The chaps over at VR-Zone has gotten its hands on one of ATI's upcoming Radeon X1950 XTX graphics cards. The card's performance is impressive, and its 1GHz GDDR4 memory seems to give it a sizeable performance advantage over the Radeon X1900 XTX. Here's a taster:

Our testing shows that the X1950XTX is significantly faster than NVIDIA's 7950GX2 at rather common enthusiast in-game setting. This is definitely very appealing for the gamers, especially when you factor in the ability of the card to run true HDR with Anti-Aliasing compared to the 7950GX2 which can't do that, and the fact that the X1950XTX offers dual display without compromising performance while the 7950GX2 has to sacrifice dual GPU performance for dual display. Add the best performing and best looking default cooler found in the market and it really seems ATi has come up with quite a winner this time. It is rather shocking however, to discover that the card actually draws more power than a multi-GPU 7950GX2. Other than that this card seems to have almost everything going for it, even though 3D Mark performance boost is not catching up to the 7950GX2 at 650MHz Core clock. Now it's much of a question of the availability of the cards at launch, and this may be partly affected by the production quantity of the rather new GDDR4 Memory. For gaming enthusiasts, if this card really retails at the USD$399 it is slated to, this is THE loveboat as you won't be able to get the performance for that price looking at any other card than this. It seems that ATi has delivered quite an uppercut to NVIDIA with this!