The new King : X1900 from ATi!

Hail the new king of graphics in PC! Well, that's the story that invaded the graphics cards industry today. The new pixel accelerator from ATi seems to bring the company back into its winning track as it unleashes the potential behind its R580 architecture. Well, the credit has to go R520 too. Read over at Anandtech to know why. It seems that the flexibility of X1600 XT design has something to do with it.

Clearly, NVIDIA and Ati have chosen to embrace the path of 'more pixel shader operation per pipelines rather than blasting all pixels/textures to the output at nonsense rate'. If this is the new trend, then I wonder when I'll be watching a card equipped with 20,24,28 or 32 ROPs in the coming years. Maybe the Force be with them!

Another big story surrounding this event is the successful attempt by Ati to avoid 'yet another paper launch', thus giving itself another boost of success for the card. Following the announcement is the direct availability of 4 flavours of X1900 in the market: X1900 XTX, X1900 XT, X1900 Crossfire and X1900 AIW (All-In-Wonder). Way to go Ati!

Here are the specs:

	X1900 XTX	X1900 XT	X1900 Crossfire	X1900 AIW
Core Clock	650	625	625	500
Memory Clock	775	725	725	480
Pixel shader (pipelines)	48	48	48	48
Texture unit (TMUs)	16	16	16	16
Vertex shaders	8	8	8	8
ROPs	16	16	16	16
Onboard Memory	512 MB	512 MB	512 MB	512 MB
MSRP	$649	$549	$599	$500

My personal opinion: Another credit should be given to NVIDIA for driving Ati nuts in achieving a successful launch for X1900. It's true that a good competition will give us, customers a very good impact.

I'll be back with the analysis of the benchmarks found in some reviews of X1900 after this!