ATI has introduced a new video card that in spite of its familiar name implements numerous innovations. We are talking about the Radeon X1950 PRO. Although the video card’s name is similar to the top of the range X1950 XTX, the X1950 PRO has a completely new architecture thanks to the use of the RV570 GPU.

The suggested retail price for the X1950 PRO is impressive because of its relatively low cost. At $199, you should be able to pick up a 256 Mbytes version of the video card. The video card is classified as being in the midrange market and should be able to fit the budget of a large portion of money conscious gamers. Although it might not be the solution of choice for hardcore gamers, the Radeon X1950 PRO offers a number of perks including a new approach to Crossfire technology that doesn’t require cables, support for AVIVO technology, and the promise of high resolutions with stronger performance. The architecture of the X1950 PRO is based on the same architecture of the X1900/X1950 XTX, and thus it only supports DirectX 9 and Shader Model 3.0. It is important to note that the X1950 PRO is not AMD’s next generation DirectX 10 supporting GPU.

Recently, many people have been asking us what the sense in buying a video card that only supports DirectX 9 is when DirectX 10 video cards are right around the corner. Since the launch of the G80 is only a few weeks away, many people see spending money on a DirectX 9 video card as an unwise decision.

In order to effectively answer this question, we must analyze the situation and the usefulness of DirectX 10 video cards. Microsoft Vista, the only operating system that will support DirectX 10, will not be launched before 2007. Since Windows Vista is the only operating system that will support DirectX 10, it will thus be the only OS that will be able to fully take advantage of the new DirectX 10 architectures. As some of our readers might know, it nearly always takes game developers a couple of months in order to fully take advantage of a new DirectX version. Even more time is required for them to deliver the final product to the market. In addition, since DirectX 10 will only run on Vista, game publishers would end up losing revenue if they immediately made the move to DirectX 10 and didn’t wait for Vista to get more widespread in the market.

Taking the above paragraph into consideration, buying a current generation is a reasonable choice. For users who are looking to buy a video card in the high-end sector of the market, it would make sense to wait and buy a next generation video card. However, if you are a user looking to buy in the price range of $200, then it would not be a waste of money to go ahead and buy a current generation video card.

The following table displays the North American pricing for the most recent solutions from ATI and NVIDIA. As can be seen, the Radeon X1950 PRO comes for a suggested retail price of $199. The NVIDIA 7900GS comes for the same price as the Radeon X1950 PRO, thus it is naturally the main competitor from NVIDIA for the X1950 PRO.