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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.'"
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"?
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