X1800 Cometh ! All hail ati for its bounteous performance !

[woodyear99]

Meh, those X1800 benches aren't that impressive, so wat we gonna see like a 20% boost in performance when ATI sorts out the drivers?

I glad I bought the 7800 GT yes, fit my budget and it looking like it still has decent performance...a few months from now there will be some other card that will blow all these out anyway as we all know hehe.

[W1nTry]

We got some first reviews...

Radeon X1800XT 512MB reviewed

Review Scores too tight, no one kicks another's but

By Fuad Abazovic: Wednesday 05 October 2005, 13:51
ATI FINALLY launched its highly anticipated R520 core and it's finally ready to share the details with the world. The company had many problems and delayed this product massively but now when the cards are out things are going to get better for them.

R520 will have two variations and just as we said in our articles R520XT, Radeon X1800XT will be clocked at 625MHz core and 1500MHz memory and Radeon X1800XL clocked at 500MHz, 1000MHz. The card has sixteen pipelines or sixteen Shader cores - that's how ATI likes to call its pipes nowadays. The chip of sixteen pipelines has 321 million transistors.

ATI taped out its card back in November 2004 and it took it many re-spins to fix all that needed to be fixed. It had some transistor problem that took seven months to be fixed. The chap that fixed it got a nice big bonus, we understand.

Back in late August we learned that ATI will reveal the whole generation of cards in early October and that’s exactly how it happened. ATI also revealed RV530, Radeon X1600 XT or PRO and its entry level RV515, Radeon X1300XT pro or Hypermemory.

Of all the cards it announced today, the Radeon X1800XL and X1300 will be available while it will ship X1800XT one month later in retail. Nvidia will insist that this is a paper launch and we can say that it's kind of right as not all of the products are available, still we saw them up and running so they exist and are just delayed.

We had just enough time to plug Radeon X1800XT clocked at 625/1500 MHz to our test bed and compare it with Geforce 7800GTX clocked at 430MHz core and 1200MHz memory. We used ATI pre release drivers and Nvidia's 78.01 as Nvidia didn’t want to send us its 81.84. Nvidia is not happy with the INQ as it implies that everyone that is not following its PR story tips has been brainwashed by ATI. NV30 all over again.

R520, Radeon X1800XT has a massive dual slot cooler and the air coming from it turns out to be the hottest that we ever experienced. Nevertheless, the card can be heavily overclocked and it turned to be very stable during all of our testing.

ATI used an Ipod-like very fancy looking white cooler and as we said it gets its job done. The card has internal 512 Mbit memory ring and features 512 MB of memory.

Test bed
We used Athlon 4800+ as the fastest CPU that we had in our hands and a DFI Lanparty Nforce 4 SLI motherboard powered with 1GB of Corsair CMX 3200XL Twinix memory. We also used Western Digital 160GB S-ATA hard drive.

We were running our usual test suite that we plan to update with couple of new games, but we just didn’t have time to do it for this specific review. We were running Doom 3, Half Life 2, Far Cry, Counter Strike source, Unreal Tournament and the 3Dmarks and here is what we got.

In Doom 3, Nvidia dominates as it of course designed its chip as MR. Carmack requested it. ATI wins by two frames at 1024x768 while it's losing as much as 10 FPS at 1600x1200.

The tables have turned in Far Cry 1.3 as Nvidia is two FPS faster in 10x7 while ATI is winning the higher resolution by less than one frame, oh dear. ATI is faster in Half Life 2 for a frame or even two but again in 10x7 Nvidia wins by a small margin, by less than a frame.

Counter strike Source test has mixed emotions but Nvidia managed to win 10x7 and 16x12 by a two frames while Radeon X1800XT is faster by two and a half frames at 12x10.

Unreal Tournament is completely on Nvidia's side, but it's again one or two FPS advantage only. When it comes to Doom 3 with 4X FSAA and 8X Aniso, Nvidia wins by a significant ten to twelve frames and this is by far the highest difference that we saw in the entire test. Half Life 2 with 4X FSAA and 8X Aniso is on ATI's side but again it's one of two frames of the difference.

Counter Strike source with 4X FSAA and 8X Aniso shows the same scenario seen before as ATI is faster, just, in 12x10 but again the difference is two to four FPS.

It's interesting to notice that the game had almost the same scores with FSAA and Aniso on and off and it would be a crime not to use those effects when you play.

When it comes to 3Dmark 03 Radeon X1800XT turns out to be faster but not by that much - it's faster in game 2, and again significantly faster in game 4 again in nature test while Nvidia wins the game 3 test by a few frames. ATI can perform just a little bit more single texturing but Nvidia can do a few more multi texturing stuff. Again ATI dominates Vertex shader while Nvidia is almost a twice faster in Pixel Shader test. We wonder why Nvidia wins Shader and loses the Vextex tests and vice versa.

Radeon X1800XT scores almost 9000 in our test bed and it's the fastest 3Dmark05 single score that we've ever seen. It beats Nvidia by a significant 1400 marks but this is just a test not a game. Still people like it, and especially Dell likes this tool. In every single game ATI ends up faster and it's significantly faster in very complex Nature test. When it comes to theoretical numbers you can clearly see that Nvidia and ATI are almost matching there and that explains such tight scores. Nvidia turns out to be significantly faster in Pixel Shader while ATI wins both Vertex Shader tests by a huge margin.

