The Radeon 9800XT graphics card is Creative’s entry into the ATI chipset market. Along with the Radeon 9800XT, Creative also introduced the Radeon 9600 for gaming enthusiasts and the 9200SE card for gamers looking for speed and value for money. With Creative’s new partnership with ATI and their existing partnership with Nvidia the 1981 founded hardware manufacturer will be able to target both the Nvidia and ATI markets.

Nvidia’s initial release of the GeForce FX series may not have gone as smoothly as the leading graphics card developer may have wanted, as the release was dominated by ATI’s 9700 series, which proved it’s self to be the higher performer. Creative were originally expected to be the sole provider of GeForce FX cards for the first two months of the European release, however it never happened and Creative’s GeForce FX series did not arrive until much later in the year. It had been rumoured that Creative would only come out with the high performance GeForce FX cards, but instead came along with the FX5950 Ultra, FX5900, FX5900 and FX5200.

Currently Creative’s ATI range stands at a rather limited but strong product line of cards, aimed at the ultra-gamer, performance enthusiast and budget buyer. At present the competition between Nvidia and ATI remains very tight, with next-gen cards from the two companies not expected until mid 2004. Nvidia’s top performing card, the FX5950 Ultra, has shown to do considerably well in comparison tests against the Radeon 9800XT, but doesn’t seem to be able to break away from the competition enough to make a fundamental difference. Whilst the Radeon 9800XT has still managed to keep a performance edge over the FX5950, it is still an older generation card, which has simply been tweaked to keep ATI in the leader board.