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ATI Radeon X1900 XT/XTX Performance Preview January 24, 2006 Brandon Sandman Bell |
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Summary: Looking over the spec sheet for ATI's Radeon X1900, you can't help but be impressed: 48 pixel shaders with a 650MHz graphics core. 512MB of GDDR3 memory at 1.55GHz. HDR with AA. 384 million transistors. In today's article we've put two high-end Radeon X1900 cards through their paces in order to see how they stack up to the competition. Should NVIDIA be worried right now? Read on to find out!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 18 ) |
Both GPUs were based on entirely new designs and manufactured on untested cutting-edge manufacturing processes (in the case of X1800, with R520 packing over 300 million transistors, ATI’s engineers felt that producing a chip with such a large die on anything but 90-nm was impractical) and both were banking on high clock speeds to achieve much of their performance.
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The one common trait that’s earned both of them so much notoriety however has nothing to do with the architecture or technology behind either GPU, instead it’s much simpler – both products were notoriously late to market. It has been reported that ATI received their first R520 samples just days after the Radeon X850 launch in late 2004, with ATI hoping to have final silicon ready in time for an early summer release right around the time NVIDIA successfully launched their GeForce 7800 GTX in June 2005. While ATI was quietly demo’ing R520 up and running at tradeshows such as E3 and Computex, the hardware was nowhere near final. ATI wasn’t hitting anywhere near the clock speeds they were shooting for, so the GPU’s 3D performance wasn’t up to snuff.
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Once ATI resolved the issue it was late summer and NVIDIA’s GeForce 7800 GTX and newer 7800 GT GPUs had gained a significant foothold of the market. Both of these cards delivered dramatically more performance than anything else on the PC and did so with aggressive pricing and solid availability for the entire summer. Ultimately ATI’s R520 products, the Radeon X1800 XT and X1800 XL, didn’t hit the market en masse until November, nearly one year after ATI had received their first R520 chips.
By the time November rolled around though, ATI delivered a hotfix driver that offered improved OpenGL performance. As a result, R520’s performance in OpenGL titles such as Quake 4 and Doom 3 blossomed, allowing the Radeon X1800 XT to surpass the GeForce 7800 GTX in performance. Right around the same time the performance picture was improving, street prices on Radeon X1800 XT and X1800 XL boards began to drop. Soon ATI had a pretty hot product on their hands!
All that’s pretty much a moot point now though, as today’s Radeon X1900 launch makes the X1800 family old news. With 48 pixel shaders onboard, the Radeon X1900 sports twice as many pixel shaders as any previous GPU. But does all this add up to a significant improvement in performance? Let’s find out.
| The architecture | Page:: ( 2 / 18 ) |
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With their follow-up R580 part, ATI’s now turned their attention to another area: speeding up pixel shading. As has been widely reported leading up to the Radeon X1900 launch, the X1900’s R580 GPU is ATI’s first graphics chip to be equipped with 48 pixel processors. It’s important to note however that R580 isn’t a 48 pixel pipeline part. Starting with the R5xx series, ATI has begun to decouple the pixel shaders from the texture units, so the traditional “pixel pipeline” as we knew it for years in R300 and R420/R480 no longer applies. The following chart sums things up nicely:
| High-End GPU Comparison | |||||
| Pixel Shaders | Vertex Shaders | Texture address units | ROPs | Max threads | |
| Radeon X1900 XTX/XT | 48 | 8 | 16 | 16 | 512 |
| Radeon X1800 XT/XL | 16 | 8 | 16 | 16 | 512 |
| GeForce 7800 GTX | 24 | 8 | 24 | 16 | N/A |
| GeForce 7800 GT | 20 | 8 | 20 | 16 | N/A |
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ATI’s making a pretty bold statement with R580. With 48 pixel processors and only 16 texture units and ROPs, ATI feels that game developers in the future will increasingly use pixel shaders to create their stunning effects. After all, pixel shaders are not only growing more common, but also more complex, with an increasing number of shaders in games being arithmetic (versus texture) operations. ATI also argues that improving texture performance is also more reliant on subsequent improvements in memory bandwidth and size. With the fastest 900MHz GDDR3 memories in short supply and selling at a premium, improving the performance of texture operations isn’t as cost effective. The exorbitant $700+ street price and limited availability of the GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB is a good example of just how constrained the high-end GDDR3 memory market is right now.
