It seems like only yesterday that the dust settled on the latest skirmish between the big two 3D graphics card manufacturers, ATI and Nvidia, when the former released the X1800 series of cards. Now we have the latest high-end cards from the guys from Ontario - the X1900 series.
The new X1900 cards are based on ATI's latest 90nm R580 core, which is a significant step up from the R520 core of the X1800 series.
The number of vertex shaders remains at eight, but the pixel pipeline count rises from 16 to an impressive 48 in the R580.
Support for the next generation of Shader Model 3 is also included. All of this, and more, raises the transistor count from the already massive 321 million to a staggering 384 million.
ATI has gone all out on image quality with the R580. Not only does it support 6x Adaptive Anti-Aliasing and HDR (High Dynamic Range), but it can enable both together.
It also supports Parallax Occlusion Mapping (POM), which is a technology that adds three dimensional detail to flat surfaces - i.e realistic looking cobbled streets or brickwork.
The R580 uses the same ring bus memory controller for the 512MB of GDDR3 memory as the previous core, with 512-bit internal and 256-bit external memory. This allows for reduced latency and more flexibility with the memory clock rate.
Four models are available so far - the top of range X1900 XTX, the X1900 XT, the X1900 Crossfire Edition and the All in Wonder X1900. The X1900 XTX has clock speeds of 650MHz for the core, while the memory runs at 775MHz (1.55GHz effective).
Both the X1900 XT and X1900 Crossfire Edition have 625MHz and 725MHz (1.45GHz effective) core and memory speeds respectively.
Once again the cards have two slot coolers and some impressive power supply requirements; 450watts for the X1900 XTX and X1900 XT and 550watts for X1900 in Crossfire configuration.
It's not exactly cheap, but neither is it as pricey as we'd anticipated, with the top of the range X1900 XTX sitting at £363.
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