Ati strikes back

[coldstorm]

Review site today have posted benchmark data of the  demo of the ati x800 pro and x800xt which will have a MSRP $399 & $499 respetively

Ati hav a platanium exiditon planed

Nvidia have a extreme ultra edition place to kick back some a$$

funny to not the the new ati cards run at 475 & 525 MHz while the nvidia ultra the current top nvidia card runs a 400 MHz .

It is ecpected the tha max speed of this generation of card will top out at 600 MHz

oh well  enough talk onto the numbers

http://www20.tomshardware.com/graphic/2004...0504/index.html                    

[TrinireturnofGamez]

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 ownage ....

and half of you guys went GAGAAa over the 6800 and lost faith in ATI one time....
the X-800 pro has only 12 pipes, the 6800 has 16, the difference is more GPU power than most of the 32mb cards had...

 didn't AMD teach you ANYTHING about clock speed : IT DOESN't MATTER, all that matters is real world performance..

how much i bet joo that te X-800 pro will sell 4 less dan de 6800.. and de X-800XT will sell for de same price                    

[SUPR3M3]

@trini
aye aye aye
Take it down son.
Calm yuhself.                    

[coldstorm]

trinigamer do u even relaise what kind of crap u posting the clock rate to real world speed is when comparing low clock to device with higher clocked ones and getting same speed . ie last gen of ati cards kicked ass becuase of there slower clock speed to nvidia
nvidia got about 200 Mhz playing room with this gen of graphics card while ati got 75 mhz .

also when one talks about ownage look @ 6800 score on COD  it old but ownage

Nvidia going to come strong with the 6900 series we all know it coming dec or early next year
ATI with current line either got to reduce circuitry size or they lose to nvidia                    

[Anonymous]

i put my hand down to that...                    

[strongton]

when the price is supposed to drop on the lower end cards??                    

[Rampage]

FiringSquad conclusion:

Conclusion

It certainly looks like the GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme is NVIDIA’s direct response to the RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition. How successful is the Extreme board at dethroning ATI’s latest flagship board? To us, the results are at best, mixed.

Where NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800 Ultra architecture already takes the performance crown over ATI X800 XT Platinum Edition, the advantage only increases with the 6800 Ultra Extreme board. And when NVIDIA falls behind the RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition, the end result doesn’t change any: the NVIDIA board still loses to the ATI high-end card, only the margins are a little narrower. Is this really worth the time and expense of developing an entirely new limited-edition SKU?

The answer probably depends on which company you prefer. If you’ve favored NVIDIA’s cards in the past, this faster SKU is probably a welcome addition to you, although you’re likely curious to see which board partner(s) are involved, their final board design, and most importantly, the price of a 6800 Ultra Extreme card. Obviously there aren’t many of you who would be willing to pay say, $600 for a board that only ships with a 50MHz core clock frequency increase. If the price premium is held to a minimum however, the Extreme board could be preferable to the 6800 Ultra in the eyes of hardcore enthusiasts, especially if it’s a superior overclocker.

If you’re like the majority who are in the middle, you’re probably pretty skeptical of the 50MHz core increase as well. But at the same time, you’re probably curious to see how board prices pan out. Like the NVIDIA enthusiast, if the price is right and the overclocking is there, the potential could make an 6800 Ultra Extreme upgrade worth it, but don’t forget our performance results with titles such as Far Cry and Tomb Raider.

Quite frankly, it’s too soon to really come to any final conclusions on the GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme in our opinion. We’d like to see how final boards pan out, and just as important, final drivers from both ATI and NVIDIA. Performance can only go up from here from both companies, which is certainly a good thing. But the question is, by how much? On paper it certainly looks like ATI has more performance potential thanks to its higher clock speeds.

We have a feeling though that NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800 GT is going to be NVIDIA’s real breakthrough product on the high end. It sports all the features of NVIDIA’s top-of-the-line GeForce 6800 Ultra, including high-speed GDDR3 memory and 16 pixel pipes, but without the excessive price and higher power requirements found on the Ultra.

