ATI Radeon X1900 family

Image Quality:

When we reviewed the Radeon X1800XL and Radeon X1800XT, we found that the high quality anisotropic filtering mode was not as usable as it should be. In fact, there were very few games where we found that we were able to increase the texture filtering quality upto the desirable and almost angle-independent high quality anisotropic filtering mode. This is where things change.

The Radeon X1900XTX is capable of playing every game - with the exception of Quake 4 which is currently hampered by a couple of bugs - with the high quality anisotropic filtering setting enabled. When the Quake 4 bugs are ironed out, the time has come where high quality anisotropic filtering could well become the default setting for cards of this calibre in the future.

In this respect, it's time for NVIDIA now to step up to the table and improve its own texture filtering quality in response to this improvement by ATI. At the high end of the market, a paying consumer shouldn't have to make image quality sacrifices in order to attain a smooth gaming experience with acceptable quality settings. We're keen to push forwards to the holy grail of no compromises image quality at the high end of the product stack. With the likes of SLI and CrossFire, consumers are spending around £1000 (or even more) on their video card subsystem and they shouldn't have to make image quality compromises in current titles.

Final Thoughts...

With the exception of the bugged performance in Quake 4, the Radeon X1900 family have taken over the performance lead in both single card and dual card configurations. It's also great to see that ATI has responded to its critics and they've proven that they're able to match NVIDIA on the hard launch game too.

The only blip in this is the fact that a couple of ATI's key partners have confirmed to us that there will be no CrossFire Edition Radeon X1900-series cards available for another few weeks - we'll have to see how fast ATI can turn this around. We'll also have to see whether NVIDIA's limited supply GeForce 7800 GTX 512 video cards drop in price, or disappear from the market.

It's worth mentioning that NVIDIA's Desktop Graphics Product Manager, Ujesh Desai, admitted that he under-estimated how many GeForce 7800 GTX 512's NVIDIA would sell. Consequently, the price of the cards hasn't dropped since the launch, making them look like a rather expensive alternative to ATI's Radeon X1900XTX 512MB.

For now, ATI are back on top. If NVIDIA are to retake the lead, they will need to reach new heights in both performance and image quality.