Top of the range graphics cards have taken the entire spotlight lately with talks of Quad SLI, GeForce 7950GX2 and issues which users are experiencing with overclocked GeForce 7900GT cards - the talk is very much focused on the high-end nVidia camp at the moment.

This isn't to say that ATI aren't turning out anything to get all excited about, it just means that nobody seems to be paying any real attention to what they are doing right now. For companies like HIS and GeCube though, who only concentrate on ATI graphics cards, it isn't a fun time for them.

So today after putting away all our nVidia graphics cards and cracking open some new ATI cards, that have made their way into our labs recently, we will let both HIS and GeCube be the first to take a run on our new benchmark suite. It has had a few programs kicked out and welcomed some new ones with open arms.

We have the arrival of Lost Coast with HDR enabled and disabled and the departure of Far Cry, since it doesn't serve us well as a VGA benchmark anymore because it is too dependent on the CPU. We would (of course) love to include Oblivion because it's the hottest game of the moment, however due to benchmarking challenges (no way to run consistent benchmark tests), we haven't added it yet but hopefully someone will come up with a benchmarking program for it soon. We'll be adding in a couple new games soon but we are yet to decide what - if you have any suggestions, you are welcome to leave a comment below which we WILL read.

We have with us two Radeon graphics cards today, the HIS X1800GTO and the GeCube X1900GT. Let's check them out individually and then move onto the important performance figures.