Its biggest competition will be the RADEON X800 PRO, and it does fall short of the PRO in performance in some areas, but comes ahead in others. And with both cards boasting similar figures for traditional performance metrics such as fill rate and memory bandwidth, it could be a very tight race between both boards a month or two from now, even once newer drivers are available.

ATI’s real advantage comes in availability however. Whereas GeForce 6800 GT won’t hit retail until the middle of next month, and the 6800 Ultra Extreme is also over a month out, ATI’s RADEON X800 PRO and Platinum Edition boards will already be available on the market. We have a strong feeling that this advantage could sell a lot of $400+ graphics cards for ATI, especially now that they’ve got new board partners onboard like ABIT and ASUS. NVIDIA needs to get its 6800 lineup to market as soon as possible to counter this


Toms Hardware Conclusion:

Conclusion

We haven't even really gotten over NVIDIA's highly impressive introduction of its GeForce 6800 Ultra, and here ATi is already hitting back hard. Thanks to its performance advantage when using anisotropic filtering, the Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition shows its rivals who's boss in this discipline without noticeably sacrificing image quality. Even the much less expensive X800 Pro with its 12 pipes can beat the GeForce 6800 Ultra in some game tests. The price difference of about $100 will certainly be an argument that could win over a number of undecided buyers. When quality-enhancing features like FSAA and anisotropic filtering aren't enabled, however, it is often the GeForce 6800 Ultra that takes first place. Thanks to Temporal AA, though, ATi has a good solution even to this "problem". At any rate, most gamers would be loath to do without anisotropic filtering when using cards of this caliber anyway. But keep in mind that neither of the cards can be termed "slow". We´re talking about differences at very high levels!

In our opinion, the most impressive thing about this card is how little effort ATi needed to reach the performance we saw here. The power consumption of the X800 XT is about the same as that of its predecessors in 3D applications. Additionally, the cards require only one auxiliary power connector and don't need an especially potent power supply like the GeForce 6800 Ultra does. Even the cooler has shrunk a bit, reducing the card's overall weight and ensuring that it would fit even into a mini-ITX case.

The trouble is, there are also drawbacks to the fact that only little effort had to be put into this design. Technologically, ATi's 3D architecture has fallen behind that of NVIDIA, and it is now the green guys that can claim to have the more innovative chip and can rally support for new features. Although the X800 cards can now process longer and therefore more complex shader programs than the R9800XT, they are still limited to 24-bit floating-point precision and ShaderModel 2.0. It remains to be seen whether the GeForce 6800 Ultra, with its support for ShaderModel 3.0 and 32-bit fps precision, will enjoy any tangible performance advantages in practice. For now, ATi's shader quality definitely gives no grounds for complaint. And not to forget 3Dc, which can improve the game experience. Nonetheless the R420 only seems to be a temporary solution. Already, the R480 is rearing its head in the roadmaps, and there's a good possibility that ATi may just introduce the R5xx series instead. And after so much speculation and conspiracy, this author can't help but find himself humming an eerie little melody. You know - the theme from that mystery series with the X in the name...

Until then, the new performance leader is ATi's Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition. Let's just hope that ATi stays true to its word and that these cards will be available in more than just homeopathic doses. Even if only the slightly slower non-Platinum XT versions actually make it to the market in high numbers, these should still be able to keep the GeForce 6800 Ultra in check. Then again, NVIDIA is not just sitting around twiddling its thumbs - it plans to launch the GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme, which will be offered by a number of NVIDIA partners, Gainward and XFX among them. It remains to be seen at what price point these cards will be sold, as the "normal" GF 6800 Ultra's price tag of $499 already makes it just as expensive as the X800 XT Platinum Edition. The direct competitor to the X800 Pro in the $399 market segment will be the new GeForce 6800 GT.



ExtremeTech Conclusion:

This is a preview of ATI's latest GPU. But we're struck by nVidia's not-so-subtle attempt to rain on ATI's parade by abruptly delivering two new cards and a new driver – all at the last possible minute. It's an additional irony that we're testing four nVidia cards and only three ATI cards in this preview of ATI's X800.

