ATI Releases Five New Radeons

An anonymous reader writes "Eager to retake the performance crown from NVIDIA, ATI has announced five new releases for their Radeon product line. The latest card features 512MB GDDR4 memory running at 1000Mhz, it's currently the fastest single CPU VGA card out there. From the review: 'ATI has proven they are a leader and not a follower with the X1950 XTX. ATI has released the world's first consumer 3D graphics card with GDDR4 memory clocked at the highest ever stock speed that chews through games when it comes to high definition gaming. Memory bandwidth looks to once again be the defining factor in 3D performance. With a re-designed heatsink/fan unit, faster memory, and lowered price, the ATI Radeon X1950 XTX and CrossFire Edition are both serious 3D gaming video cards for the [H]ardcore that offer some value over NVIDIA's more expensive 7950 GX2. ATI's CrossFire dual GPU gaming platform looks to have just grown up.'"

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Another Review Perspective

[Vigile]

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?type=expert&aid=2 87

Here the review talks up the signle X1950 XTX card but finds the CrossFire platfrom from ATI still very under-developed.

More X1950XTX Reviews

[jmke]

- http://www.madshrimps.be/gotoartik.php?articID=482
- http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.aspx?articl eid=861&cid=1
- http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=6538
- http://www.mvktech.net/content/view/3357/48/
- http://pcper.com/article.php?aid=287
- http://uk.theinquirer.net/?article=33872
- http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/08/23/review_ati _radeon_x1950_xtx/
- http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ATI/X1950XTX
- http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=954
- http://techreport.com/reviews/2006q3/radeon-x1950x tx/index.x?pg=1
- http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2007324 ,00.asp
- http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/08/23/ati_releases_rad eon_x1950/
- http://www.guru3d.com/article/Videocards/375/
- http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/131
- http://www.hardwarezone.com/articles/view.php?id=2 020&cid=3&pg=1
- http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/ati_radeon_x19 50_xtx_performance/
- http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews/X1950XTXreview /

up to date list: http://www.madshrimps.be/forums/showthread.php?s=& threadid=26526

Re:Graphics card naming...

[Chandon Seldon]

They model numbers. The requirement is that they be different between different cards, so customers can see that different products are different. Beyond that, marketting can do whatever they want with them - it doesn't really matter.

Suprisingly, the marketting departments at ATI and Nvidia have settled on a highly structured and informative system for model numbers (for something generated by marketting departments).

Here's how it works: Take the "X1950 XTX". That splits into 4 segments: "X1" is the generation, "9" is the class, "50" is the revision, and "XTX" is the specific model. Nvidia uses exactly the same system. For the 7950 GX2, we have generation 7, class 9, specific model GX2.

Generation usually changes yearly. Class splits into (generally): 0-3 is low-end, 5-7 is mid-range, and 8-9 is high end. The revision number allows more recent products to have higher numbers than older products. Generally for ATI "Pro" Now - that still doesn't let you determine which card is "better" based on the model number, but model numbers never do that. Which is better, An "AMD Opteron 165" or an "AMD Athlon64 FX-50"?

Re:ATI/AMD - Show leadership

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

and had never heard of "Unichrome" -- that has got to be the most uniniviting name for a GPU ever.

They're very low-end, (used in cheap laptops, via's embedded line, etc) so if your a windows-gamer-fanboy, you're not going to have heard of them. (and if you judge a card by its name, you have bigger problems than that).

Anyway, if you have political issues with Nvidia that's one thing, but otherwise they've run fine under Linux for years.

No they don't. They run better than ATI's offering. There's a number of things that don't work correctly. (TwinView doesn't support multiple monitors with different resolutions, framebuffer/x switching support is poor, you can't report (linux) bugs to the kernel team, you're allowing an unaudited binary blob to run in kernelland, I can go on and on).

If Nvidia & ATI were the only choices, then fine, I'd reccommend Nvidia's buggy binary blob over ATIs buggier binary blob. But they're not. Two companies have offered the specs & a reference GPLd driver - I reccommend them and I think other supporters of FOSS should do likewise.

Saying a reccommendation of a driver that actually supports linux over one that doesn't is 'political' is.... well - let's say I suspect you have a political agenda of your own.