ATI plays the speed card

ATI formally announced its latest graphics chips at Computex last week, claiming top spot with the fastest cards in the market.

It is a bold claim to make, but tests on preview cards conducted last month by vnunet.com's sister title Personal Computer World confirmed ATI's boasts.

The company has released three desktop families, from high-end to budget - the Radeon X800, X600 and X300 - and the Mobility Radeon X600.

The leap in performance is made possible by a number of technologies, including 3DC for high-resolution mapping, Smoothvision HD, Smartshader HD, Hyper Z HD and native 16-lane PCI Express (PCX).

ATI described PCX x16 as the first major change in infrastructure for a decade, and Intel believes it will ship about 100 million such ports in the final six months of this year.

The technology increases bandwidth threefold, from 2Gbps to 8Gbps, helping to radically improve gaming features, making them run smoother and faster on consumer-level cards.

Matt Skyner, director of desktop products at ATI, said: "PCX brings professional applications to the mainstream and makes it affordable for them."

Card manufacturers at Computex showed off their products using the latest Radeons, with the likes of Abit, Asus, Gigabyte and ECS all ready to ship.

Each Radeon series is available in two options. The X800 XT has a 500MHz engine and 1GHz of memory and ships at the end of June for around $449 (£245), shortly after Intel's new chipsets will be available commercially.

The X800 XT Platinum Edition, which comes out in late July, has a 520MHz engine, 1.12GHz memory and will retail for about $499.

The X600 XT has a 500MHz engine and 740MHz of memory, while the X600 Pro comes with a 400MHz engine and 600MHz memory. Both are available now.

The X300 is the first graphics chip to be manufactured using a 0.11 micron production process, rather than 0.13. Skyner indicated that this gave a 20 per cent area saving over the 0.13 micron processors.

"The X300 is for the value sector. It is targeted at gamers and those that surf [the internet] and video chat. It is double the performance of the 9200 AGP for that class of product," he said.

It comes as the X300, with a 325MHz engine, 400MHz memory, 128bit memory interface and 64MB, 128MB or 256MB configurations, and the similarly specified X300 SE, which has a 64bit memory interface and 64MB or 128MB configurations. Both are available now.