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Some time ago, Volkswagen promoted its high-performance hatchback with the “GTI Fast” ad series. The Fast, loosely put, was the bowling-ball sized offspring of a Pokémon and a rejected Mech Warrior character, and would be immediately at home amongst the cover art freaks on any retail video card box. The tagline was “Make friends with your Fast,” although the incentive was dubious: The Fast encouraged the need for speed in ways that caused young males to thoroughly sabotage their relationships with women.

Shift gears to video card upgrades, and The Fast suddenly makes sense. The exorbitant cost of top-tier technology, and the time-sink effect, rarely do anything good for pre-existing relationships.

Time issues are left to the reader, but maybe we can reduce the cost. DirectX 9 has matured, and the accelerator pedal is floored toward DirectX 10 – notably, in the stunning Nvidia G80 core just released, and in the similar R600 core expected from ATi in early 2007. With distractions like these, yesterday’s high-end technologies can be lost in the dust cloud.

The dust cloud is further polluted by a fog of letters. G, O, P, R, S, T, X, and doubtless more to come – no “GTI edition” yet, but maybe Volkswagen is inking a licensing deal. Is the HyperMegaPro GTS-XTP edition a performance king or a drama queen? Nobody knows. The letters were assembled, lottery-style, by marketing interns chained to the wall in Sublevel 17, and were never meant to give useful data. Memo to ATi and Nvidia: Normal people stare at GTO, GTX, XTX, and the like, and mostly see enough HOT, AIR to raise fabric above seventy or eighty wicker gondolas. Clean up your act or we’ll (sedatives administered, back to our regularly scheduled review –The Editors).

So: what card will offer functional value to the enthusiast who has a need for speed, but doesn’t have a spare car payment available as disposable income? Enter ATi with the X1950 Pro.

The new GPU produces mixed reactions. On one hand, “Pro” here does not mean, for example, “9700 Pro”. And unlike the X1900 GT it replaces, the new Pro does not share the screaming R580+ core with the X1950 XT or XTX. Instead, we have the newly released RV570, in an 8-vertex/36-pixel shader configuration and a reduction in thread dispatch capability.

Then again, the deposed X1900 GT was the product of selective feature disabling, and offered nearly the same specs. Think of the RV570 as more of a middle-end Renaissance: DirectX 9 support is in full bloom, visual goodies such as 16x anisotropic filtering and 6x antialiasing neatly guild the lily, and CrossFire has finally risen out of the Dongle Ages. The processing core may contain yesterday’s high-end technology, but our first impression is that the paint is shiny and the odometer shows a low reading.

The Sapphire team evidently agrees with our assessment, and in October released their own X1950 Pro, complete with dual-DVI, a new blue-themed appearance package, and comprehensive support for ATi’s Avivo connectivity features.

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