Windows Vista and DirectX ten are, barring further delays, a trifling 5 months away, and with them will come next-gen Computer games, for example Crysis. Based on previews of Crysis we saw at the year’s E3, if you’ve got the hardware to run it, you’ll be treated to a heretofore unseen level of graphical realism. ATI’s new Radeon X1950 XTX, expounded today, will not deliver that experience. It is a DirectX nine card, that means it can only make the best of games from this generation. Spotting this fact, ATI has priced the new card at an assertive $450. If this card had come out a year back, it could have been priced between $500 and $600, since it is the fastest single-chip card on the market.
The largest change it brings to the Radeon X1000 family is GDDR-4 memory. It should be the 1st 3D card to market with GDDR-4 when it hits the streets on Sep fourteen. It is also the source of the major clock speed ticks to this card. At 650MHz, the chip’s clock speed remains the same as the Radeon X1900 XTX’s, but the memory now runs at a full 2GHz, up from its predecessor’s 1.2GHz. ATI has held a slight edge in DirectX games ( most titles ), and Nvidia has won on OpenGL-based titles ( Doom three, Quake four, Prey ), but neither was ahead enough to actually claim outright dominance. And we cannot say that ATI blows Nvidia out of the water now, but we do have to hand it the final edge for its gains on Quake four and, by extension, OpenGL.
Fourteen to go with the stand-alone model, but we do not endorse it. To be fair, we do not advocate buying any new multicard or multichip setup now, so Nvidia’s SLI is out, too. The arrival of the next-gen cards is just too near to spend that sort of cash now.
Eventually , when ATI told us that it was showcasing the Radeon X1950, the CrossFire Edition, and its other new cards today, but wasn’t selling them till Sept. Fourteen, we were reminded of the distressing launch of the Radeon X1000 series, in which ATI did not communicate the heavy delay between the press coverage and the availability. We were not going to fall for that again, so we asked ATI’s Will Wallis to clarify why this isn’t another paper launch. The issue is that there were similar conferences that had taken place in Europe, and 3 print publications are now locked and loaded to run stories on the X1950 cards on August twenty-five, basically breaking the NDA if we move it to the fourteen.
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