ATi's X1950 series, specifically the XTX, get's a look from PC Perspective. As a single card, looking at just the X1950 XTX, ATI has a fantastic product on their hands. While not the hands down winner in all of our benchmarks at resolutions of 1600x1200 or 2048x1536, the X1950 XTX gets ATI much closer than it was before to the NVIDIA 7950 GX2 multi-GPU board. At 2560x1600, the GDDR4 memory system on the X1950 XTX really starts to shine as more often than not, it is able to overcome the top NVIDIA card and still maintain a playable frame rate. Ryan had some trouble with Crossfire working properly during testing, however, he has managed to show in real world gaming, Crossfire X1950's can beat out Quad SLI. Here's a few more reviews: [H]ard|OCP Anandtech Tech Report Guru of 3D Hexus HotHardware
yes well it doesn't make me feel any better about my purchase but that is very impressive, looks like ATI finally made the jump to the top
Oh, I think they're hardware has been at the top for quite some time. The killer for them was their drivers, which they've been doing well on for a at least since the Radeon 9700 was new. Unfortunately, the bad driver stigma still haunts them.
i didn't realize that software could mess stuff up that much, hmm i did learn something usefull today
I don't know, it's nice that ATI relased a faster card but it's a pretty minor improment it seems at times. nVidia is still winning a far part of the tests and the X1900XT/XTX's are pretty darn close. It wouldn't be a big deal but the card only kicks into it's own as it goes to insanely high resolutions that only people with very highend LCD's or top notch 21+ inch CRT's can actually allow for. But then again that's kind of the point of a lot of highend cards anyway I guess. As for ATI being on top I'd too say that since the 9700 came out they're pretty much been on top more or less ever since (that us for the highend league). The 9800's shortly after still held their own, the X800's are still kicking, the X1800's and now X1900's are kicking butt. nVidia is great with the mid and low end but I think ATI still has the edge when it comes to the big deal cards. Though the 7950GX2 changes this somewhat.
Yeah. Drivers can make or break a system in some cases. Hardware by itself is pretty solid, outside of a really poor BIOS, but drivers can be much more finicky.
well i should have been more specific, i did realize that faulty program can makes things really frustrating and difficult, but i guess i was just refering specifically to graphics cards.
