December 03, 2004 - It's very typical these days to expect graphic chip makers to issue a new part in the Spring with a Fall refresh of the same technology at faster speed grades - this year is no exception so far. ATI recently announced its successor to the X800 series which was released back in the summer. This speed-bumped GPU is essentially nothing more than a faster version of the same technology - still no Shader Model 3.0 support and we're still looking at a 256MB solution available currently in PCI-Express; we're told that AGP versions are soon to follow.

ATI's new flagship GPU is dubbed the X850 and comes in three flavors, all of which have 16 pixel pipelines - X850 XT Platinum Edition, X850 XT and the X850 Pro. We're most excited about the potential of the Pro version as it means ATI will finally have better competition to NVIDIA's very formidable 6800GT solution which is competitively priced and also features 16 pixel pipelines.

The core clock rate of the X850 XT PE is set at 540MHz; only 20MHz faster than the X800 XT PE, and the memory clock runs at 1.18GHz DDR. GDDR-3 is the memory used and is currently the fastest memory to be found for today's graphic cards.

Let's take a look at some X850 XT PE benchmarks, pitting it against an X800 XT PE and 6800 Ultra. Our test specs were as follows:

P4 3.4GHz EE
1GB DDR2
Intel 925p-based Motherboard
Catalyst 4.11 Beta Driver
ForceWare 67.02 Beta Driver