HotHardware has checked out the ATi Radeon 9800 XT 256MB

When ATi released the Radeon 9800 Pro earlier this year, the Toronto, Ontario Canada design team, had been working with a strong foundation, that was built on their most successful card ever, the Radeon 9700 Pro. The base GPU architecture that would drive several iterations of performance enthusiast, mid range and mainstream products, was paying off in spades, versus their fiercest rival, NVIDIA. At the same time, NVIDIA was failing to execute on any meaningful competitive new design effort. The combination of NVIDIA's technological stutter-stepping and ATi's seemingly flawless execution, provided a new product springboard unlike any other in the Canadian company's history. When the Radeon 9800 Pro was launched in March '03, it had literally no competition, with NVIDIA's follow-up to the miserably botched GeForce FX 5800, still months away. Even then, when NVIDIA was able to finally unleash the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, since it had to compete with ATi's second generation VPU, its impact and market splash was diminished, versus what should have been a block-buster release for the Silicon Valley rocket-ship semiconductor company.

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