Generally, we have seen promising numbers from this low-end budget card. While the drivers used are different and may have contributed to its performance, the MSI Radeon X1300 PRO can easily equal and better the Radeon X600 XT. The 3DMark05 benchmark was where the MSI Radeon X1300 PRO excelled, where it even matched the mid-range Radeon X700, though some of that could be attributed to its extra 128MB memory advantage. As for the sole NVIDIA card in the comparison, the GeForce 6600 may find the Radeon X1300 PRO a tough competitor, as there were some close scores between them, especially in FarCry, Halo and both 3DMark benchmarks. At least the benchmarks seemed to have showed some credible improvements over the previous generation cards, even at this very early stage with drivers that are probably not optimized yet. In fact, we would say that the performance of the lower end cards of this new generation should be close to the mid-range of the previous generation, which is to say that there is some progress and value to getting the new cards. Finally, as if to silence the ATI bashers once and for all, there is Shader Model 3.0 support for these new cards and it is working well.
With a HyperMemory version expected for the Radeon X1300 series, the MSI Radeon X1300 PRO is one of the better cards for the new low-end graphics segment. Overall, this is a promising start for ATI's new cards and we look forward to bringing you more in-depth coverage, including the high-end Radeon X1800 cards in the very near future.
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, atleast for the testers that is.