Today ATI debuts its Radeon X1900 series. Upgraded with 48 pixel shader processors, it's designed to tackle next generation games and blow away the competition. PowerColor charged into our labs with their Radeon X1900 XT and we put it to test to see what this new GPU can deliver. The new Radeon X1900 series shares the same overall architecture and features that the Radeon X1800 series boasts, but the core now has one significant change ? more shader processors. To be precise, it now has 48 pixel shader processors, triple that in the original Radeon X1800 series and double that of the GeForce 7800 GTX. Take note that the 48 pixel shader processors do not equate to 48 pixel shader pipelines. Both ATI and NVIDIA have approached their GPU architectures differently and they no longer equip their cores with equal number of processing units with the pixel pipeline. Basically a pixel pipeline consists of a pixel shader processor, a texture mapping unit (TMU) and a raster operator unit (ROP). ATI has sort of designed their pixel pipelines such that the pixel shader processors are more independent, while NVIDIA has their ROP units independent. With varying processing emphasis within the GPUs, you can easily foretell that graphics cards from both camps are going to perform dissimilarly for certain games and settings, which we'll all find out in due time.

Hardware Zone.com or Hardware Zone.au