If you have not been following ATI's video cards too closely lately, don't feel bad. They have been incrementally improving performance from one card to the next, but have been unable or unwilling to make any of the exciting moves we have seen from Nvidia. The X1900 XTX was impressive for the time, but since then we have seen cards like the 7950 GX2 and the 8800, so it can be tough to make a too big a deal out of anything else.

Moving past the top end, the focus of this review is on ATI's X1950 Pro, a performance card that finds itself in that $199-$249 sweet spot. This is a price point that offers very nice bang-for-the-buck and is perfect for dedicated gamers who are working within a budget. The equivalent card in the Nvidia line is probably the 7900 GS, though with newer cards out now there is some blending of price points as previous generations drop in price.

HIS X1950Pro IceQ3 Turbo Dual DL-DVI VIVO 256MB PCIe
* Powered by ATI Radeon X1950Pro - 620MHz (Turbo)
* 256MB-256bit 8 channel GDDR3 memory - 1.48GHz (Turbo)
* 36 Pixel shader processor
* 8 Vertex shader processor
* 8 Geometry Pipelines
* Ultra-threaded SM 3.0 Engine
* 512-bit Ring-bus
* ATI Avivo
* High Precision Architecture
* CrossFire Support
* PCI Express x16 lane native support

Looking at the specs we can see the card brings along 36 pixel shaders, 256MB of memory, and speedy 620/1480 MHz clock rates. The X1950 Pro does not pack the firepower of something like the X1950 XTX/CF but given the price level some sacrifices have to be made. Some nice selling points include CrossFire support, dual DVI, and HDCP compatibility.