The release of the X1000 series from ATI garnered a lot of attention for two main reasons. The first being the long awaited and long overdue support for image quality enhancing technologies such as SM3.0 and HDR, to name a few. The second is that the X1000 series is undoubtedly going to provide a card capable of competing with NVIDIA’s upper echelon of graphics cards—and we all know a little competition doesn’t hurt.