ATI officially announced today the highly anticipated Radeon X1900 series of graphics cards, based on the R580 GPU and aiming at the serious gamers and enthousiasts.

ATI claims that the X1900 series deliver three times the shader performance than the previous generation of cards. The parallel architecture -- with 48 pixel shader processors -- promise richscenes, bringing games to life. Combined with the cards? high clock frequencies, the architecture is capable of more than half a TeraFLOP of shader computations.

But the architecture isn?t just about force performance, it also delivers high image quality including the ability to apply advanced features such as antialiasing and high dynamic range lighting simultaneously.

For gamers who want the ultimate in gaming, ATI is also introducing the Radeon X1900 CrossFire for multi-GPU systems. Combined with either the Radeon X1900 XT or Radeon X1900 XTX, the Radeon X1900 CrossFire gives gamers access to even more performance and image quality. According ATI, the XT and XTX are clocked at 625MHz and 650MHz, respectively, with their DDR memory buffers set to run at 1.45GHz and 1.55GHz, respectively. Both chips support up to 512MB of GDDR 3.

The Radeon X1900 XT, Radeon X1900 XTX and Radeon X1900 CrossFire are shipping immediately from ATI and its board partners around the world. The Radeon X1900 XT has a suggested retail price of USD$549 and the Radeon X1900 XTX has a suggested retail price of USD$649. The Radeon X1900 CrossFire has a suggested retail price of USD$599. ATI has already shipped many thousands of Radeon X1900 GPUs to partners and into the channel.

Also launching today is the All-In-Wonder X1900, which joins ATI's multimedia product family . ATI's fastest multimedia video card enables Avivo technologies for the best possible video and image quality. All-In-Wonder X1900 comes bundled with Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 Plus Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0 software .