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With that in mind as stated ATI launched two new products, the really lovely Radeon x800 XL and the x850 XT PE. We finally have both reference products from ATI in our lab, which makes us wonder how many samples actually are available and with that in mind how long it'll take to see them in the stores. Bare in mind, originally the plan was to get them in stores before Christmas. This review will handle the Radeon x850 XT PE and next week we'll handle the x800 XL.
Exciting times in the graphics industry you ask? You betcha. It's never been any different though, yet it is more and more difficult for us journalists to test these cards. When I received the x850 I immediately got a flashback to last year. We've seen a plague of driver optimizations from manufacturers. It wasn't too long ago that a rather big discussion in the industry that a image filtering technology called Trilinear filtering was optimized by NVIDIA with the help of a mixture of filtering technologies (Brilinear). ATI remained clear of such questionable "tricks"... until the x800 launch, that is as we learned they where doing something similar. It started with their Radeon 9600 Pro series. Nobody noticed it yet it's there alright and now merged into the x800 and x850 series. The newer CCC (Catalyst Control Center drivers) recently showed new options to actually disable these optimizations in a somewhat same manner NVIDIA's ForceWare drivers allow. It's quite funny that a year and a half ago optimization were to be considered an absolute shame but they now are completely accepted and considered to be normal. The good thing here is that image quality wise the Series 6 from NVIDIA and x800 now are roughly the same, take two computers equip one with a x800 and the other with a 6800, look at a screenshot from both PC's and you cannot see the difference with the naked eye. Speaking as a journalist I have to admit that the so called optimizations made our job very hard as you cannot compare oranges with apples eh?
With that being said, let's start up this review beginning with a small overview of ATi's new premium flagship; the Radeon x850 XT Platinum Edition!
Today's tested product is the shaggy Radeon X1950 Pro which comes with the newer IceQ3 cooling solution; a review on ATI's latest 12-pipe mid-range product which obviously was based off the R580 silicon, and is quite frankly a very credible graphics card as you'll learn in this article. The card features 36 Pixel Shaders units. And for roughly $219-239 you can pickup the 256MB version already.
Primarily this is a Radeon X1650 XT Crossfire article, yet with included X1950 Pro Crossfire results as well. Ever since NVIDIA released the GeForce 7600 GS/GT cards earlier this year ATI has had a very rough time delivering a product that offers the same performance. They constantly were close but not close enough. ATI worked hard to finish up its new 80 nanometer products and despite a delay of all the 80 nanometer chips, it is finally ready in good quantities. The Radeon X1950 Pro for example is such a product.
The Radeon X1650 Pro utilizes the ATI RV535 graphics core, a new revision of the RV530 which was the basis of the X1600 series. What's new then you are asking ? Uhm, well nothing except a newer 80nm fabrication process. That 80nm process ensures cheaper production of the silicon and more importantly less heat and likely lower graphics core voltages. That means you can clock the core faster, which was done quite insignificantly for this model but the increase is there.
So today we'll be looking at the rather lovely Radeon X1950 Pro from this company, a review on ATI's latest 12-pipe mid-range product which obviously was based off the R580 silicon, and quite frankly is a very credible graphics card as you'll learn in this article. The card features 36 Pixel Shaders units. For $199 you can pickup the 256MB version already, it sounds like a great deal as it should offer at least twice the performance of a X1600 Pro.