We've finished another article. This time we take the Radeon X1900 XTX for a spin. While it may not be the the fastest card for all games, it packs more than enough punch for heavy shader games like F.E.A.R and Splinter Cell Chaos Theory. The soon to come price cuts just made this card all the more appealing. It's only been three months into the year 2006, but the next generation of graphics chipsets are already here. This time around, the first salvo is from ATI, in the form of the Radeon X1900 series formerly known as R580. When the very late Radeon X1800 came out several months ago, most people agree that the chip to watch out for is not the Radeon X1800 (or R520) but the R580. Architecturally, the two are very similar, but the R580 is equipped with more shader units per pixel pipeline than the R520 - 48 shader units in all. The X1800 and X1900 come with more than just raw shader power. It offers higher quality filtering with less optimization, adaptive antialiasing for transparent textures, high dynamic range rendering with anti aliasing and overall faster antialiasing performance. We'll be looking into several of those claims in this article.

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