Sapphire Technology is now shipping the AGP version of its latest graphics card offering based on the ATI Radeon X1600 Pro graphics chip, which offers support for DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 and utilizes ATI's Avivo Technology.

The Sapphire RADEON X1600Pro AGP features 12 Pixel pipelines, it is equipped with 256MB of DDR2 memory and runs at 500MHz (core) and 400MHz (memory).

Retail versions of these new Sapphire graphics accelerators will ship with multimedia software including PowerDVD and Sapphire Select. Each card is bundled with a DVD containing a selection of games from several software houses. The end customer can play each of the games for a one hour trial before choosing which titles he or she wants to keep and using the activation codes for those titles.

Basic specifications:

Chipset: RADEON X1600 Pro AGP
Engine clock: 500 MHz
Shader units: 12
Memory clock: 800 MHz DDR2
Memory interface: 128-bit
Memory Support: 256
Bus Interface: AGP
Variable display outputs: VGA / DVI / TV out
Max 3D resolution: 2560x1600 (dual-link DVI) 1024 x 768 (TV out)
Hardware Features: DirectX 9ShaderModel 3.0 Software Feature: Avivo