ATI announced its new flagship graphics card family, the Radeon X1950 series. The new Radeon X1950 XTX and Radeon X1950 CrossFire Edition work together or individually to deliver the ultimate gaming performance available today. On September 14th, both the Radeon X1950 XTX and Radeon X1950 CrossFire Edition will ship from retailers, system integrators, with an estimated street price of US$449 or EUR399 (VAT included) for each card. The Radeon X1950 family will also be available shortly from leading OEM vendors, including Dell.

The first reviews can be found on HardOCP, Driver Heaven, Guru3D, HotHardware, PCPerspective, TechPowerUp! and TechReport

There are a number of comparisons that are important to consider in this summary. First, lets talk about the 256MB Radeon X1900 XT. The 256MB Radeon X1900 XT performed very well, besting a GeForce 7900 GT virtually across the board and it finished right alongside a GeForce 7900 GTX in many of our tests. If this card is actually released at the price ATI is claiming it will be, we suspect it will be quite popular. The Radeon X1950 XTX was also an excellent performer. In a single-card configuration, the Radeon X1950 XTX was faster than a GeForce 7900 GTX in almost every test. The GeForce 7950 GX2 was faster than the Radeon X1950 XTX more often than not, however. The same scenario plays out in the multi-GPU/multi-card configurations as well. A Radeon X1950 XTX CrossFire configuration was faster than a GeForce 7900 GTX SLI setup in the vast majority of the tests, but Quad-SLI came out on top most of the time. The tests were much closer than expected though, considering the battle at the top was between two ATI GPUs and four NVIDIA GPUs.

The 256MB Radeon X1900 XT put up some good numbers considering its projected $279 MSRP as well. At that price, the 256MB Radeon X1900 XT will fall somewhere in between a GeForce 7900 GT and 7900 GTX. Its performance was clearly better than the 7900 GT though, which makes it easy to justify the increased expense. The Radeon X1950 XTX is in a similar position. With a proposed MSRP of $449, the Radeon X1950 XTX's price should lands somewhere in between the GeForce 7900 GTX and GeForce 7950 GX2. Looking at our benchmark results and accounting for its 2GHz GDDR4 memory and redesigned cooler, that's a fair position to be in. The Radeon X1950 XTX out-muscled a 7900 GTX most of the time, and traded victories with the GX2.