Breaking with the tradition of "paper" releases, ATI announced and began shipping graphics cards based on their latest and greatest chipset, the Radeon X800. ATI's theme for this launch revolves around HD, or or high definition gaming — Smoothvision HD, Smartshader HD, Hyper HD and Videoshader HD have all been improved upon. To start, ATI shrank the physical size of the chip to 0.13 microns, which decreases power consumption and allows the part to be clocked higher. The number of pixel pipelines and vertex processing units have been doubled to 16 and 6, respectively, resulting in the highest fill rate of any graphics card. ATI has also added a new method of anti-aliasing, called temporal anti-aliasing, which uses programmable sample patterns to achieve even better image quality than before.

ATI's flagship card, the Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition ($499), features 16 pixel pipelines, a 520 MHz core clock, and 256 MB of 560 MHz (1.12 GHz effective) GDDR3 high-speed memory. The Radeon X800 Pro has 12 pixel pipelines and has slightly slower core (400 MHz) and memory (900 MHz) clock rates, but is priced at $399.

Early reviews agree that it is faster in many of the benchmarks than NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 Ultra, but how they perform in next generation games (DOOM 3, Half-Life 2) remains to be seen.

ATI has not officially announced any Mac products based on the Radeon X800 chip, but history indicates that there is a very good possibility Mac gamers may be seeing such a product in the coming months.

For more information on the Radeon X800 and its new technologies, visit the links below.

PR: ATI revolutionizes PC gaming with introduction of RADEON™ X800

Radeon X800 Real-Time Demos

FiringSquad X800 Pro/X800 XT Review

Beyond 3D X800 Pro/X800 XT Review

Tech Report X800 Pro/X800 XT Review

ATI (add to watch list)

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