ATI announces X1950 Pro sub-$200 card

When video card manufacturers are constantly pushing the biggest and best, they seem to sometimes forget that most people can't afford or don't want to spend $400+ on a new video card, especially just to meet the “minimum” requirements of the newest titles. Thankfully, they do occasionally come around, giving us something that offers fantastic performance for low cost. ATI is now introducing the Radeon X1950 Pro, a mid-range card designed to be priced below $200. It is not a DX10 capable card, meaning it may not be an ideal choice for Windows Vista, but is the first card to be released on the 80nm process, and comes with a simplified version of Crossfire that works better than previous implementations of the technology according to the first reviews of the card.

Depending on who is offering it, the card comes with an impressive stock GPU clock of around 575MHz and a stock memory clock of 690MHz, starting at configurations of 256MB GDDR3. The card is supposedly already shipping, meaning it should be available quite soon. Based on the price, it may be an ideal card for a midrange game platform.