14 DAY TRIAL // ATI's Radeon X850 XT PE was the last speed bump that the producer surpassed at the end of lasy year. Usually ATI's announcement comes head-to-head with Nvidia announcing some major improvement of their cards, but it wasn't the case for the last roundup.
ATI stepped up once again the performance for performance graphics with its new X850 series of graphics processors.
ATI presented in December the X850 XT Platinum Edition on the high end as well as the X850 XT and the X850 Pro, which marked the entry point into ATI's highest performing class of desktop graphics product line. The 16-pixel pipe X850 XT PE includes a 540 MHz core and 590 MHz memory. The core of the X850 XT is clocked at 520 MHz, with memory checking in at 540 MHz.
The X850 Pro runs at the same clock speed as the X850 XT, but integrates only twelve pixel pipes.
But memory is the major increase that everybody is expecting, and it took ATI another two months to jump to this category as well. All major players on the IT media are speculating, after The Inquirer blew the whistle a few days ago, that ATI will be making an announcement, maybe as early this weekend, about a 512MB version of its X850 card.
ATI is sponsoring a big overclocking tournament this weekend. It is publicly saying that there will be an "unveiling" of some sort, but no-one knows what it is. The same site announced that sources outside of ATI also indicated that a 512MB part is imminent.
Of course, the extra memory would allow players to have a blast with their favorite games at extremely high resolutions and with lots of anti-aliasing. There could also be an upgrade to Rambus XDR memory chips, which allow transfer rates at eight bits per clock cycle yielding 8GBps, ten times faster than 400MHz DDR SDRAM.