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ATI Technologies on Tuesday unveiled a new family of Radeon X1900 graphics processing units (GPUs) that combine high gaming performance as well as future-proof architecture. The company also said that the newcomers would be available for purchase immediately, something which is does not happen often in the graphics card industry.
“All of the Radeon X1900 products raise the bar in so many ways. They deliver the best performance, they offer image quality features unavailable from any other company and they are widely available,” said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, PC business, ATI Technologies.
The Radeon X1900-series chips utilize the already proven Radeon X1800 architecture, but add pixel shader horsepower and some other improvements aimed to boost performance and ultimately improve image quality.
The Radeon X1900 graphics chip, also known under code-name R580, features 48 pixel shader processors, 8 vertex shader processors, 16 texture units, enlarged by 50% hierarchical Z-buffer (HyperZ buffer), higher amount of general purpose register arrays as well as Fetch4 feature designed to accelerate lookup of textures consisting of one component by the factor of four. The new chip naturally utilizes ATI’s ring-bus memory controller as well as other improvements found in the Radeon X1000 family.
ATI’s add-in-board partners started to ship four versions of the Radeon X1900-series: Radeon X1900 XTX ($649) – the fastest graphics cards to date, Radeon X1900 CrossFire Edition ($599) – the main building block for a system containing two Radeon X1900 products for ultimate performances, Radeon X1900 XT ($549) – a slight lower-clocked version of the XTX, All-In-Wonder Radeon X1900 – a multimedia graphics card based on the latest chip from the company.
According to tests by X-bit labs, the Radeon X1900 XTX beats the GeForce 7800 GTX 512 graphics card developed by Nvidia Corp. in virtually all benchmarks and also offers some proof for the future, the article “The Fast and Furious: ATI Radeon X1900 XTX Review” found out.
