ATI have reclaimed the performance crown today with the launch of Radeon X1900XT and X1900XTX. We pitched it against the NVIDIA 7800 GTX 512MB and the results were impressive. In short, it's fast. Very fast.


Final Thoughts...
With the exception of the bugged performance in Quake 4, the Radeon X1900 family have taken over the performance lead in both single card and dual card configurations. It's also great to see that ATI has responded to its critics and they've proven that they're able to match NVIDIA on the hard launch game too.

The only blip in this is the fact that a couple of ATI's key partners have confirmed to us that there will be no CrossFire Edition Radeon X1900-series cards available for another few weeks - we'll have to see how fast ATI can turn this around. We'll also have to see whether NVIDIA's limited supply GeForce 7800 GTX 512 video cards drop in price, or disappear from the market.

It's worth mentioning that NVIDIA's Desktop Graphics Product Manager, Ujesh Desai, admitted that he under-estimated how many GeForce 7800 GTX 512's NVIDIA would sell. Consequently, the price of the cards hasn't dropped since the launch, making them look like a rather expensive alternative to ATI's Radeon X1900XTX 512MB.

For now, ATI are back on top. If NVIDIA are to retake the lead, they will need to reach new heights in both performance and image quality.