ATI Technologies, a leading supplier of graphics processors, officially announced the Radeon X1900 GT graphics product for the retail market. Previously the company did not plan to release it to mass market, but to offer it to system integrators only. Nevertheless, ATI decided to allow its add-in-card partners to sell the model X1900 GT to end-users.

The Radeon X1900 GT sports a cut-down version of the Radeon X1900 graphics processor with 36 pixel processors, 12 texture units and 8 vertex processors. The graphics card with single-slot cooler clocks the processor at 575MHz, and carries 256MB of 1.20GHz GDDR3 memory. Based on the picture submitted by PowerColor, the Radeon X1900 GT is made using print-circuit boards for the Radeon X1800 XT or the X1800 XL with lower number of elements compared to the Radeon X1900-series boards.

Radeon X1900 GT graphics cards are to be available at a suggested retail price of $299. ATI believes that at this price-point the board offers very good price to performance ratio and provides a lot of value for gaming enthusiasts, who do not want to pay about $500 for a premium class graphics card.

“The Radeon X1900GT is a fantastic gaming card for the money, plain and simple,” said Vijay Sharma, director of ATI’s desktop discrete products, ATI Technologies.

Originally, sources close to ATI Technologies indicated that the Radeon X1900 GT graphics boards would only be offered to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), who will then resell those parts along with systems to personal computer suppliers, such as Dell or HP. However, in the recent days several companies, including GeCube, Tul Corp., Sapphire Technologies and some others revealed retail flavours of the Radeon X1900 GT.

The initial plan was to ship approximately 25 thousand Radeon X1900 GT units to computer makers worldwide. The relatively low amount of boards to be available could be dictated by the fact that some of the Radeon X1900 GT parts should utilize R580 chips that do not have 48 pixel processors fully-functional, whereas ATI did not have enough “partly-faulty” chips and had to use fully-fledged R580 chips – which could be sold for $500 per card – with some of execution units halted. It is unclear whether with retail availability of the Radeon X1900 GT the number of units to be produced will remain the same, or will increase.