With that in mind as stated ATI launched two new products, the really lovely Radeon x800 XL and the x850 XT PE. We finally have both reference products from ATI in our lab, which makes us wonder how many samples actually are available and with that in mind how long it'll take to see them in the stores. Bare in mind, originally the plan was to get them in stores before Christmas. This review will handle the Radeon x850 XT PE and next week we'll handle the x800 XL.

Exciting times in the graphics industry you ask? You betcha. It's never been any different though, yet it is more and more difficult for us journalists to test these cards. When I received the x850 I immediately got a flashback to last year. We've seen a plague of driver optimizations from manufacturers. It wasn't too long ago that a rather big discussion in the industry that a image filtering technology called Trilinear filtering was optimized by NVIDIA with the help of a mixture of filtering technologies (Brilinear). ATI remained clear of such questionable "tricks"... until the x800 launch, that is as we learned they where doing something similar. It started with their Radeon 9600 Pro series. Nobody noticed it yet it's there alright and now merged into the x800 and x850 series. The newer CCC (Catalyst Control Center drivers) recently showed new options to actually disable these optimizations in a somewhat same manner NVIDIA's ForceWare drivers allow. It's quite funny that a year and a half ago optimization were to be considered an absolute shame but they now are completely accepted and considered to be normal. The good thing here is that image quality wise the Series 6 from NVIDIA and x800 now are roughly the same, take two computers equip one with a x800 and the other with a 6800, look at a screenshot from both PC's and you cannot see the difference with the naked eye. Speaking as a journalist I have to admit that the so called optimizations made our job very hard as you cannot compare oranges with apples eh?