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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.'"
What I want to know is where can I get the world's fastest accelerated EGA graphics card? I want to play Kings Quest II.
I just can't help but wonder what their Linux driver support will be like. If it is the same or worse then honestly, it only means that ATI has produced five more cards to ignore. Harsh? Maybe, but there is some truth in that statement.
My humor is probably your flamebait
This does indeed look like a fantastic video card, but I found this comment from TFA a little funny:
ATI has proven they are a leader and not a follower with the X1950 XTX
No, X1950 XTX, ATI's top of the line card, sounds nothing like Nvidia's top model, 7950GTX.
These cards are nice...for windows users.
What the new AMD led ATI can do to help show leadership is to release the information (or even drivers) needed for Linux to take full advantage of their card capabilities.
ATI seemed to not want to do this. I hope this changes under the new AMD administration.
What I've heard in the Linux community is to stay away from anything ATI if you plan to use it with Linux. Too bad really, because they really do make nice cards.
Soccer Goal Plans
They keep releasing new cards and the drivers that support them keep slowing down and mangling the performance of the previous cards (currently had to uninstall 6.8 catalyst to use 6.6 because the FPS rate got cut in half due to a conflict with FSAA/Bloom effects; and 6.7 driver refuses to install because it thinks the card is not an ATI while 6.6 and 6.8 do). This has been their history. I have been buying ATI cards since mid 90s (glutton for punishment I suppose) and every time a new card comes out I install the new drivers and my slightly older card runs slower or drivers crash or effects are blurred. I think they really need to beef up their driver development to keep up with the constant release of new hardware, what good is a new card if you are worried the drivers will be problematic.
While NVIDIA is not perfect, the 2 cards I have from them work perfectly with their drivers. While ATI is releasing better featured cards their drivers leave something to be desired.
It is generally predicted that DirectX 10 cards will be with us in a few months (holiday season or just after).
Are sales declining because of anticipation of this?
Will ATI and Nvidia be able to shift large quantities of cards over the next few months, with people like myself waiting for the next (significant) generation?
Aside: Yes, I am aware that these cards will still pack a punch in DirectX10 games, and will not be obsolete over night, but the unified shader/vertex architecture of DirectX10 seems to be a big shift in card design and will offer a lot of features to game desingers, not efficntly do-able on the odler hardware, so you may be stuck with a less good lookign rendering of a new game.
Please note that the term "Radeon" is not an official definition. The term was recently proposed by the International Videocard Union to define a "Graphics card which costs less than $200 American dollars to purchase and whose shape is more highly inclined and angular than a traditional card".
This definition causes all sorts of problems, such as how to define dual-card setups and what happens when a Radeon is attached to a daughter card rather than a motherboard. Videostronomers are currently divided between those who favour the term "Radeon" and those who argue that we should stick with the current definition favoured by consumers, which is "the weird square-ish blue plug at the back of my Dell".
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
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.
Although it was touched on a little above, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to rant about ATI. ATI does not support more than 2-3 generations of cards. Their driver development quickly stops and their Catalyst drivers are ridiculously huge.
On the linux side of things their support is so freaking lame it is ridiculous. Reverse engineered open source drivers are 10X better than drivers developed by ATI. ATI is pathetic and any company that releases such terrible software in their name does not have very high standards and cannot be trusted. I had a radeon 8500 and I will never recommend or waste my money on such pathetic ATI junk again.
Math
- http://www.madshrimps.be/gotoartik.php?articID=482 l eid=861&cid=1 i _radeon_x1950_xtx/ x tx/index.x?pg=1 4 ,00.asp d eon_x1950/ 2 020&cid=3&pg=1 9 50_xtx_performance/ w /
& threadid=26526
- http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.aspx?artic
- 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_at
- http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ATI/X1950XTX
- http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=954
- http://techreport.com/reviews/2006q3/radeon-x1950
- http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,200732
- http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/08/23/ati_releases_ra
- http://www.guru3d.com/article/Videocards/375/
- http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/131
- http://www.hardwarezone.com/articles/view.php?id=
- http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/ati_radeon_x1
- http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews/X1950XTXrevie
up to date list: http://www.madshrimps.be/forums/showthread.php?s=
Is there some kind of rule that says we can only use letters like X, N, R, and words like CrossFire, to denote 'cool' products mainly aimed at men?
Just once I'd like to see an ATI Shiny B001 LALA and FluffyPants Edition. Just to shake things up.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
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"?
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.