All of this last-minute scrambling reminds me of the tag-line from Barry Levinson's brilliant movie Wag the Dog: "What do you do? You change the story." By saddling analysts with these cards and a new driver at the last minute, nVidia tried to deflect the focus from ATI's launch. Perhaps the biggest irony of all is that the new "emergency edition" 6800 didn't really change the story much.

nVidia stated that it simply moved up the roll-out of two speed-binned SKUs to show that the 6800 GPU family would run even with or best ATI's latest greatest in benchmark tests. Unfortunately, it also makes nVidia appears desperate; whether the company is simply desperate for attention or truly worried about the competition is hard to tell.

nVidia has a very good GPU in the 6800, and this part has proven its mettle now twice in benchmark testing. The main issue will be power draw, and whether users want to spend another $60-100 for the power supply to drive a card that uses the Ultra or "Ultra Extreme". The 6800 GT has lower power-draw requirements, and will run fine on a 350-watt power supply.

To be fair, ATI is no saint in this department either, and both companies often wind up looking like a pair of Vaudeville performers cutting in front of each other to try and get the last curtain call. The irony for nVidia this time around however is that by trying to crash ATI's party, nVidia has effectively denied itself the separate coverage these GPUs would have undoubtedly gotten.

Bottom Line Time

At the end of the day, the performance race is once again too close to call. ATI's engine clock difference set an expectation for better performance than we actually witnessed. But to the credit of the nVidia's engineers, the 6800 architecture demonstrated good per-clock efficiency versus ATI, and that has allowed nVidia to run even or slightly ahead on many tests. That said, ATI still holds a small advantage at the1600x1200 race between the 6800 Ultra and the Radeon X800 XT. nVidia does gain a small performance lead with the "Ultra Extreme", though the price of shipping cards at this point is anyone's guess.

If made to choose between the two, we give a slight nod to ATI. At the $500 price-point, the Radeon X800 XT does hold a slight overall performance advantage, particularly at very high resolutions. The lower power-draw requirement appeals to us, though most hardcore gamers, often already have an adequate power supply. nVidia does have Shader Model 3.0 support, although we're taking a wait-and-see attitude about how prevalent games that use it become over the next 12 months. Shader Model 3 support is an interesting feature, and it's clear that the 6800 lays the groundwork for future generations. Truth is, either of these GPUs is going to haul ass, and neither will leave you wanting for performance.

It would appear that both ATI and nVidia are trying to recreate a market that didn't quite fly the last time around. Two generations ago, nVidia created a version of the GeForce4 known as the 4400. It wasn't cheap enough for the midrange, and wasn't quite as fast as the high-end editions.

Given the $200 sweet-spot for price/performance cards, there's kind of a no-man's land that exists between $200 and $450-500. This type of in-between product is often dubbed a "'tweener" by marketing types. Traditionally, 'tweeners get squeezed, and die on the vine. They're too expensive for the budget-minded buyer, and they don't offer the full spread of performance for the hardcore enthusiast. We'll be curious to see if this segment actually develops into something viable. nVidia's 6800 GT is the winner when stacked against the X800 Pro, but again, it's a close race.

We'll be revisiting these cards in the near future, examining new anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering modes, dissecting the drivers a bit more and taking a closer look at video quality.



Beyond3d conclusion:


Conclusion
So, there we have the R420. This part is certainly not revolutionary, it's hardly even evolutionary, but more of a refinement on R300’s weak points, placed on a more advanced process with double the number of pipelines and effectively we have an R300 on steroids! This speaks volumes for R300’s initial design in that it can be scaled to such a degree that it can offer well in excess of three times the performance in many cases of its original incarnation.

While the scalability speaks well of R300’s initial design, you might think the lack of Shader Model 3.0 support doesn’t speak so highly of ATI – seeing as the Shader 3.0 specification had resided, unchanged, in DirectX9 from its introduction you’d probably be forgiven for thinking it would be supported by ATI with R420. From the software perspective ATI’s position is that the vast majority of developers are hardly pushing the limits of Shader 2.0 yet, not for titles in 2004, and even many developers who are working to much longer timescales now, and hence they feel there is still a fair bit of headroom in both what can be done with Shader 2.0 and educating developers on shaders in general. Should developers be providing Shader 3.0 code in the short term, ATI feel confident that their ISV team will be able to provide Shader 2.0 alternatives that have the same output and without loss of performance – so they say.

