ATI Technologies today unveiled its highly-anticipated new-generation graphics processors that bring additional speed and realism into today’s and tomorrow’s computer games.

The latest RADEON X800-series graphics processors use additional capabilities of the previous generation RADEON 9500/9600/9700/9800-series graphics chips and greatly improve performance in DirectX 9.0 applications. The features the RADEON X800 processors employ are aimed on improving of the graphics quality in computer games. However, the new family of ATI’s VPUs do not support the Shader Model 3.0, something that is available on the hardware of ATI’s arch-rival NVIDIA.

ATI and its worldwide board partners will offer several configurations of graphics boards based on the RADEON X800 chips. Board partners that will be shipping RADEON X800 products include ABIT, ASUS, Celestica, Club 3D, Connect 3D, Creative, Diamond, Elsa, FIC, Gigabyte, Hightech Information Systems, Info-Tek, MSI, Sapphire, Tul, VisionTek, Xpertvision and Yuan.

System Integrators including ABS, Alienware, Falcon Northwest, Velocity Micro, VoodooPC and ZT Group, will include the RADEON X800 in their systems for customers who want the ultimate gaming PC.

ATI will offer two RADEON X800 products, the RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition and the RADEON X800 PRO through retail, system integrator and OEM partners.

For the competitive gamers who demand the best performance bar-none, the RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition will be powered by a 16-pipe pixel processing engine clocked at 520MHz. To take advantage of the massive pixel processing power of the RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition, the product has been paired with high-speed 1.12GHz data rate GDDR3 memory and a 256-bit memory interface. The RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition will ship later this month with a suggested retail price of $499.

The RADEON X800 PRO, with a suggested retail price of $399, will be powered by a 12-pipe pixel processing engine clocked at 475MHz. A 256-bit memory interface and GDDR3 memory with a 900MHz data rate will deliver unmatched performance in its price category. The RADEON X800 PRO is shipping immediately and customers can purchase it online through major retailers in North America starting today.

More information about architectural capabilities of the RADEON X800-series graphics processors is available in X-bit labs’ article titled “ATI RADEON X800: R420 Totally Exposed”. To compare ATI’s novelties with competitor from NVIDIA in 25 benchmarks, check out the “Clash of the Titans: ATI RADEON X800 PRO and ATI RADEON X800 XT Against the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra” article.