ATI has announced a new family of graphics cards known as the Radeon X1000 series. Three main configurations are available, including the high-end X1800 XT, mid-range X1600 XT and entry-level X1300 XT.

The X1800 XT and X1300 XT are available from today, while the X1600 XT will ship 30 November.

All three are based on a new 90 nanometre fabrication process, allowing them to run at higher clock speeds than their 130nm Nvidia counterparts.

Interestingly, ATI has abandoned the mantra that more pixel shader pipelines equates to better performance. Instead, it touts a new memory-efficient architecture as the key to the X1000 series' strong performance.

We tested the X1800 XT recently and were generally quite impressed. It achieved better scores in 3Dmark 2005 and Far Cry than the high-end Nvidia Geforce 7800 GTX, particularly at high resolutions and with full-screen anti aliasing (FSAA) and anisotropic filtering (AF) enabled.

As expected, the X1800 XT doesn't quite match its Nvidia rival in OpenGL games such as Doom 3, but it isn't far off. Where the card excels is in its ability to render games using High Dynamic Range (extreme light contrast) techniques whilst applying AA - something the Nvidia cards can't do.

All X1000 cards are HD-ready (via support for the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD H.264 compression standard), but you'll need to buy a special Crossfire version on all but the X1300 to enable dual-card setups. Check the next issue of  PCW for more information.