ATI Radeon X1900 XTX Review

Introduction

Radeon X1900 XTX, formerly known as R580, is the new high-end chip from ATI, replacing Radeon X1800 XT as the fastest GPU from ATI. We’ve got a reference sample for this new model from ATI, so we will compare its performance to other members of the Radeon X1000 series, to previous ATI chips and also with competing products from NVIDIA, namely GeForce 7800 GTX.

Figure 1: Radeon X1900 XTX reference board.

We’ve posted a complete article explaining what’s new on Radeon X1900 family, so we won’t be repeating here everything we have already explained there. The most important feature from this new chip is that it has 48 pixel shader processors, three times more than Radeon X1800 XT and two times more than GeForce 7800 GTX.

So far there are two chips on Radeon X1900 family: Radeon X1900 XT, working at 550 MHz and accessing its memory at 1.45 GHz (46.4 GB/s transfer rate), and Radeon X1900 XTX, working at 650 MHz and accessing its memory at 1.55 GHz (49.6 GB/s transfer rate). Both access their memories at 256-bit rate.

You can see in our tutorial “ATI Chips Comparison Table” the difference between this new chip and the other chips from ATI, while on our tutorial “NVIDIA Chips Comparison Table” you can compare it to its competitors from NVIDIA.

You can see the Radeon X1900 XTX reference board on Figures 2 and 3.

Figure 2: ATI Radeon X1900 XTX reference board.

Figure 3: ATI Radeon X1900 XTX reference board, back view.

Let’s now take a closer look at the Radeon X1900 XTX reference board from ATI.