However, given the choice they probably would have wanted to support Shader 3.0 now, but quite evidently there were some business drivers that suggested they couldn’t – are these drivers down to lack of resources, or simply feeling that what they believe to be true Shader 3.0 support can’t be implemented in current processes? We’ll let ATI’s new CEO, Dave Orton answer that one. However, one thing is clear is that ATI have set up a lot of their engineering resources to be focused on the PCI-Express transition such that they hit the market with an entire line of PCI-Express solutions as soon as PCI-Express is ready to be released.

Looking at the performances of the Radeon X800 boards, in the case of the X800 PRO we can see that even had the X800 XT Platinum Edition not been here the performance increase would have been about what we would see from many previous next generation / refresh launches. In some gaming instances, at least those that are quite intensive, performance increases of beyond 70% are offered and in some shader tests over double the performance can be seen, which bodes well for more shader intensive titles. So. While this may make a respectable upgrade from even a 9800 XT, it would certainly make a huge upgrade in term of for those who are still clinging on to their 9700 PRO’s as the X800 PRO doubles, or even greater, the performance of this board in a wider range of cases.

One thing that you may have noted with the X800 PRO, though, is that the theoretical performance difference to the X800 XT PE is lower than the performance difference seen in some of these tests – indeed, in one or two cases it wasn’t able to show an improvement over the 9800 XT. ATI can map different memory timings within the driver to different modes of operation (for instance, whether FSAA is enabled or not) and understanding the optimal setting for a new chip and board configuration can take time. Obviously the lions share of the understanding of the optimal modes have gone into the high end X800 XT PE and ATI still have to spend more time understanding how the 3 quad operation of the X800 PRO best maps to the memory interface. However, as time goes on ATI will be able to work on these timings more and in a number of cases the performance should move closer to the X800 XT PE and further away from the 9800 XT.

As for the X800 XT Platinum Edition, ATI have managed to repeat the performance improvement that they had with Radeon 9700 by more than doubling the performance of their previous generation. While limitations in the software prevent them from showing that performance differential in many cases, and lack of higher speed memory prevents it with FSAA, it is illustrated in many of the shader tests. Hopefully performance increases like these will spur developers on to have the confidence in offering more immersive, shader intensive titles than there currently are today.

One thing that we also see with both of these boards in a number of cases is that the performance gains over the previous generation are often greater than the shear memory bandwidth increases would suggest. R300’s memory bus was fairly efficient, but relatively slow so one of the key tasks for R420 was to increase the speed, however it also needs to maintain and increase the efficiency. The performances appear to bear out that this has occurred.

Whilst the lack of Shader 3.0 is somewhat disappointing, regardless of how much difference it will make in the short term, the performance to power utilisation is less so. To double performances from the previous generation whilst reducing power consumption is fairly impressive. This also keeps the board to single slot solution which should please Small Form Factor PC owner that still want high end gaming performance.

We are of the understanding that Radeon X800 PRO boards are in production now, and could be shipping this week. Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition boards are presently scheduled to ship two weeks after the PRO.

While this review has been looking at things very much from the isolated view of what ATI has managed to do relative to its previous offerings, how this equates in a competitive environment is a whole different kettle of fish. Hopefully we’ll soon be able to compare and contrast the two architectures of both ATI and NVIDIA’s latest offerings to see where both their relative strong and weak points may lie



AnandTech Conclusion:

Final Words
I don't think anyone thought the race would be this close after what has been going on over the past couple years with ATI and NVIDIA. Clearly, both camps have had their wins and losses, but it is safe to say that ATI comes out on top when it comes to DX9 and PS 2.0 performance, NVIDIA leads the way in OpenGL performance, and NV40 and R420 split the difference when it comes to DX8 (and older) style games. Even though we haven't yet seen the performance numbers from NVIDIA's 6850 Ultra part, it is likely that there will be a price premium that goes along with that performance. On top of that, the 6850 is really just an overclocked 6800 Ultra part. We will take a look at the issue further when we are finally able to run some numbers.

