), but then there are other shader-heavy apps such as F.E.A.R. and Far Cry with HDR that show more muted performance improvements of about 10%, and games like Call of Duty 2 and Quake 4 that show no improvement at all. For about $50 more, the Radeon X1900 XT provides a nice boost in performance thanks to its higher clock speeds, and you’d also be getting 512MB of memory. While 512MB probably still isn’t a prerequisite for any of today’s latest games, by the end of this year we will see quite a few titles that will definitely take advantage of the additional memory. Considering the forward-looking nature of ATI’s R580 GPU, 512MB of memory seems like a more natural fit, particularly when you’re dealing with a card that’s selling for $500 or more.

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