ATI unleashes Radeon X800 XL with 512MB RAM

ATI today launched the Radeon X800 XL 512MB graphics card. The company says its first graphics card with 512MB RAM will be available in May from Abit, Connect3D, Gigabyte, HIS, Info-Tek, MSI, Sapphire, TUL and VisionTek with a suggested retail price of $449.

The Radeon X800 XL 512MB is currently being used by today's top developers including BioWare; Crytek; Digital Extremes; Funcom; Gas Powered Games; Grin; id Software, inc; Juice Games; Lionhead; NCsoft; Remedy and Valve. Hungry for new advanced platforms to drive development, industry pioneers are already praising ATI's advancements powering the shift to High Definition gaming.

"The new 512 MB cards from ATI will allow us to increase the visual quality of our games and take graphics in forthcoming games to an unprecedented level," said Jorgen Tharaldsen, Product Director, Funcom.

"No matter what the shader model, having the space to store the best high definition textures local to the VPU is critical. This is particularly important in true next generation development, with complex materials requiring concurrent access to multiple high definition source maps. That, along with techniques using multiple render targets for deferred rendering components and demand for high definition, anti-aliased back buffers mean that the new 512MB development platform from ATI offers us important new degrees of freedom," said Ian Moran, Lead Programmer, Juice Games.

"The 512MB of memory on ATI's card makes our games run at high frame rates even on scenes with very high amounts of textures," says Tim Rance, Chief Technical Officer, Lionhead Studios. "Our games run more smoothly in these cases because everything can be stored in video memory with no thrashing of the texture cache."

"The Radeon X800 XL 512MB has both immediate and long-term advantages," said Gary McTaggart, Graphics Architect, Valve. "Texture thrashing during a frame render is drastically reduced or eliminated. This is even more beneficial in the case of High Dynamic Range rendering (HDR), which we are in the process of releasing for the Source engine, where environment and light maps are eight times as large. Further down the road, memory hungry technologies like 3D textures, used in things like procedural noise for detail textures, some fog algorithms, and color correction, will benefit as well from the capabilities of this new card."