Conclusion
I promised both Nvidia and ATI that if ATI wins I will title the article "R520 Fudo kicks Nvidia's butt" or if Nvidia ends up faster I would write "Nvidia kicks R520 Fudo's butt". I could not use either, as in most of the tests the scores were tight. They were too tight that I just could not give the credit to any of the cards. X1800XT is a fast and a nice card and when it comes to gaming will provide you all that you need. But so will almost the identically performing Geforce 7800GTX. The only difference is that you can buy 7800 GTX now and you could get this kind of performance back in July, while it will take four more weeks to get a new Radeon X1800XT in your machine.

Radeon has 512MB of memory, but Nvidia is coming out with such a card and you can clearly see that 512MB doesn't make any kind of significant difference in all of the tests. As Nvidia likes to say, SLI is still faster than any X1800XT card but ATI's Crossfire is just around the corner.

You can overclock Nvidia but I suspect that X1800XT can go much higher to 700 MHz easily and we will let you know what happens when that takes place. Be aware that whatever you buy is a top notch card and will let you drive your games at sick resolutions and with every, I really mean every effect on.

R520, Radeon X1800XT is finally out but it's too close to Geforce 7800GTX to crown any of the cards as the performance king. X1800XT turns out to be faster in many cases, but do you really care that much about being one to two FPS faster? If you do, the Radeon X1800XT is the card for you but than again you will lose in Doom 3. Whichever you buy, you will be happy.

[Czar]

Well, it's not the G70 killer that many were expecting...but that was a foolish expectation to begin with...the bottom line, it's competitive in the frames per second department and either card will get the job done competently. However, the X1800XT gets beaten in the availability and price department; 7800GTX is available now, X1800XT will not be available for a few weeks again...vapourware iymc...I was really hoping that they wouldn't paper launch the damn thing, especially in light of nVidia's recent history of having cards available at launch, in decent quantities, I might add...guess some PR people just don't learn...tsk tsk.

[Beomagi]

I think ti's a nice jump - new drivers pull it up quite well, and that 512 MB buffer WILL come up for some of the heavy and future games. The big problem that's anyone should consider, is that, as czar said,

It is not out yet...

The x1800xl is out, and the x1800xt is DUE this november. Until then, the fight between the 2 companies, is limited to the x1800xl/7800gt arena.
ATI's architecture shift lets the cards perform closer to theoretical maximums, and have a higher than usual core speed.
ATI's big bonus I believe is their memory. Memory speed at the 256 bit width ati is pushing, would help ati out at higher resolutions and AA where the bandwidth is really necessary.

  i own a geforce 6 card , i tell you the SM3.0 support is TOO POOR for it to use many of Sm3.0 features without halving its frame rate , try enabling HDR on a geforce 6 card in any game and the frame rate gets cut into pieces , the geforce 7 is nvidia's first proper implementation of SM3.0.... sm3.0 with shader processing fast enough to use it ..   

This is for the most part TRUE! I've stated this myself on max pc forums in those "make or break" 6800gt/ultra vs x800xt/xl/x850 arguments. It's a PLUS, but in GENERAL, it's also a bottleneck in a few games.
 
Now that we're in another phase of this graphic card era, bottlenecks within the card need to be looked at.

a prime example, is ati bringing out the x800GT
At 8 pipes, and a clock of 470MHz, this card has equal fillrate and shader performance as an x700xt - a card most of us wouldn't use in a regular pc as a big gamer card. Most of us know that the 6600GT was a bit faster and at a comparable price.

It's definitely slower than an x800 vanilla card having 12 pipes - or is it?
The memory on the x800 clocks in at 700MHz, that of the x800GT is 1GHz (and yes they're both 256 bit)
which one is faster? Here's an engineer's answer - depends! Obviously, the 12 pipe card has better shader performance,  but at high resolutions, with games not using much shaders or fill rate, the x800GT can pull ahead. dont you LOVE marketing? until this performance is in the hands of the mainstream gamer cards, to play a game such as say, riddick with the bells and whistles, we're not there yet.

The main benefits of the x1800xt
1. better performance at super high resolutions for gaming
2. larger buffer for better textures, in a couple present games, and fiture games
3. Avivo - video acceleration fo upcoming video standards. This is a good thing
4. dual link dvi standard - those of us that like large screens - like apple's 30" monster, can use 2 with this card.
5. physics - yes, this card actually can manage some physics

The main messups
1. master cards for xfire cost about $50 more, and will be out AFTER this
2. expensive - the x1800xl, is selling for the price of the 7800gtx atm - ouch!
3. too late! nvidia's update cycle is almost here! the last two rounds were, the 6800s vs x800s/x850s. then the 7800s vs nada. No company sits on their duffs for a year. and hearing about ati's 580 before the 520's are in quantity add insult to injury to us consumers.

still surely a couple of you can see where a card like this would be great for The benefits of this card, should have been available to us for some time now.