ATI officially announced today the introduction of its Radeon X800 GTO premium graphics card, the newest member of the Radeon family of products. The card is designed to give gamers a combination of graphics performance, gaming power and value.

"ATI's new Radeon X800 GTO will let you get into the game and lose yourself in a truly immersive gaming experience with any of today's top titles," said Rich Heye, Vice President and General Manager, Desktop Business Unit. "With the X800 GTO's advanced technology, ATI once again brings gamers great performance, realism and value."

ATI's Radeon X800 GTO combines a 12-pipe 3D engine with 256-bit memory interface and a memory data rate of up to 1GHz. The Radeon X800 GTO's advanced 3D architecture also features the SmartShader graphics technology claimed to be the most-advanced pixel shader engine available.

The new Radeon X800 GTO delivers a new gaming experience through technologies and capabilities that include:

- Massively parallel 3D gaming engine;
- 256-bit GDDR3 memory interface for fast memory speeds;
- SmartShader and SmoothVision graphics technologies for exceptional gaming realism;
- 3Dc compression technology to bring out fine details with minimum memory usage;
- Videoshader with programmable video performance;
- HyperZ for lossless Z-Buffer compression that reduces memory bandwidth by up to 25%.
The Radeon X800 GTO begins shipping immediately and will be available from ATI and its partners including Abit, Asustek, Giga-Byte, MSI, Sapphire etc.

ATI's new card is expected to put some more pressure on Nvidia on many fronts, as ATI has product for almost every segment. Before making the decision to buy twelve pipelines and a decently fast X800GTO card, bear in mind that in three weeks, ATI is preparing to release the much more advanced RV530, Radeon X1600 Shader model 3.0 and full feature set card.