Sapphire Radeon X1900XTX

Craig Simms observes that adding more Xs apparently means more speed.

The 7800GTX 512 killer is here, or so ATI likes to tell us. Unlike the past few card releases from either side, the X1900 series is more than the expected speed boost, and despite looking almost exactly like an X1800, now weighs in at 384 million transistors, with a gigantic 48 shader processors – three times that of the previous X1800XT and double that of the 7800GTX 512 – resulting in a card that is just hankering for some shader-heavy games.

We put Sapphire's new baby in an ASUS AN32SLI-Deluxe with an Athlon XP 4800+ and 2GB of PC3200 PQI RAM, and turned up the heat using the same methodology as this month's Head to Head.

As you can see from the graphs, the X1900XTX is indeed the new top dog, but only just. With the X1900 series Crossfire is now also a viable competitor to SLI, thoroughly trouncing it using the XTs (at this stage an XTX Crossfire solution is not expected). Some however may still be put off by the master card and slave card (or as we call it, the Visa card) setup, requiring one of each, not to mention the annoying bridging cable out the back - which just like the X1800XTs is free of the 1600x1200 maximum resolution that was imposed on X850 Crossfire, making those who own the Dell 2405 or 3007 immeasurably happy. We have also been assured by ATI, vendors and distributors that the X1900s will be on the shelves and plentiful in stock at the time of writing, in comparison to the 7800GTX 512 which is available, but scarce.

Of course ATI has more than just speed in its favour – the ability to do FP16 HDR with AA, for example, as well as its superior anisotropic filtering and AVIVO technology for hardware accelerated H.264 use (although H.264 hardware decoding is planned for NVIDIA’s ForceWare 85.xx release through PureVideo technology). ATI plans to capitalise on this by releasing the X1900 ALL-IN-WONDER board shortly, once again securing the home video market.

In the negative, drivers are still nowhere near as stable as NVIDIA's and the fans are still quite a bit louder. So in short, that’s superior image quality and faster, but louder and a little shaky. We think we can live with that.
Despite the hullabaloo, right now the X1900XTX isn’t hugely faster than the 7800GTX 512. The fact is though that it is faster overall and is priced competitively, so if you simply must splash out on the best of the best right now, this is the one to get. Go you big red Crossfire engine.