Conclusions
See, like I said, remixes can bring good things. In this case, we have a new top-end Radeon X1950 XTX that furthers ATI's claim on the title of the fastest single-GPU graphics card around, and does so without costing any more than the product it replaces. I'm not sure I can say definitively that the Radeon X1950 XTX is faster than the GeForce 7900 GTX—that depends on the situation. You will have to live with higher power consumption if you choose the Radeon, but ATI has worked to mitigate the worst effects of that fact with its new cooler. The X1950 XTX also has a few feature advantages in its corner, including the ability to handle floating-point texture filtering for high-dynamic-range rendering in concert with antialiasing and a superior default algorithm for anisotropic filtering. That's a pretty good combination.

Meanwhile, with the 256MB version of the Radeon X1900 XT, ATI has captured our full attention. The X1900 XT 256MB clearly has the GeForce 7900 GT running at Nvidia's stock speeds beaten on performance. We've seen the now almost-ubiquitous "overclocked in the box" versions of the GeForce 7900 GT deliver somewhat better performance, but they're not likely to make up the gap entirely. As I said early on, the X1900 XT 256MB's biggest liability is the lack of a well-matched CrossFire Edition card for it. If you hope to upgrade to multiple GPUs, you may be better off with a 7900 GT.

Still, the X1900 XT 256MB is so good, it raises all sorts of interesting questions. If ATI and its board partners can deliver this thing at the promised $279 price point, we'll have a new favorite graphics card to recommend. In fact, given the performance we've seen out of the X1900 XT 256MB, one wonders why anyone should pay any more for a graphics card. Yes, the X1950 XTX is certainly faster, but it's not in an entirely different class or capable of offering playable framerates in many resolutions where the X1900 XT 256MB can't. But then you probably knew that the high-end card wasn't exactly at the sweet spot for price and performance.

Now the big question is: how will Nvidia respond? These products won't hit store shelves for three weeks, and that's a veritable eternity in PC graphics. Remixes don't take long to paste together, so we may be hearing another new track or two soon in the thump-thump-thump of progress.