In hindsight they have been correct that the added PS3.0 support for the GeForce6 series hasn’t exactly given it any big advantage and that it is just now the gaming scene is starting to move to more PS3.0 support. Their reason at that time was that it simply wasn’t worth it at that time (X800 preview, ). While NVIDIA included SM3.0 support in the GeForce6 chips ATI decided to stay at SM2.0 support, albeit with some added features. The X1800XL will be available from the 10th of October and then X1800XT from the 1th of October. The X1800 chips help ATI once again beat NVIDIA and become the king of the Hill (although I am quite certain we’ll hear about NVIDIA’s response quite soon again). The X1600 will be available end of november. This chipset probably is one of the more interesting one for people who want a lot of performance without the price.
The X1300 will be available from the 10th of October. This means you can hook up two X1300 cards right away without having to buy a special CrossFire edition X1300. One interesting thing about the X1300 chips is that it is the first chip that is CrossFire capable without a special chip. The card of course also has the other new improvements of the architecture that we will speak of a bit later in this article.
Let’s start with the low-end, the X1300 series.īeing the low-end solution this chipset probably doesn’t interest most hardcore gamers but it is finally time for ATI to bring full Sm3.0 support even for their low-end cards. They have de-coupled the components of the rendering pipeline to make the GPU design much more flexible. With the X1000 series ATI has decided to focus a lot on the shader performance. All chips are built with a 90nm process technology.Basically they are introducing the new architecture all the way from the bottom (X1300 series), midrange (X1600 series) and the high-end (X1800 series).īefore we check into each specific chip let us look at the things that all cards have: I’ve spent 2 days at Ibiza Spain partying listening to ATI presentation and, much more important, testing actual X1000 products and now it is time to give you an idea on what you can expect from ATI’s new line of products coming this autumn.Īti today presents not a single card but a whole family of cards. This time it is a bit more interesting since ATI are introducing their first family of SM3.0 supporting chips as well trying to retake the performance crown from NVIDIA.
In the 8 years I’ve been running this site 3D-acceleration has evolved a lot and it is easy to get a bit jaded when you see a new generation of cards.
We’ve not only listened to tons of presentations about the X1000 but also done some extensive benchmarking to give you the low-down on the new cards. With a new and updated architecture, new features and even more performance ATI has closed and in many cases passed NVIDIA again. ATI has finally released their first Shader Model 3.0 famlily of Shader Model 3.0 supporting chips.