This year, CES in Nevada is a place where the Good, the bit-trusted and the butt-ugly have congregated for different reasons.

Word on the exhibition floor is that some varmints have come here to either tell more lies to manufacturers to beg for money for advertorials, or spend time on their own at parties, ‘cause nobody seems to want to talk to them.

In the meantime HEXUS has spent time ploughing the fields for beans to satiate your hunger, and here’s the spiciest of them so far…

Fancy a ride with HEXUS on the Rodin Rodeo? – here’s the red beans my Fanny promised earlier:






Futuremark 3DMark 05

ATi RADEON X1900 XT 512MB CrossFire (625MHz VPU / 1450MHz GDDR-3) (not XTX) (AMD A64 FX-57 2.8GHz)
13,501 3DMarks for $1098 (£622.01)

NVIDIA GeForce 7900 512MB (700MHz GPU / 1800MHz GDDR-3 (not GDDR-3+) (AMD A64 FX-60 2.8GHz)
~13,000 3DMarks (?)

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 512MB SLi (550MHz GPU / 1200MHz GDDR-3) (AMD A64 FX-57 2.8GHz)
12,200 3DMarks for $1,439.61 (£815.58)

ATi RADEON X1800 XT 512MB CrossFire (625MHz VPU / 1500MHz GDDR-3) (MESH Computers TITAN X1800 FIRE - AMD A64 X2 4600+ 2.4GHz)
12,050 3DMarks for $1071.16 (£606.78)

ATi RADEON X1900 XTX 512MB (650MHz VPU / 1550MHz GDDR-3) (AMD A64 FX-57 2.8GHz)
11,149 3DMarks for $649 (£367.67)

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 512MB (580MHz VPU / 1703MHz GDDR-3) (ARMARI Pantheon-FX - AMD A64 FX-60 2.8GHz)
10,062 3DMarks

ATi RADEON X1900 XT 512MB (625MHz VPU / 1450MHz GDDR-3) (AMD A64 FX-57 2.8GHz)
~10,000 3DMarks for $549 (£311.04)

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 512MB (550MHz GPU / 1700MHz GDDR-3) (AMD A64 FX-57 2.8GHz)
9,608 3DMarks for $719.81 (£407.79)

ATi RADEON X1800 XT 512MB (625MHz VPU / 1500MHz GDDR-3) (AMD A64 FX-57 2.8GHz)
9,271 3DMarks for $535.56 (£303.39)

ATi RADEON X1800 XT 512MB (625MHz VPU / 1500MHz GDDR-3) (MESH Computers TITAN X1800 FIRE - AMD A64 X2 4600+ 2.4GHz)
8,544 3DMarks


Sharp witted HEXUS readers will be thinking, what will this list look like when the inevitable R580 die shrink and frequency hike comes?…

Well, we’d like to tell you… however, when David introduced himself to ATi Technologies’ Director of Public Relocations, Chris Evenden at CES, and we asked whether he’d brief us (obviously under NDA) about what ATi had to show under wraps, Chris said that we’d have to wait until later this week when ATi officials came over to London. Odd we thought, as it’s well known that ATi’s North American PR often selectively disclose and leak information to at least one European publication.

In the absence of assistance from ATI's North American PR, we thought you guys would expect no less than for us to go digging up those special HEXUS.beans for you, but how ATi’s next, next generation is likely to perform we’ve not yet seen a sprout.

What we can say though is that so far there’s a distinct absence of the familiar ATi words ‘Platinum Edition’ (PE), which begs the question - what headroom does the existing 90nm R580 have for a PE version as a firm response to NVIDIA’s ultra-extreme GeForce 7900? It's gotta be on the cards...

Recent history shows that for two quarters of the year ATi will be on top and for the other two quarters it will be NVIDIA... So, if this trend continues, then from a 3D graphics performance enthusiast’s point of view, one of the primary decisions to be made is simply ‘in which quarter do you buy?’

If Fanny's HEXUS.bean on NVIDIA launching at CeBIT in March is as firmly planted as its partners seem to think so (whilst it’s not looking like a walkover), in Q1 2006 ATi seem set to rule the roost with it’s forthcoming RADEON X1900 (R580/Rodin).

What will the fullness of NVIDIA’s response be in a few months time, and will it be sufficient to head off an ATi RADEON X1900 XTX Platinum Edition?