ATI initially priced the X1600XT at $249. At that price point, the card was dead on arrival, as the competition, the 6800GS offered better performance for less money. ATI decided before release of the card to lower the MSRP to $199, and you can purchase the X1600XT today for $167 on Newegg for the retail cards. The competition, the NVIDIA 6800GS retails for $189 on the same site.
What you get with the X1600XT is full DirectX 9.0 Pixel and Vertex Shader 3.0 compliance, HDR support with Anti-Aliasing at the same time, high quality Anisotropic Filtering and Adaptive Antialiasing. These combine to give the best image quality in its class to the X1600XT. Performance is below that of its competition, the 6800GS, in most instances, but no game today really takes advantage of the X1600XT's unique architecture. Much like with the X1900XT series, as games get more complex requiring more pixel Shaders, the X1600XT will likely scale well.
ATI announced the X1K series in October of last year. The high-end, the X1800XT has already been replaced by the X1900XT and X1900XTX cards. The X1600XT is an interesting chip, as it has more in common with the X1900XTX (3:1 texture: ALU ratio, Fetch4) than the release date of the card may indicate. There is a huge gap at the moment between ATI's $167 X1600XT and the X1800XL, the next level. I imagine ATI might release an X1700 to fill that gap.
