Lost Circuits has just posted a review of Sapphire's flagship Radeon X1900 XTX video card. In typical LostCircuits fashion, Mike goes into great detail on the architecture and explains may of the X1900 GPUs key features. This is a good read.
"Sapphire's repertoire of ATI-based graphics cards has recently been expanded to encompass the X1000 series, which includes the X1900 XT and the X1900 XTX, sporting slightly higher core and memory frequencies than the more plebeian "XT" version. The XTX version is what we are looking at today and to make a long story short, there is little out there that could match the performance of the new Sapphire flagship. So how did they do it? We have heard a few buzzwords here and there about the Ring Bus memory architecture and the quad shader blocks or Fast-Z-Clear but details were sketchy at best, so we started our own investigation with the goal of digesting the information down."
Marco Chiappetta
Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com