ATI launches Radeon X800, pushes Nvidia to second place

Markham (ON) - ATI today introduced its next generation graphic chip, the X800. Although the processor shows less innovative features than the recently introduced Nvidia 6800, the chip manages to regain ATI’s performance lead, as benchmarks show.

ATI is not shy advertising the X800 as "beginning of an new era of gaming", which the company calls High Definition Gaming. This "new era" makes gaming experiences more realistic than ever and is equivalent to watching a sporting event on an HDTV, the company said. According to ATI, the newX800 offers 16 parallel pixel pipes and 6 vertex pipes to process more than 8 billion pixels and almost 800 million vertices per second.

While marketing terms and reality usually two different worlds, it is apparent in first benchmarks run by Tom’s Hardware Guide, that ATI’s new chips present impressive performance levels. Thanks to its performance advantage when using anisotropic filtering, the new Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition shows its rivals who’s boss in this discipline without noticeably sacrificing image quality. Even the much less expensive X800 Pro with its 12 pipes can beat the GeForce 6800 Ultra in some of our game tests.

Most notably, these cards reveal that ATI needed little effort to reach this performance level. The power consumption of the X800 XT is about the same as that of its predecessors in 3D applications. Additionally, the cards require only one auxiliary power connector and don’t need an especially potent power supply like the GeForce 6800 Ultra does. Even the cooler has shrunk a bit, reducing the card’s overall weight and ensuring that it would fit even into a mini-ITX case.

Read the Review of the ATI X800 here :
ATI’s X800 Pulls Off Another Coup in the Graphics Performance War