It Ain't Over Till the Fat Lady Sings

Today marks the release of three new ATI reinforcements spanning all three major price categories. These new cards represent ATI's hopes of getting the final say in the clash between its latest generation of Radeon X1K graphics processors with NVIDIA's GeForce 7 series. While the performance between the flagship processors from both sides were comparable, ATI has arguably emerged worse in the retail market due to the higher manufacturing cost of its larger and more complex architecture. This has allowed NVIDIA to seize the price performance advantage. However, ATI hasn't given up the fight yet by getting its engineers to work on improving existing cards. Besides developing the next generation R600 core, they've apparently had the time to revise its existing lineup and plan new products that are better placed to compete against NVIDIA in both technology and price. Here then are the newcomers:

Our main focus in this article is the Radeon X1950 XTX and its R580+ core, which is exactly the same as the original R580 in terms of architecture, features and specifications. However, the crucial difference performance-wise seems to be banking on support for GDDR4 memory type in the new flagship product with a staggering debut clock speed of 2.0GHz DDR. Thermal and noise output are also predicted to be lower as well, thanks to a newly redesigned cooler. Before we get to that, here's a look at its technical specifications compared to the rest of the high-end alumnus.