ATI Attempts to Conquer Mainstream with RADEON X800 GT
 

ATI Technologies’ inability to supply RADEON X700 XT product in quantities late last year allowed NVIDIA to capture a huge market share with its GeForce 6600 GT graphics processing unit. ATI RADEON X800 product introduced just before the 2005 was designed to compete against the GeForce 6600 GT, but while the latter dropped in pricing from $200 rather rapidly after that, the latter was more expensive, which did not allow it to gain popularity. Now ATI attempts to recapture the mainstream market with one more offering: RADEON X800 GT.

“PowerColor X800 GT series is targeting at Nvidia 6600GT graphics card, to provide better performance with more reasonable price,” Tul Corp. said in a statement.

ATI RADEON X800 GT-based will be equipped with code-named R480 or R423 graphics processors made using 0.13 micron low-k manufacturing technology that have 8 pixel and 6 vertex processors enabled. By contrast, graphics cards with the mentioned visual processing units (VPUs) features 12 or 16 pixel processors. The VPU of the RADEON X800 GT will operate at 470MHz or 475MHz. ATI RADEON X800 GT-based graphics cards may be equipped with 128MB, 256MB or 512MB of memory that has 256-bit interface and functions at up to 980MHz.

A number of web-sites have released reviews of the RADEON X800 GT, which were positive in overall.

“So before we see the launch of the upcoming high-end R520 and R580 graphics cards, ATI released something price competitive and definitely has got something there that can compete with the GeForce 6600 GT really well and in fact mostly is faster. In fact in some cases it can even get close to the 12 pipe GeForce 6800,” Guru3D web-site claimed.

“I have drawn plenty of facts from testing ATI's latest VPU, RADEON X800 GT. PowerColor X800 GT is a beast in its own class. Thanks to very high core and memory clocks the performance of an 8 pipeline card is as good as it will ever get,” Bjorn3D web-site wrote.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/web/display/20050812052321.html