ATI X1600XT Video Card Review :: Introduction

Mid Level Madness!

In the last few years video cards have gone up astronomically in price, and also advanced in features and performance. The first video card I ever reviewed, a Diamond Viper 550 TNT card from 1999 had a fill rate of about 180 Megatexels a second, cost around $199 on the market, and had basic multitexturing and 32-bit color as its main features. Today, the lowest end video card on the market would laugh at the TNT.

High end video cards are getting up in the stratosphere. ATI recently announced the X1900XTX and X1900XT for a price point of $649 and $549. These cards have fillrates that literally couldn't be done on less than 180 TNTs working together/ to me it's a bit insane to spend up to $1200 on video cards for a single system (Crossfire X1900XT).

ATI is the number one discrete graphics card company in the world in terms of market share. ATI and NVIDIA control the discrete graphics chip market, with over 90% market share combined. Other companies like XGI S3, and Matrox have fewer than 5% total market share between them. The majority of the market for add-in video cards is not made up of $600 video cards. Most add-in cards sold today are in the $199 range or lower.

ATI launched the RADEON 9700 Pro in July of 2002. I remember it well, because I attended the launch event and met Doc Overclock and a bunch of ATI folks including Eric Demers and Dave Orton. Two years later, their cards were still based upon the same technology i.e. Vertex and Pixel Shader 2.0, with some improvements. The basic technology hadn't changed from 2002 to late 2005.

ATI launched their real next-generation cards the R520 in October of last year. This family of cards introduced Pixel and Vertex Shader 3.0 to ATI cards, a ring memory bus, improved anisotropic filtering and many more features. The high-end card, the X1800XT has recently been replaced by the X1900XTX and X1900XT this week. In December of 2005 ATI released their mid-range product line, the X1600 series. Today I'm reviewing their reference card of that moniker.