X-bit labs

Sapphire Quietly Unveils New Performance-Mainstream Graphics Card.

Category: Video

by Anton Shilov

[ 01/29/2007 | 11:59 PM ]

Sapphire Technology, the main add-in card production partner of ATI – graphics product group of Advanced Micro Devices, has quietly released a new offering, which is aimed at performance-minded customers in budget.

“The Sapphire X1950GT combines high-definition entertainment with fast gaming performance, industry-leading image quality and crystal clear high definition digital video at a new and very affordable price point,” a statement by Sapphire reads.

The Radeon X1950 GT is a downclocked version of the Radeon X1950 Pro graphics card, which is based on the chip code-named RV570 that has has 36 pixel shader processors, 8 vertex shader processors 12 texture units, 256-bit memory bus and so on. While the Radeon X1950 GT has clock-speeds of 500MHz/1200MHz for chip/memory, the more advanced X1950 Pro has 575MHz/1.38GHz frequencies.

The addition of yet another graphics card based on the RV570 graphics processor boosts AMD’s competitiveness in the mainstream market segment and increases pressure on Nvidia’s GeForce 7900 GS and 7600 GT graphics cards. It is highly likely that other makers of graphics cards will also offer their versions of the Radeon X1950 GT.

The pricing of the Sapphire X1950 GT was not announced, however, it should fill in the gap between $149 (Radeon X1650 XT) and $199 (Radeon X1950 Pro).

The Sapphire X1950 GT is scheduled to ship from retailers and system integrators worldwide from January 29^th 2007.