Hi Everyone. Tonight I'm reviewing the ATi Radeon X1900XTX, a card advertised for months as the fastest available consumer graphics card. Still, after more than a year on the market (released January, 2006), it is among the strongest cards available. This review, unlike some of the others you'll find around the web, won't spend ten pages looking at the new architecture of the R580 chips, or the Fetch4 depth textures because it isn't new and foreign anymore, and that would just be copying and pasting from ATi's website anyway.

To get a feel for where the X1900XTX stands on the market, it was created shortly after the X1800 series to compete with nVidia's 7800 series. Specifically, the X1900XTX would compete with the 7800GTX. The X1900XTX, however, blew the 7800GTX out of the water and is more aptly compared to nVidia's 7900GTX. The difference between the two is solely based on opinion. ATi has since come out with the X1950 series, of which only one card exceeds the X1900XTX in speed, and nVidia has come out with the 8800 family: the fastest cards out there today. Full specifications, reproduced below, can be found at ATi's website.