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ATI Radeon X1900 Reviewed Around the Web

ATI’s Most-Recent Radeon Receive Reviewers’ Approval

by Anton Shilov

[ 01/27/2006 | 02:26 PM ]

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ATI Technologies’ Radeon X1900-series graphics cards released earlier this week was quickly adored by enthusiasts and reviewers for its high performance in forward-looking game titles as well as increased speed over the previous flagship Radeon X1800 offering in cases when high-quality graphics is enabled.

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.

“Looking at current applications, though, we can generally see performance increases over X1800 between 15%, even for the less shader bound titles, up to the mid 30% range for the more shader bound cases. ATI points out that with a mere 20% increase in transistors over X1800 they can triple one aspect of performance, and with titles that are available currently that die size increase corresponds exactly in performance,” said Beyon3D’s review.

“Overall, we have to give kudos to ATI for starting off 2006 with a such a bang. The company's problems in 2005 were well documented, so we won't rehash them here. Instead, we'll congratulate ATI for launching the Radeon X1900 so quickly, and thank them for keeping the rivalry between them and NVIDIA alive,” report by HotHardware wrote.

“Best for the games, best for the media playback, best for the future games – that’s what the Radeon X1900 XTX is, based on the numbers we have obtained,” X-bit labs’ review said.