X-bit labs

ATI Raises Performance Bar with New RADEON X850, X800 VPUs.

Category: Video

by Anton Shilov

[ 12/01/2004 | 06:00 PM ]

ATI Technologies, a leading developer of graphics and multimedia solutions, unveiled today new additions to its RADEON X800 product family, offering extreme performance and value for different types of end-users.

“The new RADEON X800-series cards reach new heights in performance and new lows in price – an unbeatable combination,” said Rick Bergman, Senior Vice President and General Manager, PC Business Unit, ATI Technologies.

The new RADEON X8-series visual processing units will be available with 16 or 12 pixel and 6 vertex pipelines with 256-bit memory interface; the products will be available for PCI Express x16 interconnection only. The architecture of the new RADEON X850 and RADEON X800 graphics processing units code-named R430 and R480 respectively is fully inherited from the previous generation RADEON X800-series code-named R423.

“ATI RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition, just like any other R480-based product, inherited all the pros and cons of ATI’s latest RADEON X800 graphics architecture. Having implausibly efficient pixel processors, RADEON X850 XT PE will clearly outperform competing GeForce 6800 Ultra graphics card in DirectX 9.0 games like FarCry and Half-Life 2, thus, are also likely to lead in upcoming titles with  heavy usage of Shader Model 2 effects. Unfortunately, lack of technologies like NVIDIA UltraShadow and truly efficient texturing modules don’t let ATI’s X800 XT PE to lead in the Doom III game,” X-bit labs’ analysts said in the “ATI RADEON X850 Platinum Edition: Good Things Go Better” review published Wednesday.

Current RADEON X800 and X850 product lineups now contain 9 graphics cards at different price-points, the majority is intended for PCI Express x16 bus, while there are also products designed for machines featuring AGP 8x interconnection.

*A SKU to be discontinued in future

The new ATI RADEON X8 graphics products, including RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition, RADEON X850 XT, RADEON X850 PRO, RADEON X800 XL and RADEON X800, are now being shipped to AIB partners worldwide. ATI and its add-in card partners expect the new family of products to hit retail shelves across the world by January 1^st, 2005.

Graphics card makers ABIT Computer Corp., ASUSTeK Computer Inc., Connect Components Ltd., Diamond Multimedia, Gigabyte Technologies, Hightech Information Systems, Info-Tek Corp., Microstar International, Palit Systems, Sapphire Technologies, Tul Corp. and VisionTek are expected to release ATI’s new product lineup.