The tussle between ATI and NVIDIA shows no sign of abating, and we hope to bring some sense to it all next month with our definitive monster group test of every chipset on the market. Just before we went to press Sapphire sent us its new X1900 GT card which sports a GPU that goes up against our bang-per-buck GPU of choice (at present) -- NVIDIA's Geforce 7900 GT.

While it was too new for us to find a supplier, by the time you read this you should find it available for around $550 - the same as a 7900 GT. Sapphire's bundle is worth noting as it not only includes CyberLink's PowerDVD 6 and PowerDirector 4 DE but includes a Sapphire Select game (where you can choose one of Tony Hawk's Underground; Prince of Persia: Warrior Within; Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 and Richard Burns Rally). Not only are all these games good (for a change), but you can try each for an hour before you buy and purchase the others at a 25 percent discount. There are also cables for Component, S-Video and Composite out and S-Video and Composite in - note that NVIDIA's cards no longer offer video in.

Also getting more exposure is ATI's AVIVO technology, which offers H.264 high definition decoding and GPU-based transcoding -- which takes the weight off the CPU, for free. NVIDIA makes you pay $20 to $50 for this, depending on which package you choose.

The card itself sports 256MB of GDDR3 RAM with a 256-bit interface and is clocked at 600MHz. The bigger brother X1900 XT has 512MB, which runs at 625MHz. The core clock runs at 575MHz to the XT's 725MHz. There are 36 pixel shaders to the XT's 48. In practice it should perform better in shader-intensive games than NVIDIA, but we've only seen noticeable benefits in the beautiful Oblivion (June 2006, page 103) so far.

Unfortunately, the benchmark scores were disappointing. In Half-Life 2 it scored 64.6fps at 1280 x 1024 and 76.4fps at 1600 x 1200 which is 12fps and 18fps behind the 7900 GT. At Far Cry it was better, managing 60.8fps and 74.9fps compared with the 7900 GT's 59fps and 78fps. However, while the 7900 GT managed to remain playable in Call of Duty 2 at both 1600 x 1200 and 1280 x 1024 with frame rates of 27fps and 36fps, the X1900 GT never scored above 22fps. Although, our benchmarks are punishing with 4x anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering enabled, with full detail settings, a top end card should be able to handle every available game at least 1280 x 1024.

It doesn't knock the 7900 GT off the A-List this month, -- like GeCube's X1800 GTO it's stuck between two Nvidia rocks -- but the extra 2D video features could tip the balance for some.