ATI finally unwraps Radeon X1000 GPU series

Yes, they're here. Well, almost. ATI today launched its 90nm Radeon X1000 series of graphics chips, though the mid-range X1600 won't be available until late October/early November.

The X1300 and some X1800 configurations are available and shipping immediately, ATI said.

The X1800 contains 321m transistors and contains 16 pixel processing pipelines - half the rumoured 32, but we suspect ATI has left itself room for expansion - fed by eight geometry engines. The chips connect to GDDR 3 and 4 SDRAM across an eight-channel 256-bit bus.

The X1600 uses 157m transistors to deliver 12 pixel pipelines, five vertex shaders and a 128-bit four-channel memory bus that also supports DDR and DDR 2. The X1300 has the same memory bus, but only four pixel pipelines and two vertex pipelines. It also lacks the higher end cards' "ring bus" memory controller, which is 512 bits wide in the X1800 and 256 bits wide in the X1600.

All three GPUs support DirectX 9 Shader Model 3.0. They operate on a PCI Express x16 bus, though some will be offered with AGP 8x interconnects.

They're also equipped to deliver video input and output to ATI's Avivo standard.

Graphics cards powered by Radeon X1000-series GPUs will be available from ATI and its board partners, including Asustek, Club 3D, Gigabyte, MSI, Sapphire, Tul and others, and the usual suspects will be building X1000-based boards into upcoming desktop systems, ATI said.

Full specs for the X1800, X1600 and X1300 can be found here, here and here. ®