Conclusions
The Radeon X1650 XT performs almost exactly on par with the GeForce 7600 GT overall. At long last, it establishes a performance balance between ATI's Radeon X1000-series products and Nvidia's GeForce 7 series products at $149. This same performance balance has existed for a while at other price points, and things are tighter than ever after the fall round of graphics card refreshes.

In fact, I'm a little surprised to see ATI simply meeting Nvidia with a product that offers nearly equivalent performance to the GeForce 7600 GT. Typically, you'd expect some one-upsmanship to kick in here. After all, it's not like the GeForce 7600 GT wasn't a well-defined target—it's been selling since March. Had ATI pushed the GPU or memory clocks a little further, they could have grabbed the decisive performance lead.

The respective strengths of these two competing graphics technologies remain more or less the same at $149 as elsewhere. GeForce 7 chips tend to be smaller and more power efficient, while the Radeon X1000 series sports a handful of additional features that can lead to higher image quality. I think those picky image quality differences tend to matter more in high-end graphics cards where advanced texture filtering and antialiasing modes will get more use. In this case, I wouldn't give the Radeon X1650 XT a decisive edge over the GeForce 7600 GT on that basis. ATI may have the advantage, though, simply because the Radeon X1650 XT is a newer product with dual-link DVI outputs and support for HDCP.

The question of dual-card capability is an intriguing one. No CrossFire config we've tested, including the X1650 XT, seems to handle F.E.A.R. well. Overall, Nvidia's SLI seems to be the more mature dual-GPU solution. On the other hand, we can't really recommend SLI for the GeForce 7600 GT given the "green fringing" problem we've encountered. We haven't seen a fix for this problem in the two months since we first reported it. I suspect not many folks are running GeForce 7600 GT cards in SLI, or we'd have a fix by now. That's a shame, because whether you're talking ATI or Nvidia, running a pair of $149 graphics cards in a dual-GPU config actually looks like a pretty decent value for the money.

Speaking of value, the X1650 XT's value proposition is a tricky subject. If you happen to have a monitor whose optimal resolution is 1280x1024 or (shudder) lower, you really don't need more graphics card than the Radeon X1650 XT in order to run today's games at some fairly high quality settings. Dropping $149 for one of these cards will give you a monstrous improvement over the awful built-in graphics in most cheaper PCs, and you may not need to spend any more.

Then again, there are much better graphics cards to be had for just 50 bucks more, including the Radeon X1950 Pro and the GeForce 7900 GS, both of which feature 256-bit memory interfaces for roughly twice the bandwidth of the X1650 XT. That means they'll run games with more antialiasing, higher quality settings, and better texture filtering without slowing down. The additional $50 will probably be money well spent for all but the most casual of gamers, especially over the long run as newer, more demanding games arrive.