Near everyone who's posted so far has already commented on the inacuracies, but i can't help but add to it as it's finally clear proof of the shameless bias and fanboy-ish statements that are spouted not only on Toms but every most of the big hardware review sites.
Taking a quick look back down the memory lane, ATI hasn’t had an easy ride over the past four years. In 2004, the GeForce 6800 outperformed the Radeon X800 and brought support for DirectX 9.0c.
The only accurate part of that statement is that the 6800 supported DX9.0c. All of the geforce 6 series cards did. However the only game that supported it at the time was Doom 3, so much like the 8800 series with DX10 it was a marketing ploy to be able to say they had support around for a year before anything really was even able to take advantage of the hardware.
Actually, i suppose it's technically accurate in fanboy logic, since the 6800 and x800 cards had half a dozen different versions released in 2004 and the R423 core x800 pro were about half the price of the 6800 with about the same performance having slightly faster Tfill rate and 2GB/s less memory bandwidth. Despite both cards being launced in may of 2004, it was near impossible to find the 6800 ANYWHERE until jan of 2005, if you could find it the card cost upwards of $550-650. The 6600 GT was the common nvidia card of choice at the time. the R430/R480 x800/x850 card that came out in Dec to counter the 6800 ultra however stomped nvidia. Unquestionably. The R480 was DX9.0B which meant it could run 9.0c games, just not with the full feature set, which didn't really matter as even Doom3 didn't take advantage of all the 9.0c capabilities and having the hardware support actually hurt performance in pretty much every other game out at the time. Thus the x850xt PE ended up performing astoundingly better than nvidia even in their own "the way it's meant to be played" games.
In 2005, the GeForce 7800 slaughtered the Radeon X850
Well the 7800 GTX 256mb card came out in june of 2005, and it hardly slaughtered the x850, it was just able to beat it in some instances but hardly something to boast about.
In october of 2005 the x1800 XL/XT's launched. The XL version stomped the 256mb 7800.
The 7800gtx 512mb card came out in Nov of 2005... which was stompted by the x1800xt. THE COMPARISON OF THE 7800 AND x850 IS IRRELIVENT WHEN THERE HAS BEEN A NEW CARD LAUNCHED.
while the GeForce 7900 trumped the Radeon X1800/1900
Actually the 7900 performed about 10% better than the x1800xt. the x1900xtx beat it out by about 5%, the x1950xtx beat it by 10%. In fact a single x1950xtx was almost dead even with 7800 GT in SLI. The x1950xtx in CF was beat out only by the 7800gtx SLI, 7950x2 SLI though only by about 4%.
So Theo, you have given a shining example of a biased fanboy that picks comparisons that prove your wet dreams justified, while ignoring reality. Either you have been vary creative in how you pair these cards against each other, in which case you're the biased fanboy douchey tool it appears, or you don't bother to check your facts. Either way you obviously should have someone not on the payroll read over your work first.
Having owned the 6600 GT, x800xt x850xt PE, x1800xt, x1950xtx i knew i was justified in laughing until my sides hurt before i checked the actual numbers. Hopefully someone at Toms will fix this offensive article, but seeing how biased toms has become if they can get away with it i don't expect much.