ATI Radeon X1900 family

Congratulations to ATI on the hard launch, XT's, XTX's and Crossfire editions are all available to buy today.

Shame they're all so expensive though, but I can dream. :)

aww no apples to apples, guess im off to anandtech to get the lowdown on these cards

Originally Posted by ozstriker
I'm debating whether to go for the 1900xtx or waiting to see how the 7900's are. I get the feeling that the 7900 will pwn the 1900 though.

Well, duh. :p It would have to in order to convince people to buy it. :)

But is it worth the wait?

Now that's something no one can tell you, with the exception of nVidia's marketing department.

either way im happy that ati released an other card, they seems quite performant, hope the bugs will be fixeds in the next catalyst drivers, I wonder how it overlock? Anyhow, hope nvidia will bring a nice reply to this card

i think im gonna wait til just before quake wars is released (end of feb ish) and get one then, i wanna be able to run that maxed out (or at least nearly maxed out) :D

So when are you going to ship me one to my door, bigz? ;)

Do my eyes decieve me, ati releases somthing and its avaliable, to buy, now.

It looks like ati is back in the game for now.

edit: after taking a better look at the review, wow those are some insane resolutions you can get. I still want soft shadows on fear.

WOW!!! look at what these have done for all video card prices, i went to new egg, i swear, all the cards are cheaper, all the X800GTO2's have fallen below the $200 mark, you can find a x800GTO for as low as $110, as with the 6800GS's, there getting relaly cheap, and the 7800GT's, there like in the $279 range!!!! I look foward to new cards only for the reason that they cause drastic proce drops in other cards.

SOme prices are more drastic then others, but they all have dropped, even if only by a few dollars.


Insanity!!!

Originally Posted by speedfreek
Do my eyes decieve me, ati releases somthing and its avaliable, to buy, now.

It looks like ati is back in the game for now.

edit: after taking a better look at the review, wow those are some insane resolutions you can get. I still want soft shadows on fear.

Let's see what the situation looks like in a week before we all sign our contragulatatory card.

It's always like this, one company puts out a new card everyone gets their panties wet, then maybe two or three months down the road the other company comes back with a better product.

Yes, ATi has released a great product but they also took a hit in sales last year versus nVidia. I wouldn't be too suprised to see nVidia retort with a hefty performer or even a dx10 card.

Originally Posted by Nature
Those are great prices, there are 7800gtx's that cost more than 1900 XT's now :D

I was hoping that this card would be 9800pro-esque however. Unlike Ati's 9800pro, no card that's come out in recent years has been able to smoothly play new games at MAX settings (by itself). I guess theres more jobs in the sowftware industry.

Yes. I remember the 9800Pro. That was THE card back then, about 1.5-2 years ago. Right below the XT, everybody had a 9800Pro.

The rate at which new cards coming out is ridiculous. X1800's lifespan is shorter than a fruit fly, and I have a feeling that G71 will come out before nVidia even manages to achieve firm availability of the 7800GTX 512MB.

Anyone know if dx10 will be release with SP3? And will SP3 be available before Vista arrives? (assuming Vista will come with dx10?)

Jeez, I'm getting tired of this, I wish the graphics card market would slow the **** down.

Back in the 9800Pro days, that card was king(at least in money/value terms) for at least a year, now, new cards are out every few months, and its damn hard to have any idea of whats actually worth looking at.

7800GT's that were looking peachy around christmass, are suddenly looking inferior compared to alot of the newer things, and no doubt the X1800XT's and 7800GT's and GTX's are going to be plummeting in price once Nvidia react to the X1900's and bring out the 7900 ranges... :(

edit:Rup[b]urt, SP3 is coming in 2007, I think DX10 is coming with Vista, but not sure.

edit 2: fixed

Well, I'm really not that impressed.

Great performance? Indeed, but I expected something much more astonishing. Kinda like what 7800GTX was compared to 6800 Ultra... This cards may be faster than anything else on the market, but don't scream "must have" to me like the 9800pro, 6800 Ultra or 7800GTX did.

And anyway, such high end products target a really small minority of users. For the cost conscious gamer, I have yet to see something that can match with a x800GTO2 or 7800GT... If ATI were to release some x1900whatever that can match the performance of a 7800GTX at a clearly lower price than a 7800GT, then I'll be fully interested in this *new* generation (yes, I'm kinda aware this is not a *new* generation per se, but a refinement of the r520 marchitechture, blah,blah,blah). Or perhaps, If the x1800XT were to drop in prices to the point of being rival to the 7800GT (or lower), that would make this new x1900 really worthwile, but I don't see that happening...

A pity... I had very high hopes on this cards. I'll guess I'll too wait for dx10 cards for my next update....

Originally Posted by specofdust


edit:Rupbert, SP3 is coming in 2007, I think DX10 is coming with Vista, but not sure.

Fixed :)

SP3 delayed again? That is some distance away. I believe they will be introducing the new winFS with SP3 now that it has been stripped from Vista, so I guess it's winFS that will dictate when SP3 arrives?

i thought sp3 was dropped totally.

Pretty thorough article once again!

I'm not very surprised by ATI's 'success' with 1900xt(x)'s. Still the gameplay results look pretty good. I guess the ball is in the green corner at the moment.

Interestingly however, 1900xt crossfire doesn't seem to fare so well with 3dmark06 results if they are to be trusted, not that it would make any difference to the actual games that are tested here. Just considering the future...

One thing that bothered me was the DoD:Source result comments: first you state that 1900xtx was faster than gtx 512 with 2048x1536 2xQAAA 16xAFHQ and then you go on saying that actually 1600x1200 6xQAAA 16xAFHQ was a better choice. Still you're listing the gtx 512 to have best playable settings for 2048x1536 2xTSS 16xAF and have almost no explanation as to why the settings were different...why not use 1600x1200 with the gtx 512 also? (and there's no mention in the benefits that a single gtx 512 would have a higher res) I am aware that this wasn't supposed to be a 512 gtx review, but it's hard to know if you've understood everything correctly without having a clear explanation

Could it be that there has been some sort of a confusion when writing that part or is it just my lack of understanding I wonder...perhaps the oxygen deprivation you experienced when testing explains the situation a bit...You really should remember to breath every once in a while when benching =]

Of course, ATI's X1000-series can do both HDR and antialiasing at the same time and it's something that NVIDIA's cards can't do at the moment.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that more of a coding issue than hardware related? From what I've understood, there's some trickery involved in getting AA and HDR elements to work together?

In DoD:Source, the HDR is alot different from that of Farcry for an example...I don't know how exactly but so I've understood from some talks with graphic oriented people...