ATI Radeon 9800XT 256MB Review

The Radeon 9800XT is not meant to be a full-on replacement for today’s Radeon 9800 Pro cards, merely a high-end compliment to the products already on the market. This means that the Radeon 9800 Pro will not be going away, nor will it be dropping heavily in price. The Radeon 9800XT squeezes that little extra bit of juice from the chip architecture, and also adds nice things like a redesigned low noise cooler, and ATI’s OverDrive technology for additional performance. Now that Radeon 9800XT cards have hit store shelves (only around two weeks after launch, good job ATI!), we’ve grabbed one of the first batch of retail boxed cards for a look at the units which are shipping today. Are these cards worth the massive $500-$600 price-tags that they are selling for? Let’s take a look.

…With nVidia’s GeForceFX 5950 Ultra card right on the horizon, ATI will certainly have a challenger on its hands, but that does not look like it will dampen the fire burning at ATI. These guys are on fire, and have had success after success with their latest graphics cards. The Radeon 9800XT unquestionably improves on their current models, but as this is the third revision card on the same basic GPU core, we’re getting less and less impressed with each revision that is released. Nevertheless, it looks like it will be a happy holiday season for the team at ATI, despite not having Half-Life 2 available to spur sales of their cards.