ATI has also added a couple of minor wrinkles to boost performance in specific situations.

In fact, the contest is more lopsided than the NFC championship game.

Not good. What can you do about it.

You have a next-generation GPU design just recently introduced, loaded with the latest bells and whistles.

Youve already made the conversion to a 90nm chip fabrication process, so your transistor budgets are ample.

And you have a pretty good idea what it might take to win back the performance crown.

Youd probably order up a new chip with a whole lot more power in order to meet the competition head on.

Youd want to do something gaudy, something that would be sure to raise eyebrows and also pack a heckuva wallop.

And then youd price em nice and high, but make sure that cards were widely available on their launch day, with thousands of those puppies lined up at online retailers, ready to sell.

In fact, that is very much ATIs plan for the Radeon X1900 series, and your favorite website has benchmarked the stuffing out of the high-end lineups from ATI and NVIDIA in order to see how these new entries fit into the picture.

With 96 pixel shaders tearing through F.E.A.R.

Michael Moore through a loaf of cheese bread, does NVIDIA stand a chance.

The R580 is the successor to the R520 GPU that powers the Radeon X1800 series of products, and its derived from the same basic chip architecture.

The only truly major change in the R580 is the expansion of the number of pixel shader units on the GPU.

Since R500-class products are very modular internally, ATI can strategically add resources with relative ease.

In a nutshell, thats how weve arrived at this mind-boggling situation where there are 48 pixel shader units on a single GPU.

Like the mid-range Radeon X1600, the R580 is a radically asymmetrical design, heavy on the pixel shaders and general-purpose registers but relatively easy on some of the resources that have traditionally gone with them.

ATI clearly believes that game developers will be making extensive use of the computational power of pixel shaders in future games, and they have spent the R580s transistor budget accordingly.

To give you a better sense of what Im talking about, have a look at the table below, which shows how the R580 stacks up against the competition in handling various stages of what used to be the pixel pipeline.

Also, like the R520, the R580 has eight vertex shader unitsno changes there.

At 650MHz, the Radeon X1900 XTX should have at its disposal 31.2 billon pixel shader cycles per second.

Pixel shader units and their computational capabilities vary greatly from one GPU architecture to the next, of course, but the GeForce 7800 GTX 512s 24 pixel shaders running at 550MHz will only reach 13.2 billion cycles per second.

The R580s rich endowment of shaders is naturally a very good thing, because pixel shaders enable developers to employ all kinds of neat tricks like parallax occlusion mapping and high-dynamic-range lighting to make real-time graphics look more realistic.

This bias toward shader power makes the R580 a very forward-looking design, and as is often the case with forward-looking designs, there may be a little bit of trouble with todays applications.

A chip this capable can run just about any current game very well, but it may not reach its fullest potential while running them.

Meanwhile, it has to compete with the likes of the GeForce 7800 GTX 512, which crams in more texturing capability per clock cycle than the R580something to keep in mind when we turn toward the benchmark results.

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