< A href="http://www.ati.com/">ATI has announced a new video card for the Mac called the Radeon X800 XT. The new card supports both ADC connectors and Dual Link DVI connectors, which means it will support legacy Macs (including VGA adapters), as well as Appleis high-end 30" Cinema Display HD.
The X800 XT has 256 MB of GDDR3 memory, and features 16 pixel pipelines and six vertex pipelines. ATIis Web site said that the new card offers twice the horsepower as the Radeon 9800 Pro.
More specifically, ATI said that the card offers the following gains over its predecessor:
- Pixel fill rate gain of 150%
- Memory bandwidth gain of 50%
- Geometry performance gain of 90%
- Floating point operations/sec. gain of 140%
"With the RADEON X800 XT, ATI has significantly impacted the user experience for two critical segments of the Mac market, gaming and content creation," said Rick Bergman, Senior Vice President for ATIis PC Business Unit, in a statement. "Mac users can perform the full gamut of tasks without any diminishing returns in performance."
Glenda Adams of gaming company Aspyr Media also commented on the card for ATI, having said: "The RADEON X800 XT brings a new level of gaming performance to the Mac. The ability to support ultra high resolutions with amazing frame rates in our current and next generation games puts this card on the must-have list for Mac gamers."
The Mac version of the X800 XT brings the companyis Mac offerings in line with the companyis PC offerings, though the X850 is said to be coming to the PC market soon.
The card is priced at US$499, and ATI will be showing it during next weekis Macworld Expo in San Francisco , at booth 2217. The company was not specific on when the card will ship, but you can find more information at ATIis Web site.