Nvidia currently dominate the sub £200 price bracket with some clearly definable parts but ATI are fighting back with the Radeon X1900 GT, a card aimed squarely at Nvidia's superlative 7900 GT. The X1900 GT is based on the R580 graphic processor but with one of the four quads disabled thus making it a 36 pixel shader part. Considering this, can it really compete against the 7900 GT when it comes down to raw performance?
Conclusion
Nvidia's second from top GT cards have a mighty reputation for delivering high end performance for reasonable money, and in terms of price/performance the 7900 GT is probably Nvidia's best ever card to date. Because of this formidable reputation, ATI really needed the X1900 GT to rise to the occasion and show the 7900 GT a thing or two. It needed to deliver something special to draw the masses away from the 7900 GT. Unfortunately the X1900 GT just doesn't have the charisma to do any such thing.
In Oblivion, it's only saving grace, the performance was quite impressive. The X1900 GT outperformed the 7900 GT by a large margin and instead traded blows with the X1800 XT 256MB. Sadly the X1900 GT performed rather poorly in the next three games, FEAR, HL2, and COD2. Most notable of these was FEAR, the 7900 GT was clearly faster and not just by a few frames per second, in fact a stock 7800 GT was faster in FEAR than the X1900 GT.
The problem now facing ATI is that this was the only logical step down from the XTX, they cannot bring a 36 pixel shader, 16 texture unit/ROP part based on R580 for example, it's just not technically possible. Disabling one whole quad was the only path ATI could take, but sadly for ATI the X1900 GT's performance just cannot match the 7900 GT. It's possible some decent gains could be had by bringing a 512MB X1900 GT card to retail, but it's price would have to stay exactly where the 256MB version is.
As it stands now, the X1900 XT is difficult to recommend in the shadow of the 7900 GT, but your best bet right now is to grab an X1800 XT 512MB. It should offer very similar performance to the 7900 GT (FEAR being an exception) with the added bonus of HQAF. Food for thought!
