ATI has been on a roll for the last few years now. The "old" ATI could be characterized by lackluster 3D features, performance isuues, or driver problems. But I've always had a soft spot in my heart for their video cards, especially their All In Wonder cards which I've reviewed many versions since 1999. The purchase of ArtX and the addition of their new CEO Dave Orton has revitalized ATI, bringing ATI near the top in terms of graphics card market share. The first ATI card that really took the mindshare away from NVIDIA was the ATI 9700 Pro. Released in August of 2002, this was the first DirectX 9.0 compliant video card (Pixel Shader 2.0/Vertex Shader 2.0 support. The intended competition (NV30) wasn't released until February of 2003 by which time ATI had released their next high end card the 9800 Pro, which was a modified 9700 Pro with a new feature (F-Buffer) which really hasn't been used to this day and isn't enabled as of yet.
The Fall of 2003 saw the release of the 9800XT and the announcement of the Half Life 2 bundle. At the time, there was a lot of controversy over NVIDIA cheating on their drivers and "optimizing" in games and benchmarks. The testimonial of Gabe Newell for the ATI cards and the performance of the cards in DirectX 9.0 made them the card of choice for HL2 if you were to purchase an ATI card last year.
It's been an interesting beginning of the year in graphics cards and will be more interesting as we go along. NVIDIA launched their next generation chip (NV40 (6800 Ultra)) in April but unfortunately they are extremely limited in supply and are just now getting to the market place over 2 months after the launch. ATI announced their next generation video card the X800 in May, but it's actually been available to purchase. This is the first X800 card we've reviewed here. Unfortunately, we don't have a 6800 card of any kind to compare this card to.
Gigabyte has been making both NVIDIA graphics cards and ATI cards for about a year now. They were one of the first manufacturers to build cards based upon both manufacturers at the same time. Today virtually every major video card AIB partner builds cards based upon chipsets from both ATI and NVIDIA. So let's see what the X800 Pro has to offer.
