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Introduction

The arms race that is the battle for 3D graphics superiority between ATI and NVIDIA is nothing short of astounding. With neither ATI nor their Santa Clara based counterpart content to have the second fastest product, the gaming public has seen product cycles being shortened from a six month cycle to a three month cycle for high end parts. In the span of the last six months, from ATI alone, there have been not one, but three flagship products released; the original CrossFire, the X1800 XT, and the X1800 XT CrossFire. As fantastic as this sounds for enthusiasts (for the most part, the wallet begs to differ), in reality, trying to consistently outdo each other has taken its toll on both sides - ATI has had problems supplying enough parts for the enthusiast market as the availability of X1000 series derived parts have been a bit scarce - a visit to some of the larger e-tailers shows dramatically more R4xx series parts available. NVIDIA has had more success in delivering most of their products but seem to have run into the same problems with the GeForce 7800GTX 512MB.

With the Radeon X1800, ATI was pushing the process technology envelope and is the first in the 3D market to produce a 90nm part. This is a bit of a break from the ATI tradition of releasing high end parts on a more mature process first and breaking new ground with mainstream parts, an example being the 9600Pro, ATI's first 130nm GPU, whereas their current high-end parts were still on the 150nm. When the dust settled, the Radeon X1800 ended up with a very fast clock rate that probably would not have been feasible on an older fab process. NVIDIA had their share of problems with launching new high end parts with a new process as well when they were trying to launch the GeForce 5 series.

Along with the history lesson, a federal election up here in Canada and the assurance of another minority government, we have something vastly more exciting; ATI is upping the ante once again with their latest and greatest graphics product, the ATI Radeon X1900 XTX, XT and X1900 CrossFire.

Specifications

There are a few ways to speed up graphics cards; improving shader performance and the tried and true methods of ratcheting up clockspeeds and doing more in parallel by adding more pixel pipelines. With the Radeon X1800 XT, ATI chose to rework the shader pipelines to include support for Shader Model 3.0, 32fp color support, Ultra-Threading as well as a significant bump in the clockspeed. However, the number of pixel shaders stayed the same as the X850 at 16. With the Radeon X1900, ATI has launched a multi pronged attack on the GeForce 7800 series; it triples the number of pixel pipelines found on the X1800 XT and also has a significantly faster core clockrate. Without further ado, lets cut straight to the chase.

Radeon X1900 XTX Box Art

There are a few things of note here:

• The number of Pixel Shaders have increased dramatically
• The number of Vertex Shaders have not increased
• The number of Texture Units have not increased
• The number of ROPs (Render Back Ends) have not increased

These design choices that ATI has made with X1900 series will be looked at in more detail. The most important thing to note is the massive increase in the number of pixel shaders which effectively triples the pixel processing power of ATI cards over the previous iteration at the same clockspeeds.

All Radeon X1900 products should be available today at major e-tailers and at some brick and mortar stores. The MSRPs are not too surprising - make no mistake about it, these are all high end parts commanding high end prices.

The biggest surprise may be the AIW Radeon X1900. I do not remember ATI having ever released an ATI wonder product at the same time with their high end offers and this card should not disappoint. It still features the Theater 200 chip as the video capture engine and not the Theater 550 but the AVIVO engine on the X1900 should be more than capable of processing the video stream. ATI claims both XP and Media Center support for this AIW product. Along with the card, there are some nice bonus items included:

• Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0
• Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0
• Remote Wonder Plus
• Gemstar GuidePlus+
• I/O breakout cable / box

Although the Theater 550 is a fine piece of hardware, my biggest complaint was the software package which utilized Cyberlink's Power Cinema. It is unclear what PVR program ATI will be including in this AIW product and I neglected to ask them before press time but we'll get this updated when we have more information.