Guru3D:  The Radeon X1800 XL is impressive, but not as impressive as the GeForce 7800 GT is. Often the score is close to the competitors card yet for some reason at several tests falls behind in performance quickly up-to a level where it was close to the Radeon X850 XT series of cards. Now don't get me wrong, that's still really lovely performance. Yet you can pick up an x850 XT for under 350 USD these days. It might be driver related though. The drivers we had available were beta and what I understand from the driver team not at all optimized just yet for the new cards. The Radeon X1600 XL then, a very striking series. For the money that is going to be one kickass mid-range product ! For the money you have to pay this card will bring the most performance. It's the new GeForce 6600 GT and can be compared to it from a performance and feature level, in most cases it definitely was faster though. It offers heaps of features and functionality for a fair sum of money. This series can be a big hit as the performance it offers is rather good. The Radeon X1300 XT, again something very notable. For not a lot of money ATI lifted the performance close to NVIDIA's standard 6600 when we talk solely about gaming. Not bad at all huh? Also bare in mind that this could make a very excellent HTPC card. Good stuff for the budget user.

TechReport: At the very high end of the market, the Radeon X1800 XT is indeed a worthy competitor for the GeForce 7800 GTX. In Direct3D games, the X1800 XT is usually faster than the 7800 GTX. Unfortunately, ATI's weak showing in OpenGL games keep the X1800 XT from capturing the undisputed heavyweight title. I also have a few concerns about the likely extent of the Radeon X1800 XT's availability in the market, given its relatively high GPU clock speeds. We will have to wait and see about that.

FiringSquad: Clearly the RADEON X1800 XT and XL shined in many of our benchmarks. Half-Life 2, Far Cry, and Battlefield 2 all tended to favor the RADEON cards, on the other hand, the OpenGL titles we tested with, including the flight sims and DOOM 3 all performed better on GeForce. ATI's new adaptive AA mode is a worthy competitor to NVIDIA's transparency AA, with both cards using the same method to accomplish the same task. In our opinion, the most critical deciding factor is going to come down to price and availability.