ATI feels that focusing on pixel shading is the most cost effective way to dramatically improve R580’s performance: ATI states “By adding 20% more transistors, shader processing power is increased by 200%”. Of course, outside of anything but a synthetic benchmark, you won’t see R580 delivering three times the performance of R520 in real-world games, or a 200% performance improvement anywhere. But you can see what ATI’s thinking.
With R580, ATI’s looking towards the future, where shader-heavy games are the norm, rather than many of today’s titles, which are more dependant on texturing and raw fill-rate. In these types of applications, R580 will perform more like its predecessor. Once you crank up the AA and AF, these two cards will perform even more similarly.
ATI is also quick to point out that the Xbox 360’s Xenos GPU also has 48 shaders and 16 texture units (although in the case of Xenos, the pixel and vertex shaders are unified whereas R580 has 48 dedicated pixel shaders), so R580’s 3:1 ratio of pixel shaders to texture units isn’t new to game developers. In other words, don’t be surprised if the future may be become a reality sooner than you think.
On the vertex processing side, ATI carries over the R520’s basic design, with 8 vertex shaders. R580’s vertex shaders continue to lack support for SM 3.0’s vertex texture fetch feature, which allows vertex shaders to read from texture memory. To date, only 1C: Maddox Games has used the feature, which was recently added via beta patch to their WW2 sims IL-2 Sturmovik and Pacific Fighters to improve eye candy (specifically relating to the game’s water). An official patch is reportedly in the works from Maddox, although it remains to be seen if they’ll use ATI’s render to vertex buffer (R2VB) workaround to provide similar capabilities to ATI users. (For the record, we didn’t patch IL-2 to run this new mode in order to keep the playing field level between ATI and NVIDIA hardware.) ATI’s R2VB workaround uses the pixel shaders, furthering favoring the design changes introduced in R580.
The other notable change ATI has introduced into R580 is that the GPU has 50% more on-chip memory for ATI’s occlusion culling technology known as HyperZ. With more memory onboard, the Radeon X1900 is better positioned to tackle ultra high resolutions such as 2048x1536 or, for 30” LCD users, 2560x1600, particularly with AA.
In the X850/GeForce 6800 generation we noted that ATI had a decisive advantage over NVIDIA at 2048x1536, so perhaps ATI’s hoping for something similar at 2560x1600, unfortunately we don’t have a 30” LCD to test this theory.
| The Radeon X1900 cards | Page:: ( 3 / 18 ) |
As you can expect, all this new horsepower doesn’t come cheap. And while the Radeon X1900 officially replaces the Radeon X1800, we don’t expect that transition to take place overnight. Let’s go over the cards ATI is introducing today first, then we’ll explain:
| The Radeon X1900 Family | |||||
| Pixel Shaders | Core Clock Speed | Memory Speed | Onboard Memory | MSRP | |
| Radeon X1900 XTX | 48 | 650 | 775 | 512MB | $649 |
| Radeon X1900 XT | 48 | 625 | 725 | 512MB | $549 |
| Radeon X1900 CrossFire | 48 | 625 | 725 | 512MB | $599 |
| All-In-Wonder Radeon X1900 | 48 | 500 | 480 | 512MB | $500 |
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At the high-end of the Radeon X1900 lineup is the Radeon X1900 XTX. This is the take-no-prisoners flagship card that gamers who crave the very most performance are going to want. The surprising part about ATI’s new flagship is just how similar it is to the Radeon X1900 XT: with a 650MHz graphics core, the Radeon X1900 XTX is only clocked 25MHz higher than the Radeon X1900 XT!
In all honesty, we’re not quite sure what to make of this. This certainly isn’t the first time ATI has launched two new GPUs so evenly matched with each other, just over a year ago today the Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition and Radeon X850 XT were separated by similar clocks, but in that case both cards were only separated by an MSRP of $50: in comparison, today’s Radeon X1900 XT and X1900 XTX are priced about $100 apart if you go by ATI’s official MSRP for the cards.
