The Sapphire RADEON X1600 PRO

Innovation and competition are constantly driving the high end video card market and as we have seen over the past few weeks it can happen very quickly. The introduction of the 7900GTX and 7600GTX have given ATI competition not only in performance but in price as well. ATI has responded in kind by lowering prices across their lineup. We covered most of the high and mid range pricing in our X1800 GTO article last week. Prices lowering in those two areas is music to the ears of those looking to upgrade on a budget.

The Radeon X1600 Pro has been available since November and up until a few days ago was considered one of the best mid-range cards on the market, but that was last week. With 7600GT being launched and the X1800 GTO on the way we find it being the subject of a significant price reduction. It can now be found just over the $100 mark and at this price represents a terrific value.

Here are some of the features that you will find on the X1600 Pro:

• Vertex and Pixel Shader 3.0
• Dynamic Flow Control
• 128-bit FP32 Processing
• 1024 instruction slots Shaders
• 128-way Ultra-threaded dispatch processor
• 256-bit Ring Bus
• High Dymanic Range rendering
• All stage Trilinear (16X) Anisotropic Filtering
• Full (HQ) Anisotropic Filtering
• 12X Temporal Max. MSAA
• 6X Adaptive AA
• Parallax Occlusion Mapping
• 12-tap error-free Dynamic Soft Shadows
• H.264 Accelerated
• Dual link-DVI
• CrossFire support
• DirectX 9 and OpenGL supported

It is amazing what a little more than $100 can get you in terms of video card performance in today's market.  While the ATI versus nVidia battle is nearing a pricing war the consumers are walking away with more bang for their buck. Sapphire has this to say about their Radeon X1600 Pro card:

"A tool for the performance oriented, the Sapphire X1600 PRO comes equipped with the hardware muscle to deliver an entire realm of fantasy right to your desktop due in large part to the awesome feature-set of the RADEON X1600 core, robust onboard memory configurations and 12 pipeline architecture. An impressive hardware compilation supporting CrossFire?paired with support for Microsoft?DirectX?9.0 Shader Model 3.0 ensures future compatibility and the advent of the ATI Avivo?Video and Display Platform ensures that you will not have to be limit your fantasies to just your desktop".

Today Legit Reviews take a look at this "tool", and will see what type of gaming performance can be had for the mainstream market.