ATI launches RADEON X800

ATI HAS TODAY launched the RADEON X800 VPU - supposedly the world's fastest visual processor.

ATI say the X800 will ensure high performance gaming to customers, and that the "High Definition Gaming" experience the card provides is equivalent to watching a sporting event on a High Definition TV. The card uses 16 parallel pixel pipes and 6 vertex pipes, which are able to process over 8 billion pixels and up to 800 million vertices per second.

Rick Bergman, the Senior Vice President of marketing at ATI says the card is stable, reliable and maintains a "high level of manufacturability".

The X800 uses a low k. 13 micron semiconductor process, made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, which boosts the card's speed to twice the RADEON 9800 XT's.

ATI's board partners will be offering configurations of graphics boards based on the X800 chips. Among the board partners that will be shipping are Club 3D, Abit, Asus, Creative, Diamond, Sapphire, Xpertvision and Yuan. Alienware, VoodooPC and ZT Group are some of the system integrators who will be including the X800 in their designs, aimed at gaming enthusiasts.

Two versions of the X800 products are to be released: the RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition and the RADEON X800 Pro.

The Platinum Edition version of the X800 will be powered by a 16-pipe pixel processing engine, clocked at 520MHz. This product has been paired with a 1.12GHz data rate GDDR3 memory, and a 256-bit memory interface. The product will ship this month at around $499.

For the less wealthy or perhaps less bothered will be the RADEON X800 PRO, which will sell for $399. This one will be powered by a 12-pipe pixel processing engine, which will be clocked at 475MHz. GDDR3 memory with a 900MHz data rate and a 256-bit memory interface should provide excellent performance for the product's price. This one is shipping straight away and can be ordered from ATI's web store, as well as most major retailers across North America.

ATI has released two X800 demo videos available for download here. µ