ATI Announced New Radeon X1K Graphics Cards But Not For Mac--Yet

ATI announced its new Radeon X1K line of graphics cards, replacing its X850 with an X1800 as top of the line. But it's not for the Mac because, at the very least, the Radeon X1800 uses a PCI Express x16 graphics card slot that is not yet available on any current Power Mac G5. The OS's supported by ATI are listed as: Windows XP, Windows XP x64 Edition, Windows Media Center Edition 2005 and Windows Vista, which won't even be released for another year or so.

With a few exceptions, the latest and greatest graphics cards, whether ATI or Nvidia based, first come out for Wintels and many are never available for the Mac. This is one issue that we hope the future (mid-2006+) Intel-based Macs will resolve.

Those interested in the latest and hottest graphics cards will be interested primarily in the new Radeon X1800. It is built with 321 million transistors on a 90 nanometer process, has 16 pixel shaders, 8 vertex shaders, HDR rendering, 6x FSAA, 16x anisotropic filtering and 256MB of GDDR3 memory. It also has ATI's Avivo video technology which ATI claims has:

• Revolutionary technologies enabling superior quality and High-Definition visual experiences
  
• Enhances digital video, gaming and photos, ensuring sharp images, crisp text, and vivid color.
  
• Universal connectivity for TVs and displays

It also has CrossFire technology which ATI states:

• CrossFire ignites a new gaming experience with the power of multiple Radeon GPUs
  
• High-performance processor sharing
  
• High compatibility with games, graphics cards, motherboards, and third party components

ATI does not list Apple as a Radeon X1K OEM but maybe Apple will announce new Power Mac G5s at next week's October 12 event with PCI Express x16 slots. [Bill Fox]