Had we gone by the history of ATI's product refreshes we'd be forgiven for thinking that this would be little more than a slightly warmed over R520 chip, tweaked to yield at higher clock speeds. However, roadmaps leaked sometime ago, with curious configuration indicators would suggest that this wasn't the case for R580. The roadmaps indicated a configuration of 16-1-1-1 for R530 and 16-1-3-1 for R580. It wasn't until RV530 (Radeon X1600) was fully understood did these descriptions become clearer as to their intent; with a configuration signalled on the roadmap as 4-1-3-2 for RV530 it become clear that the numbers represented the number of "pipelines" (even though ATI's engineering didn't like this terminology), the number of texture units per pipeline, parallel shader ALUs per pipeline and the number of Z samples per pipeline. When this is extrapolated back to R580 it would appear to mean that the pixel shader pipelines would be increased threefold over R520, sounding a little absurd to some...

In this article Beyond3D takes a look at the performance of the X1900 XTX in single and Crossfire configurations, the architecture changes and te effects of the new "Fetch4" capabilities.

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