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ATI Launches Radeon X1900 XT and XTX
Steve from HEXUS writes "ATI have done more than just boost clock speeds for their latest GPU; they've concentrated on boosting particular aspects of the GPU. This doesn't necessarily mean a boost in performance in all apps, however. HEXUS has a review: 'Even current synthetic benchmarks designed to show off theoretical rates in 3D hardware can have a hard time exploiting the tripling in fragment processing ability. That's not to say the performance increases at the same clocks as R520 are invisible. Clearly they're not without increases, especially at the higher resolutions, of up to 30% in the games we tested, clock-for-clock.'"
With the minor difference that Windows users can run them in a decent resolution and decent refresh rates for something simple as Microshaft Word. Linux users will not be able to do this for a while. And I mean users, not freaks living on the apt-get unstable edge or developers.
When something really new comes out it takes at least 6 months+ for it to get filtered down at X-whatever level and at least a year for it getting to a distribution level. There are so many branches and fig leaves on the X tree now that even if ATI releases a source for any specific X-whatever it will be bloody useless to anyone but that specific X-whatever.
Just as an example - I looked at merging the changes for the recent crop of PCI Express Radeons from X.org into the debian sarge (Thy Last XFree86) driver and I simply had to set it aside. A few days job at least because in their infinite wisdom the X.org people have started merging things like DRM right into the code instead of separating them out. So as a result the source which was arcane before the split is now outright mindbending in some places. Code maintainability... Yeah... Right... Heard about it...
Grgghhhhhhhhhhh....
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
I've already spoken to one UK reseller who confirmed they have them in stock. Not yet booked in, and thus not available for purchase, but cards from Connect3D, Sapphire, PowerColor and HIS were all on the premises and will be available to exchange for cash within 24 hours. Clearly ATI has learned its lesson where launches are concerned.
The link in the article appears to be broken but you can get a pretty good overview on the card over at the [H]
ATI Radeon X1900 Series Evaluation
The Tech Report's in-depth analysis is flowing freely with narry a hiccup. Check it out here.