It is that time of the year again; a new GPU introduction by ATI. The X1000 family includes the X1800, X1600 and X1300 chipsets (available in the various confusing XL / XT / Pro configurations), with cards based on these chips going for about $549 for the fastest model to $79 for the slowest. HardOCP and Tech Report have previews of the R500-series graphics architecture, which is all about proper Shader Model 3.0 support.

The bottom line is that the Radeon X1800 XL and X1600 XT compete very well with what NVIDIA has out there. They do not offer any large performance increases, but they do add a few quality improvements that may be beneficial to gamers. With the X1000 series, you have control over anisotropic filtering and you can also now enable a high quality method to create the absolute best filtering in your games. The X1000 series also supports anti-aliasing with HDR. This could potentially be a big feature if future games start to use a lot of HDR. The performance of HDR with AA in new games is really yet to be seen, but if these video cards can master it, they might just have a good image quality advantage over the GeForce 7 series. All the talk about being able to do dynamic branching very fast could also be an advantage if those features are used heavily in future titles.