On one hand, you could say that it looks like ATI’s pricing the X1900 XTX at such a premium to ensure that demand doesn’t outstrip supply – a case which repeated itself on multiple occasions for ATI over the past 12-18 months. But on the other hand, both cards are still clocked so similarly, so if yields really were bad on R580, we don’t think 25MHz would make much of a difference in the X1900 XT’s favor. Therefore, this theory doesn’t really make much sense either.
Like we said, we really don’t know what to think of this. But one thing’s clear: today’s X1900 launch confirms that the price of high-end graphics cards isn’t going down anytime soon. It also confirms that ATI knows there are a lot of people out there with more money than sense, as anyone who must stick to a budget is going to opt for a Radeon X1900 XT instead of the XTX, as the two cards are clocked so similarly.
At least high-end gamers on a budget will be glad to see that the X1900 XT is so close to the flagship XTX.
Priced between the Radeon X1900 XT and the X1900 XTX is the Radeon X1900 CrossFire card. The Radeon X1900 CrossFire card shares the exact same clocks as the Radeon X1900 XT of 625MHz core/725MHz memory (1.45GHz effective), so Radeon X1900 XTX users may be a little upset, but at least their XTX slave board will continue to operate at its stock frequencies of 650MHz/775MHz, so you’re not losing much. Perhaps CrossFire’s presence priced between both X1900 cards explains ATI’s pricing strategy this time around for the X1900 family, but if that’s the case we can’t help but feel a little disappointed with this line of thought. After all, NVIDIA users don’t have to pay a $50 premium for a master SLI card to increase performance. This premium ATI is currently charging for CrossFire is part of what’s holding the platform back in our opinion and we think it would help both ATI and ATI enthusiasts if it went away and the Radeon X1900 CrossFire carried the same MSRP as the Radeon X1900 XT.
The final card ATI is announcing today is the All-In-Wonder X1900. This is in some ways, perhaps the second-most interesting card launched today behind the Radeon X1900 XT. This is because for starters, this is the first time ATI has provided a multimedia All-In-Wonder card based on new technology the same day as the more conventional desktop PC cards are announced. Previously All-In-Wonder cards didn’t hit the market until a few months after.
Secondly, with an MSRP of $499, it’s the least expensive card based on X1900 technology ATI’s currently offering. So if you want to see what all the fuss about 48 pixel shaders is without having to pay a king’s ransom, this would be the least expensive way to do it. And finally, its clock speeds of 500MHz core/480MHz memory may provide an indication of where ATI would be heading with a vanilla Radeon X1900 card if such a card were to be announced in the future. ATI was actually shooting for 500/500 with the AIW X1900, but ultimately had to settle for 480MHz on the memory in order to get the card to market in time for today’s launch.
The All-In-Wonder X1900 supports all the multimedia and FM/TV tuning features of its predecessor, the All-In-Wonder X1800 XL, although some gamers may be disappointed to hear that like the AIW X1800 XL, the AIW X1900 doesn’t currently support ATI’s CrossFire mode. For the All-In-Wonder cards ATI continues to emphasize multimedia, so gamers that would like to mix a little CrossFire-loving with the AIW X1900’s multimedia capabilities will be best served by going with one of ATI’s external TV tuner cards like the TV Wonder Elite or the TV Wonder PRO.
Availability
The number one question that’s been asked of ATI with every new product release as of late revolved around availability. After a checkered history of product launches, it’s a reputation that ATI has definitely earned. With today’s Radeon X1900 release ATI hopes to resolve this by providing cards for sale on launch day. Retail boards have already been shipped to may popular e-tailers, while ATI will also be providing cards for purchase on their own website, shop.ati.com. We’ll be keeping our eyes open to see if they can deliver this time around.
