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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.'"
Seriously, why does ATI marketing feel the need to prematurely boost the suffixes all the way to unheralded 'XTX' when the 1900 series is being introduced? At least there has been some reasonable pattern to follow for a while in their naming scheme....now they have caved to their profit desires and taken adavntage of our familiarity with their naming scheme.
That's what their previous designation was for the very top of the line cards. Unfortunately (particularly with the X800XT PE, which I waited 3 months to get hold of) the suffix was associated with being impossible to find (quite true) and for marketing / PR reasons the name was retired in favour of an additional X. Still, I agree that the trend towards increasingly lengthy names is getting a bit out of hand. I remember when the original GeForce launched and it was simply referred to as the "GeForce256". For a while Nvidia even flirted with making the names more simple with the GeForce 2. Then they brought out the MX and it kind of got confusing from there on out...
Sorry to contradict you, but this one is not going to be a paper launch, ATI is shipping around 10,000 Radeon X1900 cards today. And comparing a overclocked card with one that is not overclocked doesn't cut it, as you can still overclock the new one. (And seeing as they are using 1.1ns memory, you could easily clock the memory to at least 1600MHz DDR). The price is going to be high, that's true, but that's also because you cannot really find any 7800 GTX 512MB around! Sure you can if you want to pay around 700$-800$.
And still working at that.
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http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=202&type=exp
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=OTUz
http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2006q1/radeon-x
http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.aspx?artic
http://www.beyond3d.com/reviews/ati/r580/