Radeon X1950 XTX

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Like we thought, a mere increase in memory clock speeds, DDR4 or not, doesn't really help the Radeon X1950 XTX too much in performance. As the overclocked HIS Radeon X1900 XTX showed, the best Radeon X1900 XTX can still pose a serious threat to this new product. At the moment, it seems like present owners of a Radeon X1900 XTX can forget about making a minor upgrade to the X1950 XTX, as there is no significant performance advantage from doing so. We only saw a minor, incremental improvement for the benchmarks that we ran. Only if you are keen on playing all your games in full glory, with HDR and anti-aliasing, can we imagine the faster memory clocks paying off. ATI's own benchmarks (which naturally showed the Radeon X1950 XTX as king of the hill) reflected this advantage, with all the games running at resolutions of up to 2560 x 1600.

Given the excellent cooler, one could probably overclock the core to the level of the HIS Radeon X1900 XTX IceQ3 and then perhaps we will find a more convincing score, but we'll reserve our overclocking conclusion for a later date. There is also the consideration to take that the improved memory performance and bandwidth will probably be much more of a boost when the Radeon X1950 XTX is used in a CrossFire configuration and with ATI pushing their triple card setup for GPU physics, it is too early to write off the benefits of GDDR4.

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The big debate I see brewing will be, “Do I go 7950 GX2 or X1950 XTX?” If money is your primary decision maker, then really the decision is easy. Out of the 7950 GX2 and the X1950 XTX the best bang for the buck is the X1950 XTX. If you would like the opportunity for Quad SLI, then your only choice is the GeForce 7950 GX2 platform obviously. Whichever you decide know that you will be getting some incredible performance in games right now on standard displays, so incredible in fact that even with single GPU video cards 4XAA and even 6XAA is playable at 1600x1200 in some popular games. If you are lucky enough to have a big 30” screen then you will want nothing less than dual-GPUs which will provide an excellent experience.

ATI has proven they are a leader and not a follower with the X1950 XTX. ATI has released the world’s first consumer 3D graphics card with GDDR4 memory clocked at the highest ever stock speed that chews through games when it comes to high definition gaming. Memory bandwidth looks to one again be the defining factor in 3D performance. With a re-designed heatsink/fan unit, faster memory, and lowered price, the ATI Radeon X1950 XTX and CrossFire Edition are both serious 3D gaming video cards for the [H]ardcore that offer some value over NVIDIA’s more expensive 7950 GX2. ATI’s CrossFire dual GPU gaming platform looks to have just grown up.