ASUS EAX1900XTX - Radeon X1900XTX From Asus

Despite the recent trend of using dual and sometimes even quad graphics card configurations, the true benchmark of total gaming performance is how a single graphics card performs. Over the course of the last few years, the industry has witnessed an epic battle between ATI and NVIDIA as they trade punches in an effort to own the overall performance crown in this category. Back in January 2006, ATI sent a vicious shot over the bow of NVIDIA with the advent of the company's R580 GPU. As illustrated in our initial review of the card, the Radeon X1900 XTX proved to be a blistering fast product with phenomenal performance which often bested NVIDIA's GeForce 7900 GTX. Fast forward eight months though and we find ATI's flagship GPU is still doing battle with the best NVIDIA has to offer. Has ATI's time in the spotlight expired or does the Radeon X1900 XTX have the muscle to retain its position as one of the dominant graphics cards in the industry?

Despite offering stellar performance in its default reference configuration, ASUS realizes that the Radeon X1900 XTX needs something more to compete with the latest offerings from NVIDIA. To that end, the company has released the flagship EAX1900XTX graphics card. Armed with an exceptional bundle that's loaded with software and accessories, there is little room for complaint for those wondering where their hard-earned cash has gone. 

ASUS EAX1900XTX Features & Specifications

Features - ATI Radeon X1900 . 380+ million transistors on a 90nm fabrication process . Ultra-threaded architecture with fast dynamic branching . Forty-Eight pixel shader processors . Eight vertex shader processors . 256-bit 8-channel GDDR3/GDDR4 memory interface . Native PCI Express x16 bus interface . Dynamic Voltage Control Ring Bus Memory Controller . 512-bit internal ring bus for memory reads . Programmable intelligent arbitration logic . Fully associative texture, color, and Z/stencil cache designs . Hierarchical Z-buffer with Early Z test . Lossless Z Compression (up to 48:1) . Fast Z-Buffer Clear . Z/stencil cache optimized for real-time shadow rendering . Optimized for performance at high display resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions Ultra-Threaded Shader Engine . Support for Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 programmable vertex and pixel shaders in hardware . Full speed 128-bit floating point processing for all shader operations . Up to 512 simultaneous pixel threads . Dedicated branch execution units for high performance dynamic branching and flow control . Dedicated texture address units for improved efficiency . 3Dc+ texture compression _o High quality 4:1 compression for normal maps and two-channel data formats _o High quality 2:1 compression for luminance maps and single-channel data formats . Multiple Render Target (MRT) support . Render to vertex buffer support . Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL 2.0 Avivo Video and Display Engine . High performance programmable video processor _o Accelerated MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264 decoding (including DVD/HD-DVD/Blu-ray playback), encoding & transcoding _o DXVA support _o De-blocking and noise reduction filtering _o Motion compensation, IDCT, DCT and color space conversion _o Vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing _o 3:2 pulldown (frame rate conversion) . Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time . HDR tone mapping acceleration _o Maps any input format to 10 bit per channel output _o 16 bit per channel floating point HDR and 10 bit per channel DVI output _o Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion (10 bits per color) _o Complete, independent color controls and video overlays for each display _o High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all outputs

Advanced Image Quality Features . 64-bit floating point HDR rendering supported throughout the pipeline _o Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing . 32-bit integer HDR (10:10:10:2) format supported throughout the pipeline _o Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing . 2x/4x/6x Anti-Aliasing modes _o Multi-sample algorithm with gamma correction, programmable sparse sample patterns, and centroid sampling _o New Adaptive Anti-Aliasing feature with Performance and Quality modes _o Temporal Anti-Aliasing mode _o Lossless Color Compression (up to 6:1) at all resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions . 2x/4x/8x/16x Anisotropic Filtering modes _o Up to 128-tap texture filtering _o Adaptive algorithm with Performance and Quality options . High resolution texture support (up to 4k x 4k) CrossFire . Multi-GPU technology . Four modes of operation: _o Alternate Frame Rendering (maximum performance) _o Supertiling (optimal load-balancing) _o Scissor (compatibility) _o Super AA 8x/10x/12x/14x (maximum image quality) _o Program compliant

Upon opening the graphics card packaging, one will surely be surprised by the sheer amount of accessories ASUS has bundled with this card. Nestled neatly within the briefcase-sized box, one finds an eclectic mix of cables, software, and other assorted goods to capture their interest. Specifically, we find a 9-disc software pack, RCA cable, S-Video cable, two DVI-VGA adapters, YPbPr splitter, VIVO splitter, PCI-Express power adaptor, Installation guide, and a leather CD pouch. In terms of software, we have five games including King Kong and Project: Snowblind as well as some assorted applications including CyberLink Power Director 3 and ASUS DVD XP.