ATI has launched the anticipated Radeon X1900 GT graphics chip. The company's board partners were quick to follow the announcement - which had been expected to take place next week - by releasing products based on the new part.

As expected, the GPU, codenamed R580, contains 36 pixel shader units - existing members of the X1900 family incorporate 48 pixel shaders. The core is typically clocked at 575MHz, with the GDDR 3 memory connected to it running at 600MHz (1.2GHz effective). The X1900 GT supports up to 256MB of memory, half the complement.

All the X1900s contain eight vertex processing units and host a 256-bit external memory bus. All three are compatible with the X1900 CrossFire Edition card for multi-GPU set-ups.

The new chip supports DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 and OpenGL 2.0. It provides high dynamic range anti-aliasing and sports ATI's Avivo video processing pipeline for decoding and encoding HD content.

ATI said X1900 GT-based cards are available now for around $299. Tul, for one, has announced a PowerColor board that utilised the chip, and we expect ATI's other board partners to make similar announcements today. ®