Half Life 2 is the first benchmark where we start to see huge performance increases for the X1900XTX. At the higher resolution the X1900XTX is a massive 84% quicker than the X1800XT and the X1900XTX is only just behind the dual X1800XT Crossfire configuration.

After a full day of testing the ATI Radeon X1900XTX graphics cards at the Gigabyte offices here in Taiwan, we are pretty happy with the performance numbers we see from ATI's newest GPU. In our benchmarks we saw increases from 13% all the way up to 84% over the previous generation X1800XT which is fairly impressive. As expected, the X1800XT Crossfire setup still manages to win every benchmark but that's because it is two GPU versus one. What we can all look forward to though is X1900XTX Crossfire which should offer some really serious performance, whenever ATI choose to release a master card version of the X1900 series.

If you've just bought a new X1800XT graphics card, should you upgrade to the newest from ATI? If you have plenty of money to spend and demand the best 3D gaming performance for your computer, then yes. Although, unless you are playing games at a resolution of 1600 x 1200 or above (with all the settings turned up), you won't start to see the performance advancements of the X1900XTX. Sure, we see the X1900XTX doing a good job of beating the X1800XT at the lower resolution but in most of the real-world game tests we don't see much of an improvement until the resolution is increased.

Sadly we couldn't compare the X1900XTX against the GeForce 7800GTX 512 but from what we can tell the new ATI GPU will be able to perform quite well against the GTX 512. The real question is, how will the X1900XTX perform against nVidia's upcoming G71 GPU which is due to be released in March of this year. And the second most important question is supply by ATI, especially at launch. ATI have been criticized over the past while for not having any product available at launch but from what we've heard this time around, ATI has well and truly heard the cries and moans from their customers and end-users and you should be able to buy the X1900XTX and X1900XT from today, the launch day!