The Radeon X1800 XT Goes Retail

The game of one-upmanship continues unabated between the two giants in the discrete graphics card business, ATI and NVIDIA. Despite their iron grip on the market, both companies have not faltered in their desire to achieve victory, however short-lived, in the race towards ever larger and more powerful graphics cards. This has created an intense competition - not unlike the one between Intel and AMD - and things can quickly get quite dirty with mudslinging from both parties. With its latest Radeon X1000 series, ATI has shifted tack and moved to a 90-nanometre manufacturing process ahead of NVIDIA. It is hoping that the revamped architecture and the higher clock speeds made possible by the die shrink will help to restore parity if not pole position compared to NVIDIA's GeForce 7 series.

The performance of the new Radeons seems to promise more than it delivers and the reception is muted so far due to its limited availability, with ATI staggering the introduction of the various cards. Also, NVIDIA is not content to wait quietly for its rivals; it has reacted to the emerging threats by modifying its existing product lines to make them more competitive. Hence, we have seen the new-old SKUs like the GeForce 6800 GS and the GeForce 6600 DDR2; both are enhanced incarnations of older cards and are very attractively positioned. This means that some of the new Radeons will likely face pressure from NVIDIA's offerings, even before they becomes available in retail. The only bright spot that remains is that ATI has retaken the bragging rights of top dog with its flagship Radeon X1800 XT 512MB graphics card.

Unfortunately, by the time we managed to get our hands on a review unit of an actual retail Radeon X1800 XT card, the latter is no longer true. NVIDIA has enhanced its GeForce 7800 GTX card with another 256MB of memory, bringing it on par with ATI's champion. From the benchmark numbers we have seen from this 512MB version of the GeForce 7800 GTX, the extra memory together with increased clock speeds means that NVIDIA has recaptured the performance crown. However, it is also prohibitively more expensive than ATI's Radeon X1800 XT 512MB, which probably blunts the blow somewhat. Meanwhile, the retail Radeon X1800 XT cards are only starting to appear in stores now and PowerColor has sent us its version for assessment:

The compact but thick box packaging used by PowerColor manages to contain one of the larger graphics cards now, along with a decent bundle of software and accessories. It is a welcome change from the usual oversized boxes.