ATI today announced the release of the X1900 range of videocards, which features a whopping 48 pixel shaders (vs 16 for the X1800) and other improvements including a larger on-chip buffer for better high-res performance. It certainly isn't cheap, at $649 for the high end Radeon X1900 XTX, and $549 for the Radeon X1900 XT. Reviews of the XTX and XT can be found at Tech Report, HardOCP, Guru3D, Beyond3D, PC Perspective, Hexus and Digit-Life. From HardOCP's article

It is quite clear that the X1800 XT is slower than the GeForce 7800 GTX 512 and the 7800 GTX 512 provides a better gaming experience. With the new Radeon X1900 XT and XTX, the performance these cards provide is now equal to that of the 7800 GTX 512 in most games. F.E.A.R. really is the only game in which the X1900 XT and XTX dominated the 7800 GTX 512. The X1900 XT is really what the X1800 XT should have been; it has just now come up to par with the 7800 GTX 512. If the rumors are true about the specifications for NVIDIA's GeForce 7 series refresh product -- we may see the X1900 XT and XTX getting trounced in the latest games by NVIDIA's next release. Competition is good, that is for sure, and it benefits the consumer greatly.

ATI has released new Catalyst drivers for its Radeon powered videocards, with mirrors availble at FileShack. According to the release notes, the new release fixes problems with BattleField 2 Special Forces, Beyond Good and Evil, World of Warcraft and Half-Life 2. Thanks anthonybean.

AnandTech has posted a preview of ATI's OCUR technology, which is the first CableCard HDTV tuner for PCs. At CES ATI is showing a technology demo, but the product is pretty much done and will ship when Windows Vista does later this year.

Radeon powered videocard owners can now also update their drivers as ATI has released a new Catalyst driver, version 5.13. The changes are unexciting as far as games fixes go, but this release does include the Avivo support for the x1xxx line of cards for improved video encoding.

Tech Report reports that NVidia has acquired ULi Electronics for about $52 million. Don't know who/what ULi is? Neither did I, but apparently the Taipei, Taiwan company is one of the "most highly-regarded core logic developers". Many motherboard manufacturers using an ATI Radeon Xpress 200 chipset to power their boards use ULi's south bridge chips instead of ATI's own.

ATI has released version 5.12 of their Catalyst drivers, once again offering a wide variety of (game) fixes. This new release has fixes for DOOM 3: Resurrection of Evil, Far Cry, Quake 4 and EverQuest 2.

Over at AnandTech you can find a preview of the ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 as used in an ASUS A7V notebook. Though the mid-range graphics solution was supposed to be out already, the mobile X1600 should now launch next month.

According to this story on X-Bit Labs, there is no AGP version of the Radeon X1800 videocard coming after all, for now anyway. Diamond Multimedia had earlier put up an ad mentioning AGP, but the company is now saying this was a misprint. According to ATI board manufacturers could actually make an AGP card if they wanted to using a special chip, but because nobody has bothered to do so "you have to assume that the add-in-card makers have decided that the market is not there anymore".

ATI has released new Catalyst drivers, which are now at version 5.11. Release notes are here mentioning updates for 3DMark 05, Battlefield 2, Call of Duty 2, City of Heroes, F.E.A.R., FarCry and various other apps and games.

AnandTech is reporting that ATI Radeon X1300 and X1600 Crossfire cards won't require a dedicated master card. Instead, ATI will release a driver update enabling Crossfire over the PCI-Express bus. No word on what kind of performance hit there will be under this solution.

Hardware Fanatics has a Q&A posted with Terry Makedon of ATI, asking the company's senior product manager about the Catalyst driver package. Thanks HardOCP for the tip.

The Firing Squad has an ATI Q&A, asking the "Director of Marketing for Multimedia products" Godfrey Cheng about the company's upcoming AVIVO products. AVIVO products will feature H.264 decoding acceleration, enhanced de-interlacing/video scaling, dual-link DVI and an Xileon TV encoder.

It is that time of the year again; a new GPU introduction by ATI. The X1000 family includes the X1800, X1600 and X1300 chipsets (available in the various confusing XL / XT / Pro configurations), with cards based on these chips going for about $549 for the fastest model to $79 for the slowest. HardOCP and Tech Report have previews of the R500-series graphics architecture, which is all about proper Shader Model 3.0 support.