It is very clear that both NVIDIA and ATI have strong offerings. With better competition in the market place, and NVIDIA differentiating themselves by offering a richer feature set (that doesn't necessarily translate into value unless developers start producing games that use those features), consumers will be able to make a choice without needing to worry about sacrificing real performance. Hopefully we will be able to say the same about image quality when we get done with our testing in that area as well.

Of course, we are still trying to gather all the pieces that explain why we are seeing the numbers we are seeing. The problem is really the amount and level of information we are able to gather is based on how the API maps to the hardware rather than how the hardware does things.

The two rather large issues we have encountered when trying to talk about hardware from the software's perspective are the following: it is easy to get lost when looking at performing tasks from slightly different perspectives or angles of attack, and looking at two architectures that are designed to accomplish similar tasks obfuscates the characteristics of the underlying architectures. We are very happy that both NVIDIA and ATI have started opening up and sharing more about there architectures with us, and hopefully the next round of products will see even further development of this type of relationship.

There is one final dilemma we have on our hands: pricing. From the performance numbers from both this generation and the previous generation, it doesn't seem like prices can stay where they are. As we get a better feel for the coming market with the 12x1 NVIDIA offering, and other midrange and budget offerings from both NVIDIA and ATI, there will be so much overlap in price, performance, and generation without a very large gap in functionality that it might not make sense to spend more money to get something newer. Of course, we will have to wait and see what happens in that area, but depending on what the test results for our 6850 Ultra end up looking like, we may end up recommending that NVIDIA push their prices down slightly (or shift around a few specs) in order to keep the market balanced. With ATI's performance on par in older games and slightly ahead in newer games, the beefy power supply requirement, two slot solution, and sheer heat generated by NV40 may be too much for most people to take the NVIDIA plunge. The bottom line is the consumer here, and its good news all around.


HardOCP Conclusion:

The above chart will give you a quick understanding at just how powerful these video cards are when it come to gaming in the real world. Above you can see the IQ settings that we found playable on our test system.

There is a very obvious pattern here; 1600x1200 with AA and AF on the X800XT. Only in one game did we have to play at 1280x1024, and that was only because the game, NFS: Underground did not support 1600x1200 resolution. Otherwise every single game was playable at 1600x1200 with AA and AF! We find this to be nothing short of incredible and frankly we did not think we would see this kind of video card power till possibly later this year.

The Radeon X800Pro comes in second in the pack and did achieve 1600x1200 with AA and AF in a couple of games with the rest being playable at 1280x1024 with AA and AF.

The GeForce 6800Ultra came in third from the top in our testing, as it had only one game that it could run at 1600x1200 with AA and AF. The rest played best at 1280x1024 or 1280x960 with AA and AF. In the case of the new FarCry game that many folks is buzzing about, only 1024x768 MediumAA/4XAF was playable. That said, NVIDIA gave us a newer set of drivers that were outlined to improve FarCry frames per second by 20% by working out some Z culling issues according to NVIDIA. These new v61.11 drivers also were saddled with IQ bugs and we did not feel comfortable testing with them as we would not have suggested them for your gaming experience.


Comparing IQ Technology:

Looking at the Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic image quality between the X800 series and the GeForce 6800Ultra we find them to be very comparable. There is one difference though. The X800 is so powerful, 6XAA is actually a useable Anti-Aliasing setting on the X800 series whereas comparable 8XAA on the 6800Ultra, is basically not usable, as it is too demanding in terms of performance because it is a super-sampling + multi-sampling technique.

The only shader quality differences we noticed were in FarCry where the X800 series is providing much better image quality. Compared to the 9800XT the X800 series have identical AA, AF and shader quality.

Temporal AA is an interesting feature, and one that you will simply have to judge for yourself. Some may like it some may not. Just keep in mind that it does enable VSYNC when it is turned on and if the framerate goes below 60fps it shuts off. Therefore in order to get the most benefit out of it you need to keep the framerate very high, the closer it is to your refresh rate the less shimmering you will notice. We are happy that ATI is evolving new techniques for improving image quality and providing a potentially better AA image quality with no performance hit impact.


