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ATI unveils Radeon X850 XT PE, X800 XL

Speeds 'n' feeds

ATI re-launched its Radeon X800 graphics chip family yesterday, to accompany the release of its latest top-end GPU, the Radeon X850.

The launches came as the company began shipping the X800 XT Platinum Edition in volume - seven months after the chip was formally introduced.

ATI launched three X850 configurations: the X850 Pro, X850 XT and X850 XT Platinum Edition. The company did not provide detailed speeds and feeds for the new chips, but it is believed that not only do they offer core and memory clock frequencies above their X800 equivalents, but that the X850 series is fabbed using a 110nm process rather than the 130nm process used for the X800s.

The Register can confirm that the X850 XT PE's core is clocked at 540MHz and its memory at 590MHz (1.18GHz effective), for a fill rate of 8.6bn pixels per second (PPS) and a geometry rate of 540m triangles per second (TPS). That compares to X800 XT PE figures of 8.3bn PPS and 520m TPS, respectively.

In addition to shipping the X800 XT PE, ATI also introduced a new X800 chip, the XL, situated between the Pro and XT versions of the part. Its core is clocked to 400MHz, lower than the Pro's 475MHz, but its memory clock is higher: 490MHz (980MHz effective) to 450MHz (900MHz effective). The XL has a fill rate of 6.4bn PPS and a geometry rate of 400m TPS.

In all other respects, the two families appear identical. Both contain over 160m transistors, configured into six vertex shaders and up to 16 pixel shaders. All the chips use a native PCI Express interface and support GDDR 3 SDRAM across a 256-bit, quad-channel bus. They support ATI's Smoothvision, Hyper Z, Videoshader and Smartshader technologies in their HD incarnation. They also offer 3Dc normal map compression as an alternative to Shader Model 3.0 support. ®

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