At this past February’s Ultimate LAN at the Texas Gaming Festival ATI was showing off the first consumer-level 512MB graphics card. Today, ATI has released the Radeon X800 XL with a whopping 512 MB of memory goodness, and in case you are wondering, this new 512MB X800 XL uses exactly the same GPU (R430) as the 256MB version. Improvements are great, but what does this really mean for gamers? Are there tangible benefits to be had by simply doubling the card’s memory? Well, I won’t spoil the rest of this review by telling you just yet - we will find out what it means for sure and let you come to your own conclusions after we’ve examined the benchmarks. With that said, it looks like it could potentially be a great thing for the video card and gaming industries.

When you compare the games we have today with what we were playing as little as two years ago, the advances in computer graphics are easy to see. With each new wave of games that hit the market we gain amazing new visual effects, higher quality models and higher resolution textures. With these new games come new demands, which up until this point, haven’t fully been met. Textures have been overflowing into the system memory, resulting in reduced performance where it could be avoided. By doubling the video memory, ATI hopes to get rid of, or at least minimize, that bottleneck.