Dueling Shaders:

So here we are at the question that we know everyone will be thinking about, what about Shader Model 3.0 versus Shader Model 2.0? Right now it isn’t even exposed on the GeForce 6800Ultra and won’t be until DX9.0c is out. There isn’t much to say except that both will look the same this year unless we see games with true displacement mapping implemented. Technically the X800 series, and going all the way back to the Radeon 9700 series, support point sampled Displacement Maps via N-Patches, while the 6800Ultra supports filtered Displacement Mapping via vertex texture lookups in VS 3.0. But it all depends on what developers use in games. If developers never use it, it is a useless feature. SM3.0 is an extension of SM2.0 and adds mostly performance enhancements, as well as possibly easier programming for developers. Again, it all depends on what the developers do, and we’ll stress again, SM3.0 versus SM2.0 image quality differences is really a non issue currently, and probably will be for this year of next-gen games.


The Bottom Line:

The X800Pro should be selling in major retail online outlets today, May 4th, and selling for an MSRP of $399. The X800XT Platinum Edition will begin shipping to retailers by May 21st and will be sold at an MSRP of $499. As usual, those MSRP prices will deflate somewhat quickly if the supply is available that ATI assures us there is.

When it comes right down to it the X800Pro matches or beats the GeForce 6800Ultra in game performance and IQ. Compare the price, performance, and IQ of the ATI Radeon X800Pro with the GeForce 6800Ultra, and the X800Pro definitely stacks up as the better value than the 6800Ultra. NVIDIA is today launching an even higher clocked Ultra, no doubt in response to the X800XT-PE. We have yet to even see a retail 6800Ultra for any of the partners so currently I would consider these a non-issue. Also, a lower clocked 6800GT is being introduced but this card is simply not currnetly going to play in the same ballpark with the X800 series from ATI.

The Radeon X800XT Platinum Edition goes even further and burns through these games like a hot knife through butter, besting NVIDIA’s 6800Ultra by an easily noticeable real-world margin. If the flagship is what you want, be assured the ATI Radeon X800XT Platinum Edition was the top performer allowing us to play today’s demanding games at higher resolution and quality settings than any 3D graphics accelerator we have ever experienced.

Our Radeon X800 Series VPU Technology article is here for those of you that wish to know more about what is in the silicon.

While we realize that it is not likely that you will own two X800s, both are worthy of our "Must Have" award. The X800Pro and X800XT-Platinum Edition can both easily be called Must Have [Hardware] by the discerning gamer.                    

[Rampage]

ExtremeTech - ATI Attacks nVidia With New X800 XT, Pro
ATI finds itself in the role of incumbent this go-round, and the pressure was really on nVidia to deliver a strong performance. With its GeForce 6800 Ultra, nVidia did just that --now the pressure is back on ATI to maintain the momentum they gained with the R300 generation of GPUs. Was the R300 a glorious fluke or does ATI have another killer 3D GPU in store for us?

Today ATI takes the wraps off of two new GPUs, the Radeon X800 XT and the Radeon X800 Pro, both of which were formerly code-named R420. The Pro has 12 pixel pipes, whereas the XT, the Big Kahuna, has 16 pipes. These are actually the same chips, but the Pro simply has four pipes disabled. We put both through their paces, and it's clear that ATI is still very much in the race. But given the speeds and feeds of the X800 XT, we're left wondering why there wasn't more of a performance gap between it and nVidia's latest and greatest.


Beyond3D - ATI Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition / PRO Review
The reference board itself bears a large resemblance to the Radeon 9800 XT board in its configuration, layout and size, but there are obviously some changes. One thing that is evident is that the RAM chips are housed closer to the core than they have been on ATI's previous boards - presumably this is to reduce trace lengths for the high speed operation of the GDDR-3 modules. A point of curiosity has been the yellow connector at the the back of the board - this is in fact a VIVO connector as some European system manufacturers like to put video inputs on the front panel of their systems, and this connector easily facilitates that. The Rage Theater provides the VIVO functionality on these boards, however this may not be available with all configurations, nor the internal VIVO connector.


