ATI Radeon X1800 GTO was launched yesterday at the same time as NVIDIA released its 90nm architecture; the GeForce 7900 and 7600 series. ATI already had a high performance card with Radeon X1900 XTX that it is very satisfied with. In the mid-range segment things were a bit thinner and that is market the new X1800 GTO is intended for at $249, just in between GF 7900 GT and GF 7600 GT ($299 and $199). Radeon X1800 GTO is as the name implies based on R520 architecture and does not have the extra pixel shaders that R580 and the Radeon X1900 series has. Radeon X1800 GTO has 12 pixel pipelines, which means that 4 pipelines inside the R520 circuit has been disabled, a core working at 500MHz.
Radeon X1800 GTO is in some ways a stripped version of Radeon X1800 XT that has 16 pixel pipelines and higher frequencies. The support for AVIVO and all other unique features for the X1K series are still there and with 256MB GDDR3 memory working at 500MHz (1000MHz DDR) there is a lot of potential for a nice performance/penny ratio.
We will soon be able to offer a comparison between NVIDIA and ATI’s mid-range cards and X1800 GTO is already lying on our test bench waiting for its turn. Until then you can read about the new circuit at ATI’s homepage.