| Board analysis | Page:: ( 4 / 18 ) |
Looking over the two X1900 cards we received (a Radeon X1900 XTX 512MB and a Radeon X1900 CrossFire) our first thought was how surprised we were to see how closely they resembled the X1800 cards they’re replacing. Even an experienced Radeon X1800 card owner would barely be able to tell the difference between the Radeon X1900s and the X1800. ATI even uses the same shot of Ruby on the card’s heatsink/fan unit. Here we should actually note that ATI plans on using a black heatsink/fan unit with a different Ruby sticker for final, shipping Radeon X1900 CrossFire cards. The card ATI sent us for testing is a pre-release engineering sample X1900 CrossFire card. Final X1900 CrossFire boards should look like this:
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ATI’s using the exact same board design and components for the X1900s (in fact, ATI uses the same board level components for the Radeon X1900 XT as they do the XTX, right down to the memory modules). We could only spot a couple of minute differences between our Radeon X1900 CrossFire and the Radeon X1800 CrossFire card we just reviewed a month ago; we couldn’t see any differences between the Radeon X1900 and the X1800. It literally looks like for the most part, ATI just dropped R580 onto R520’s PCB and went into full production.
This should help make the R520 to R580 transition that much easier for ATI and their board partners, as the exact same parts can be used for both cards. ASUS for instance shouldn’t have any trouble taking the same heat pipe-based Arctic Cooling VGA cooler used on the Extreme X1800 XT TOP and moving it over to the X1900 XT/XTX (Arctic Cooling has basically already confirmed this, so as long as ATI continues to sanction overclocking for R580, the chances of seeing a 700MHz Radeon X1900 card at some point in the future could be bright.
Also like the Radeon X1800, ATI runs the Radeon X1900 in two different modes. A 2D mode, which runs at slower clock speeds of 500MHz core/594MHz memory, and a 3D mode, which runs at the X1900’s full clock speeds.
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The heatsink/fan unit on the X1900 operates identically to the cooler used on the X1800 since it’s the same cooling unit. The fan sucks in the air within your PC from the right side of the card, passing it across the VPU and its memory before it finally exits outside of your system’s case. ATI uses a combination of copper and aluminum to cool the graphics core and memory modules, while a bank of VRM circuitry is cooled with a second aluminum heatsink. If you stick your hand behind the card when it’s running, you’ll literally feel the hot air as is passes from the X1800’s back plate. It’s an effective system that works pretty well, but as we’ve noted in the past, it does run louder than NVIDIA’s GeForce 7800 GTX, particularly when two X1900 cards are combined for CrossFire mode.
The fan spins at varying RPMs that depend on the GPU’s current temperature. At full speed, the X1900’s fan can get pretty loud, but fortunately we only saw this speed when we were first booting up the system. Even when running with two cards in CrossFire mode, the fan on either card never ran at full speed.
| Test Systems | Page:: ( 5 / 18 ) |
System Setup
AMD Athlon 64 FX-60
ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe
2GB OCZ DDR400 SDRAM
ATI Radeon X1900 XTX
ATI Radeon X1900 CrossFire (to simulate performance of X1900 XT)
ATI Radeon X1800 XT 512MB
ATI Radeon X1800 XL 256MB
Driver version sample_8-203-3-060104a-029367E
NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB
NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB
NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT 256MB
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT 256MB
Driver version ForceWare 81.98
250GB Maxtor Hard Drive Maxline III SATA Hard Drive w/16MB Cache
Windows XP Professional SP1
DirectX 9.0c
Benchmarks
3DMark 06
IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles
Call of Duty 2
Half-Life 2 Lost Coast
Far Cry
F.E.A.R.
