Indeed it does. I was quite surprised when I saw the first headlines regarding the renaming of X1300 which was transformed into the "bigger" X1550. And although I didn't like that move, I was kind of expecting it especially because Ati has done it several times in the past (the 9200 and the 9250; the 9600 and the 9550). But I have to say I wasn't expecting this from AMD. And just when I was beginning to think it was just an honest mistake, they announced that they will do it again.

And whether you believe it or not, it's about the exact same chipset. Behind the X1050 lies the ancient RV370 GPU which was used to power X300, X550 and X600 cards a quite a long time ago. So they are not only renaming an older product, but they are also renaming one which has already been renamed several times. Ok, maybe the GPU and memory clocks might turn out to be different but it's still the same chip.

A Detailed look at the configuration file in the Catalyst 12 driver, revealed the following:

"ATI Radeon X1050" = ati2mtag_RV370, PCIVEN_1002&DEV_5B63&SUBSYS_30001002br "ATI Radeon X1050 " = ati2mtag_RV370, PCIVEN_1002&DEV_5B60&SUBSYS_30001002
"ATI Radeon X1050 Secondary" = ati2mtag_RV370, PCIVEN_1002&DEV_5B70&SUBSYS_30011002
"ATI Radeon X1050 Secondary " = ati2mtag_RV370, PCIVEN_1002&DEV_5B73&SUBSYS_30011002

RV370 has Shade model 2.0 and that makes it Vista ready. Other than that, it has four pipelines and is still based on the 110nm process. The GPU has 75 million transistors, and comes with full DX 9.0 support. Several flavors are available by incorporating this GPU with either 64-bit or 128-bit memory and GPU clocks up to 500MHz.