ATI secretly released its Silver Bullets material to AIBs this week and the picture of R580 is slowly coming together. R580, or Radeon X1900 as it is called internally, is expected to "launch" in January according to ATI documentation. Unfortunately, ATI's track record has not been spectacular with the last few product launches. ATI's Crossfire chipset "launched" twice, once in June and again in October.

ATI released their Silver Bullets for Radeon X1800 approximately two months before the launch of the card, but it took nearly six weeks after the launch for master card variants of the X1800 to show up on store shelves (and nearly as long for Crossfire motherboards as well).

The Silver Bullets presentation was a little light on details, but did confirm the R580 GPU has 48 pixel shader processors and higher clocks than R520 (a.k.a. Radeon X1800). Radeon X1900 uses a 90nm process also found on Radeon X1800. The internal briefing also confirmed that there will be two separate versions of the card, RX1900CF "Master Card" and RX1900 "Crossfire Ready" card. Like the Radeon X1800 series, you will need at least one master card to enable Crossfire support. Avivo and Shader Model 3.0 will also appear on Radeon X1900.

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  • Shark974 - Friday, December 23, 2005 - link

    Would shut up about ATI availabilty!

    I haven't heard a peep from anyobody about the fact 512 GTX has been out of stock at 750 basically SINCE LAUNCH.

    I'm getting tired of this biased CRAP.

    As somebody on another forum said about the CF review where Anand claimed a 512 GTX setup runs 1400..where? You cant buy them! Let alone for 700 each.

  • Slaimus - Tuesday, December 27, 2005 - link

    The GTX was the ONLY high end card that was available to buy on the day the NDAs expired.
  • DigitalFreak - Friday, December 23, 2005 - link

    ATI has pretty much paper launched everything since the X800XT PE, so I'm glad that AT keeps harping on them.

    The GTX 512 was a hard launch. There just weren't that many cards available, and they sold out quickly. Besides, how many people are going to purchase a $700 video card anyway?

    And yes, I've owned only ATI cards since the 8500...
  • Live - Friday, December 23, 2005 - link

    No way was the 7800 GTX 512 a real "hard launch". If so the ATIs "hard launched" 1800XL and XT as well, "There just weren't that many cards available".

    "Hard launch" and "There just weren't that many cards available" don’t go together.

    The 7800GT(X) 256 were real hard launches were cards were available from the get go and availability just kept ramping up and MSRP were soon reached. That’s just not the case for the 512 version.
  • bob661 - Monday, December 26, 2005 - link

    I guess you didn't bother to look at all when they were launched because you could get 512 parts for about two weeks. Shit, Newegg had three 512 cards for about 2 weeks before they ran out. Nvidia launched and deliver actual product. Where was ATI's product?
  • bob661 - Monday, December 26, 2005 - link

    I wonder how many "launches" ATI will do on the X1900 parts?
  • Cygni - Friday, December 23, 2005 - link

    There is NOT a chipset called the 7800GTX 512. Memory size is decided by the BOARD MAKERS. If the board makers dont think there is enough demand, they wont make many.

    They hard launced the GTX, the end.
  • piroroadkill - Saturday, December 24, 2005 - link

    The GTX 512 is not at all the same as the GTX with more RAM. Do your homework.
  • Anton74 - Friday, December 23, 2005 - link

    The 7800 GTX 512 is in fact a different part than the 7800 GTX. The difference goes beyond the additional RAM.

    http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2607">http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2607
  • ViRGE - Friday, December 23, 2005 - link

    Eh? They mentioned the 7800 GTX 512 just earlier today in the GDDR3 insider story.

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