AMD today introduced an innovative graphics card that makes use of its new native CrossFire technology, the ATI Radeon X1650 XT. With a 575MHz clock speed, 24 pixel shaders, 8 vertex shaders, and a $149 price tag, the Radeon X1650 XT has all the right specs on paper to do extremely well in the mainstream graphics market. But does this new GPU deliver the goods in real performance?

AnandTech: The performance of the X1650 XT is just what you would expect from a mainstream graphics card of this type. With the 7600 GT being on the market for so long without any competition from ATI, the X1650 XT was overdue. With the release of this card, we now see performance from ATI that is very similar to the popular 7600 GT. This card handles a wide variety of games with ease at flexible resolutions. It still has trouble running some of the games at 1600x1200 and above, but getting smooth frame rates at 1280x1024 in nearly all the games we tested is a nice achievement in a card projected to be in the <$150 price range. Those with 1280x1024 monitors can easily shun more expensive GPUs without sacrificing that much in the way of gaming enjoyment.

FiringSquad: In terms of performance, the Radeon X1650 XT ran neck-and-neck with the Radeon X1800 GTO despite its 128-bit memory interface, even though we were testing with 4xAA. Overall the Radeon X1800 GTO was a little faster than the X1650 XT in most of our benchmarks, but the X1650 XT's new RV560 GPU kept it close for the most part. In comparison to the GeForce 7600 GT, the Radeon X1650 XT earns its fair share of wins and losses, but ultimately it wins more than it loses. The only games where the GeForce 7600 GT clearly came out ahead were in Quake 4 and Lock On: Modern Air Combat, while the Radeon X1650 XT clearly put up a stronger showing in Oblivion and to a less extent in Half-Life 2 Lost Coast, everywhere else the two cards really were neck-and-neck. Also keep in mind the plethora of factory overclocked GeForce 7600 GT cards which aren't tested here. Hopefully ATI's board partners will step up to the challenge and produce factory overclocked X1650 XT boards of their own, as our tests with the GPU indicate that it scales easily to higher clock speeds.

TecReport: 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 ATI Radeon X1650 XT will hit store shelves during the week of 13 November, at an estimated street price of US$149.