The bottom line is that the Radeon X1800 XL and X1600 XT compete very well with what NVIDIA has out there. They do not offer any large performance increases, but they do add a few quality improvements that may be beneficial to gamers. With the X1000 series, you have control over anisotropic filtering and you can also now enable a high quality method to create the absolute best filtering in your games. The X1000 series also supports anti-aliasing with HDR. This could potentially be a big feature if future games start to use a lot of HDR. The performance of HDR with AA in new games is really yet to be seen, but if these video cards can master it, they might just have a good image quality advantage over the GeForce 7 series. All the talk about being able to do dynamic branching very fast could also be an advantage if those features are used heavily in future titles.

As for availability, Radeon X1800 XL, X1300 Pro, and X1300 equipped cards should now be available, the top end Radeon X1800 XT mid-November, and the mid-range cards by the end of November.

Owners of Radeon videocards should head over to the ATI website, where new Catalyst drivers are now available. Release notes should be available here, though at the moment that URL redirects to a "Unauthorized download" page. Thanks anthonybean.

Beyond3D and Hexus have previews of ATI's new Avivo vido and display pipeline, which will be part of the company's next-gen R5xx graphics chips. Avivo should help with all kinds of encoding and decoding, and includes support for H.264.

ATI has released version 5.8 of the Catalyst drivers for all of you with Radeon videocards. Release notes can be found right here, there are game specific fixes in there for Battlefield 2, GTA: Vice City, Quake 3, Warcraft 3 and Area 51 among other titles.

AnandTech has a new ATI Crossfire article, offering some benchmark numbers from a Gigabyte Crossfire motherboard / videocard setup. Pretty much all games tested show performance by an X850 XT Crossfire setup to be better than a single 7800 GTX card, but SLI GTX is king (it better be, seeing how its a $1000+ solution).

ATI's custom care page has been updated, now offering version 5.7 of the Catalyst drivers for Radeon videocards. Release notes can be found here; there are fixes for Flight Sim 2004, Trackmania Sunrise and Warcraft III and cards with 64MB and 128MB framebuffer configurations should see a performance increase in 3DMark05, Far Cry, Half-Life 2 and UT2004.

Owners of Radeon videocards should head over to the ATI site, as a new Catalyst driver is now available for WinXP/2000. According to the 5.6 release notes offers improved WMV9 acceleration, performance improvements for DOOM 3, Halo, Chronicles of Riddick and 3DMark05 and fixes for MVP Baseball 2004, Shadow Vault and Virtual Skipper 3 among many changes. Thanks timm.

Following months of talk, ATI has finally unveiled their answer to NVIDIA's SLI solution to pair up videocards: Crossfire. ATI's solution allows you to buy a Crossfire edition of an X800 or X850 powered videocard, and mix that with any regular card with the same chipset from whatever manufacturer. Instead of bridging the two videocards, ATI relies on a special composing chip found on Crossfire compatible motherboards, which will mix the images. Also, while NVIDIA's solution depends on game specific profiles, ATI promises Crossfire will work with pretty much any Direct3D or OpenGL game though in most cases optimized driver profiles will help further improve performance. You can find a pair of ATI Crossfire previews at HardOCP and Tech Report (there are no benchmarks at this time though). Expect to see cards appearing in July.

We talked in the introduction about the fact that CrossFire does not rely on gaming profiles. What this means is that ATI does not have to wait for driver updates to support their multiple video card advantage in new and even old games. CrossFire is a feature that you simply enable and it just works, with no fuss or worry about what mode a game uses or if it has a driver profile or not. This is a good thing for gamers out there because we all don't just play the latest and greatest games. Some people still pop in an old game occasionally. With ATI's CrossFire, even that old game you decide to play will supposedly just work in multiple VPU mode. With those old games and these new AA settings, you should be able to crank up those old games to resolutions and AA settings to heights never seen before. Imagine putting in that old game that had many alpha textures where aliasing was a problem and being able to run with the 14XAA MS / 2XAA SS combination at a high resolution.

Update: Anand Tech also has a preview. They do have some benchmark numbers showing impressive results in DOOM 3.