[Dave Baumann]

The graphics world is in the season for reinventing itself once again, and following NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800 Ultra’s announcement a few weeks again, ATI are now ready to tip their hand. The Long awaited R420 is now ready to be shown in two incarnations of the Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition and the Radeon X800 PRO. We dig into the performance and architecture of both these boards to see what features are on offer and what types of speed improvements ATI brings in comparison to their previous generation of high end boards.

"Under the Pixel Shader 2.0 test from 3DMark03 We are seeing much great performance differences between the boards than in previous test The X800 XT PE is up to 65% higher performance than the X800 PRO and very close to being 3 times the performance of the 9800 XT! Given the 9800 XT used not to be considered a slouch in this test, comparatively, these gains are fairly impressive. The X800 PRO even shows as much as an 82% improvements in this test over the 9800 XT."

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