Battlefield 2
Quake 4 (dual-core patch wasn’t used)
| 3DMark 06 | Page:: ( 6 / 18 ) |
3DMark 06– Direct3D
| 3DMark 06 | Page:: ( 7 / 18 ) |
3DMark 06– Direct3D
| Half-Life 2 Lost Coast 4xAA/16xAF | Page:: ( 8 / 18 ) |
Half-Life 2 – Direct3D
| HDR: HL2 Lost Coast | Page:: ( 9 / 18 ) |
| Battlefield 2 | Page:: ( 10 / 18 ) |
Battlefield 2 – Direct3D
| Battlefield 2 Performance 1600x1200 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB | 92 | 114 |
| GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB | 77 | 91 |
| GeForce 7800 GT | 65 | 80 |
| GeForce 6800 GT | 35 | 52 |
| Radeon X1900 XTX | 101 | 136 |
| Radeon X1900 XT | 96 | 130 |
| Radeon X1800 XT | 86 | 106 |
| Radeon X1800 XL | 68 | 77 |
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| Quake 4 | Page:: ( 11 / 18 ) |
Quake 4 – OpenGL
| IL-2 4xAA/16xAF | Page:: ( 12 / 18 ) |
IL-2: FB – OpenGL
| IL-2 Sturmovik Performance 1600x1200 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB | 45 | 122 |
| GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB | 39 | 94 |
| GeForce 7800 GT | 38 | 89 |
| GeForce 6800 GT | 31 | 75 |
| Radeon X1900 XTX | 33 | 104 |
| Radeon X1900 XT | 33 | 104 |
| Radeon X1800 XT | 39 | 121 |
| Radeon X1800 XL | 30 | 93 |
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| F.E.A.R. Performance | Page:: ( 13 / 18 ) |
F.E.A.R. – Direct3D
| F.E.A.R. Performance 1280x1024 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB | 31 | 112 |
| GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB | 23 | 87 |
| GeForce 7800 GT | 22 | 79 |
| GeForce 6800 GT | 14 | 56 |
| Radeon X1900 XTX | 31 | 184 |
| Radeon X1900 XT | 32 | 182 |
| Radeon X1800 XT | 31 | 134 |
| Radeon X1800 XL | 24 | 103 |
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| Call of Duty 2 | Page:: ( 14 / 18 ) |
Call of Duty 2 – Direct3D
| Serious Sam 2 | Page:: ( 15 / 18 ) |
Serious Sam 2 – Direct3D
| HDR: Serious Sam 2 | Page:: ( 16 / 18 ) |
| Far Cry HDR | Page:: ( 17 / 18 ) |
Far Cry – Direct3D
| Conclusion | Page:: ( 18 / 18 ) |
With the Radeon X1900’s R580 GPU, ATI has taken the foundation that was first laid with R520 three months ago and made some pretty noteworthy enhancements that could reap significant dividends for Radeon X1900 card owners in the future. With three times the shading horsepower of Radeon X1800, the X1900 has the potential on paper to deliver performance improvements similar to what you’d expect in a next-generation part -- all in a mid-cycle upgrade!
But as we’ve seen so many times in the past, a GPU that looks good on paper may not pan out so well in the real-world. In the real world, games may not be programmed efficiently enough to truly take advantage of the capabilities of the hardware. Or by the time the software finally does catch up to the hardware, the latest and greatest graphics card of today may be yesterday’s news. ATI’s taking a very bold step towards pixel shading with R580, but the reality is that many of today’s latest games are built on game engines that are 1-2 years old, if not older. After all, do you really think EA creates a new graphics engine for every rehash of Madden, NBA Live! or Need for Speed do you?
It’s because of this that we really feel it’s appropriate that this article is titled as a “preview” rather than a “review”. Right now it’s definitely too early to come to any final conclusions on the Radeon X1900’s architecture, and we’re not just talking pixel shader usage in future games here either. ATI’s driver development will be just as critical for the X1900’s success as the GPU’s new pixel shaders are. We saw this firsthand with the Radeon X1800 just a few months ago, where one new driver delivered performance improvements of over 30% in Quake 4. ATI has steadily improved their performance in F.E.A.R. as well (although part of this can be attributed to a bug in Catalyst A.I. that wasn’t fixed until Catalyst 5.13).
With all that being said though, we’re going to try and provide some early conclusions now, as we know that many of you are likely ready to pull the trigger on a new upgrade and want to know if the X1900 XT/X1900 XTX is worthy or not.
The answer to that question is ultimately going to come down to what types of games you’re playing now, and what you see yourself playing in the future. If you’re a flight simmer who follows 1C: Maddox’s developments closely, that answer has been pretty one-sided for over six months now, as NVIDIA’s GeForce 7800 cards continue to deliver superb performance with this game engine (even without vertex texture fetch). The X1900 cards actually underperformed in IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles, although we’re going to chalk this one up to the immaturity of ATI’s current driver for the X1900.
