Conclusion

If you read our original review way back in May of the first Radeon X1900 GT card we got our hands on, Sapphire’s Radeon X1900 GT, you know that initially we weren’t big fans of the GPU. It’s not that the Radeon X1900 GT was a poor performer, we just felt that it wasn’t the true replacement for the Radeon X1800 XT that ATI had intended. Its performance was often slower than the X1800 XT, and carrying an MSRP of $300 at that time, it was a little more expensive than the Radeon X1800 XT as well.

Fortunately over the course of the summer board prices came down, and at the $200 price point the Radeon X1900 GT carries today, it’s quite competitive with competing offerings in its price range, namely NVIDIA’s GeForce 7900 GS. In fact it outperforms the 7900 GS in many of our benchmarks.

As a result of all this, our bearish initial outlook on the Radeon X1900 GT has become quite bullish in recent months. It’s a more than worthy competitor to anything else out there in its class.

With the Radeon X1950 Pro, ATI has essentially taken the basic ingredients found in the base Radeon X1900 GT, namely its 36 pixel shader/8 vertex shader architecture and spiced the package up a little further with faster memory speeds, a better cooler that runs very quiet, and for dual-GPU enthusiasts, integrated CrossFire support.

All these tweaks add up to a very nice package in our opinion.

Performance-wise, the Radeon X1950 Pro ran up to 4% faster than the Radeon X1900 GT in Quake 4 and Far Cry, although there were some titles such as F.E.A.R. and Call of Duty 2 where the margin was much closer. This wasn’t enough to outperform the GeForce 7900 GS in benchmarks NVIDIA’s GeForce architecture has traditionally done well in such as Quake 4, but it did close the gap somewhat for ATI. At 1600x1200 for instance the X1950 Pro only trails the 7900 GS by 8%. And of course, the GeForce 7900 GS was no match for the Radeon X1950 Pro in games that ATI has done well in like Oblivion.

Basically the winner of the ATI X1950 Pro versus NVIDIA 7900 GS battle is going to come down to which games you play. If you find yourself playing lots of Quake 4 and Prey, the 7900 GS currently delivers better performance, while the X1950 Pro performs well in Oblivion, Call of Duty 2, and F.E.A.R.

With the debut of the Radeon X1950 Pro, the X1900 GT will slowly fade away. ATI has lowered the MSRP of the X1900 GT to $195, pegging it $4 cheaper than the X1950 Pro’s $199 MSRP. Based on the improvements ATI has integrated into the X1950 Pro, we think you’d be better off spending the extra four dollars on the Radeon X1950 Pro if you plan on going with ATI. It’s a quieter card that runs cooler and a little faster, with the added bonus of built-in CrossFire support.

For those of you with AGP systems, we’ve heard that Sapphire is prepping an AGP X1950 Pro card as we speak. We weren’t able to get independent confirmation on this from Sapphire, but if true this card could become the AGP upgrade of choice for a lot of users if the price and performance pan out.

In any case, it looks like ATI’s finally got the affordable mainstream card that they’ve always wanted with the Radeon X1950 Pro. It’s cheaper for them to manufacture than the X1900 GT, and has just enough goodies and performance to make ATI enthusiasts on a budget happy as well. We hear ATI’s got one more launch planned for this month in the works as well…