Packaging

The card itself comes in a relatively small box; nonetheless the box is really packed with goodies. The thing I probably like best about the design is the see through window, through which you get to see the actual card. The bundle is something that Sapphire should be proud of, I have yet to see a company that gives away so many CDs with recent games and programs, you also receive all the cables that you need to get the card going (as well as cables for full ViVo functionality); the case badge is like a cherry on top.

In the bundle, you will find:

• Sapphire Radeon X850XT PE
• DVI to VGA Converter
• Molex Pass-through cable
• Composite cable
• S-Video Cable
• Input cable
• Prince Of Persia Sands of Time
• Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow
• Power DVD
• Power Director
• Sapphire Redline tweaking utility

Specifications

According to ATI:

Technology Features

• Over 160 million transistors
• Sixteen parallel pixel pipelines
• Six parallel vertex processing engines
• 256-bit quad-channel GDDR3 memory interface
• PCI Express® x16 lane native support

SmartShader™ HD

• Full hardware acceleration of Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 programmable vertex and pixel shaders in hardware
• DirectX 9.0 Vertex Shaders
• Vertex programs up to 65,280 instructions with flow control
• Single cycle trigonometric operations (SIN & COS)
• Direct X 9.0 Extended Pixel Shaders
• Up to 1,536 instructions and 16 textures per rendering pass
• 32 temporary and constant registers
• Facing register for two-sided lighting
• 128-bit, 64-bit & 32-bit per pixel floating point color formats
• Multiple Render Target (MRT) support
• Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL® via extensions

SmoothVision™ HD

• 2x/4x/6x Anti-Aliasing modes
• Sparse multi-sample algorithm with gamma correction, programmable sample patterns, and centroid sampling
• Lossless Color Compression (up to 6:1) at all resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions
• Temporal Anti-Aliasing
• 2x/4x/8x/16x Anisotropic Filtering modes
• Up to 128-tap texture filtering per AA sample
• Adaptive anisotropic filtering algorithm with bilinear (performance) and trilinear (quality) options

3Dc™

• High quality 4:1 Normal Map Compression
• Works with any two-channel data format

HyperZ™ HD

• 3-level Hierarchical Z-Buffer with Early Z Test
• Lossless Z-Buffer Compression (up to 48:1)
• Fast Z-Buffer Clear
• Z cache optimized for real-time shadow rendering
• Optimized for performance at high display resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions

VideoShader™ HD

• Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
• FullStream™ video de-blocking technology for Real, DivX, WMV9, and WMV10 formats
• VideoSoap™ noise removal filtering for captured video
• MPEG1/2/4 decode and encode acceleration
• DXVA Support
• Hardware Motion Compensation, iDCT, DCT and color space conversion
• All-format DTV/HDTV decoding
• Adaptive Per-Pixel De-Interlacing and Frame Rate Conversion (temporal filtering)

Display Features

• Dual integrated display controllers
• Dual integrated 10 bit per channel 400 MHz DACs
• Integrated 165 MHz TMDS transmitter (DVI 1.0 compliant / HDMI interoperable and HDCP ready)
• Integrated TV Output support up to 1024x768 resolution
• YPrPb component output for HDTV display connection*
• Single and dual link external TMDS transmitter support for high resolution and/or multi-monitor DVI configurations
• Compatible with ATI’s THEATER™ video decode and capture devices for VIVO (Video Input / Video Output) configurations

Unfortunately, the bundle we received was not the newer version. If you purchase a card now, you should receive a Sapphire Select CD, with a series of games that you can play for a limited time each, and then choose and unlock a game of your choice. This is a nice addition, as you are more likely to find a game that will interest you, and also if you buy two PCI-Express cards for Crossfire, you’re not stuck with the same game bundled with each card. Also, Sapphire’s OC utility called Sapphire TRIXX should be available with new cards.