ATI’s Radeon X1800 launch came and went in October with very little fanfare.  The R520 ASIC was hampered by delays and redesigns, and the final product was a far cry from the GeForce 7800GTX (G70) killer.  Ultimately, what killed R520 was the lack of commitment to produce quantity – which in turn made the chip difficult to obtain, and even harder to buy for a competitive price.  NVIDIA made the same mistake with their GeForce 7800GTX 512 chip as well, but this is a look at ATI’s newest, not a history lesson.

Even though the official launch of Radeon X1900 is not until next week, one of our writers in Taiwan was able to over-night a card back to our labs.  There are two standalone versions of Radeon X1900; the Radeon X1900XT and the Radeon X1900XTX.  The X1900XTX is essentially the same card as the X1900XT, but with slightly higher clock speeds.  One tier one AIB told us ATI switched from the “Platinum Edition” to the “XTX” naming due to the low quantity stigma associated with Platinum Edition.  Finally, there is also a Radeon X1900 CF (CrossFire) card expected at launch as well.  This card has the same core clocks as the X1900XT, but replaces some of the outputs with a VHDCI connector for CrossFire support.  ATI’s low end cards support CrossFire directly over the PCIe bus, but X1900 will unfortunately require the bulky cable.  Radeon X1900XT and Radeon X1900XTX come with twin DVI outputs, but a dongle comes with the retail card can convert the DVI signal to VGA instead. 

Radeon X1900, or R580, is in many ways what the R520 should have been before all the die respins.  R580 uses the same memory controller found on R520, with the 512-bit internal ring bus.  Externally, the chip can address 256-bits at a time.  Our Radeon X1900XT came with 512MB DDR3 running at 1.45GHz, but the X1900XTX version comes with a default memory clock of 1.55GHz.  As anticipated, the R580 core features 16 pixel pipelines with 48 pixel shader processors.  R580 is produced on a 90nm process.  Unfortunately, all X1900 series cards are double width cards; the additional width is needed to properly cool the GPU.

ATI has an internal presentation to show the distinction between each of the new cards:

We ran our X1900XT against our eVGA GeForce 7800GTX 256MB in a few popular game timedemos.  The cards were both benchmarked on an Opteron 165 workstation with 2GB of PC-3200.  We used the latest NVIDIA driver, but the Catalyst 6.1 driver did not detect the Radeon X1900.  Thus, we used a beta driver from late December.  Our tests are no where near extensive, but they should give you a good idea of what to see during ATI’s launch next week.  All settings are default unless noted elsewhere. 

ATI has told its partners that the X1900 launch will be an actual product launch; meaning we should see inventory in the stores on the 24^th.  This may be true for ATI branded inventory, but AIB partners say it will be several weeks before they have reliable shipments of inventory ready for merchants.