Radeon X1950 Pro is a highly anticipated graphics card, not just because it will become cheaper to get a X1950 card, but also because there have been made several improvements over big brother. Radeon X1950 Pro is based on the RV570 circuit and this is ATI’s first 80nm circuit for the higher-end segment. An improved manufacturing process means less power consumption and higher frequency scaling, which can be used in several ways. Except from a new manufacturing process ATI has decided to integrate its CrossFire technology into the graphics core. In other words you won’t need an extra CrossFire chip and at the same time all cards have support for the multi-GPU technology.
Which now means that ATI has trashed the external cable (also known as dongle) and replaced it with an internal connection, which is more or less identical to the SLI bridge NVIDIA uses.
If we consider the performance of Radeon X1950 Pro it comes with 36 shader processors (X1950 XTX has 48) which is housed in 12 pixel pipelines. The frequency of the 80nm core is at 575MHz but varies between manufacturers. The cards are equipped with 256MB GDDR3 memory that is working at 1380MHz. X1950 Pro has also been granted a new cooler and with this card it is a single-slot model, which we believe many will be thankful for.
With a price at about $200 it will be a card to battle NVIDIA’s GeForce 7900 GS. According to the first tests that’ve appeared it does it really well too. The CrossFire technology seems to be a bit subpar when compared to SLI, when it comes to performance scalability. Those who wants to know more about Radeon X1950 Pro can read on in ATI’s press release and below we’ve gathered some of the tests that’ve appeared so far.
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