On the opposite end of the spectrum are games like F.E.A.R. and Half-Life 2 Lost Coast with HDR lighting. For Half-Life 2 Lost Coast’s HDR lighting in particular Valve uses pixel shaders to provide HDR functionality instead of FP blends like you see in Serious Sam II, Far Cry, and 3DMark 06. This allows them to provide HDR support for a wide range of graphics cards (practically anything DX9). In this case, the X1900 XTX’s new architecture brought performance improvements of 30% at 1600x1200 with Lost Coast over the X1800 XT. F.E.A.R performance was up by 20% at 1600x1200 for the X1900 XTX and 29% at 2048x1536. Even in Far Cry with HDR lighting the X1900 XTX outperformed the Radeon X1800 XT by over 25% at resolutions of 1600x1200 or greater. These are the kinds of gains that ATI is really banking out for the Radeon X1900 XTX, and as games become even more shader-heavy, ATI may even be hoping for even better improvements. An Unreal Tournament 2007 benchmark would be a really nice thing to have right about now.
Then there are the titles like Quake 4, Serious Sam 2, and Call of Duty 2. The gamer who follows id closely may be feeling a little under whelmed right now by the Radeon X1900 family. id’s Doom 3 engine isn’t as shader-heavy as some of the other engines out there, and as such, the X1900 doesn’t excel as much in these games (remember that upcoming games Prey and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars will use a derivative of the Doom 3 engine). While the X1900’s extra shaders did pay dividends to the tune of a 15% performance improvement in Quake 4 at 1600x1200, Quake 4 clearly prefers the more balanced combination of high clock speeds and 24 pixel shaders/24 texture units in the GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB. The GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB and Radeon X1900 XTX are separated by a healthy 10% at that resolution. And although the Radeon X1900 XTX did come out on top in our Call of Duty 2 testing, the margins between the X1900 XTX and X1800 XT narrowed down to just 12% at 1600x1200, although this may be in part due to the nature of our demo we use for benchmarking. In the demo we’re on a full server with lots of grenades going off. Based on the results we just saw in our testing, we’re guessing R580’s extra shaders really don’t take advantage of any of this. Perhaps a demo taken under a different environment would have yielded more tangible results for R580. The same may also apply to Serious Sam 2.
The most promising aspect of ATI’s Radeon X1900 family though isn’t today’s performance, but the performance of tomorrow. While the X1900 XT and X1900 XTX delivered sweet performance in games like F.E.A.R., Half-Life 2 Lost Coast, and others, it’s the crop of games that haven’t been released yet which could show the most significant benefits. As game developers continue to incorporate more shaders into their games and begin to rely on more of shader model 3.0’s features like dynamic branching, the performance potential of the Radeon X1900’s R580 architecture will increase. In other words, like a fine wine, the Radeon X1900 could get even better with age. It’s this future that ATI’s obviously banking on.
NVIDIA’s not going to sit around and watch though. Their refresh for the GeForce 7800 GTX is right around the corner, and it’s rumored that NVIDIA’s going to be integrating more shaders into their next part as well. But until they can get their availability issues resolved with GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB, ATI’s Radeon X1800 XT and X1900 XT/XTX cards are essentially competing with the GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB. And in this battle, ATI’s the clear winner.
In terms of price and availability, ATI states that all X1900 cards are in full production now, and that they’ve been shipping cards to both e-tailers, retailers, and system builders and OEMs ahead of launch, with “thousands” of boards in the channel pre-launch. As you’d expect, the Radeon X1800 is no longer in production, so once existing inventories are sold off the X1800 will be gone, but don’t expect that to happen overnight. Obviously ATI’s priced the X1900 to the level where both lines can continue to co-exist without one affecting the other too badly, but ATI still hasn’t addressed the gaping hole in their lineup between the sub-$200 Radeon X1600 XT and the roughly $350 Radeon X1800 XL. This is the one clear weakness that we see in today’s launch and it’s something ATI needs to address shortly if they hope to recapture some of the market share they’ve lost recently to NVIDIA.