[H]ard|OCP - Radeon X800XT-PE and X800Pro Review
The X800XT is a red single-slot single Molex connector AGP8X video card. SFF owners raise up, this card will fit inside with no problem. The yellow connector on the rear of the card is for a composite video-in connector so that you can run a cable to your video capture port on the front of your case if you have one. ATI says this will most likely not be on the shipping cards in North America as it is a more popular feature in Europe.


AnandTech - ATI Radeon X800 Pro and XT Platinum Edition: R420 Arrives
The bottom line is that R420 has the potential to execute more PS 2.0 instructions per clock than NVIDIA in the pixel pipeline because of the way it handles texturing. Even though NVIDIA's scheduler can help to allow more math to be done in parallel with texturing, NV40's texture and math parallelism only approaches that of ATI. Combine that with the fact that R420 runs at a higher clock speed than NV40, and even more pixel shader work can get done in the same amount of time on R420 (which translates into the possibility for frames being rendered faster under the right conditions).


Tom's Hardware - ATi's X800 Pulls Off Another Coup in the Graphics Performance War
In our opinion, the most impressive thing about this card is how little effort ATi needed to reach the performance we saw here. The power consumption of the X800 XT is about the same as that of its predecessors in 3D applications. Additionally, the cards require only one auxiliary power connector and don't need an especially potent power supply like the GeForce 6800 Ultra does. Even the cooler has shrunk a bit, reducing the card's overall weight and ensuring that it would fit even into a mini-ITX case.


[H]ard|OCP - Radeon X800 Series VPU Technology
In the past texture use in games use to be simple. You just had one or two simple textures applied to a polygon. Now with video cards that support pixel shaders developers have found new interesting ways to use textures. Different material properties can be stored in textures along with color information. Because of the use of all these textures it becomes necessary to have good texture compression, else bandwidth and space in local memory would run out quickly. DXTC has been the standard texture compression technique for quite a while now in games. With the increasing use of pixel shaders though DXTC isn’t the most optimal solution all the time. 3Dc was created by ATI to go beyond DXTC’s capabilities and improve upon image quality while using compression.


The Tech Report - ATI's Radeon X800 graphics processors
The folks at ATI have improved mightily on the R300 design with the R420, successfully delivering the massive performance leap necessary to keep pace with NVIDIA's new GPUs. The achievement of ATI's demo team with the Ruby demo is a heckuva reminder that ATI knows what it's doing with DirectX 9-class graphics, and a very strong argument that the X800's new, longer shader instruction limits don't preclude much higher quality graphics in real time than anything we've seen from game developers yet.


Gamers Depot - ATI X800 Knockout Punch
ATI is releasing the R420 in two different flavors – an X800XT Platinum clocked at 520MHz core and 1120MHz GDDR3 memory. The X800 Pro is clocked at 475/900MHz respectively and has 12 pixel pipelines. Neither card is a slouch and as you’ll see in our benchmarks, there are times when the Pro version even surpasses NVIDIA’s lofty 6800 Ultra.


Bjorn3D - X800 Preview
With the Radeon 9600 XT ATI started to use a .13 micron process and it is now time for them to move the process to their high-end cards. The process allows ATI to reach their high filrlates and core-clock while still keeping the heat low as well as the wattage needs low. Looking at the transistor count we see that even though the x800 has ~45 million more transitors than the Radeon 9800 XT it still is ~ 60 million less than the GeForce 6800 Ultra. Most of you already know that the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra demands a new 480W powersupply and I know there were rumours that the same would happen with the X800. It is therefore good news that ATI has managed to keep the need to the powersupply at the same level as for the radeon 9800 XT, a 300W powersupply.


Hot Hardware - ATi's X800 XT & X800 Pro - Heart Burn For The NV40
ATi reclaims highest over all peak memory bandwidth and fill rate with the X800 XT, at 8.32 Gigapixels/sec versus even the GeForce 6800 Ultra Ex at 7.2GP/sec. Additionally, the X800 Pro is within striking distance of the GF 6800U at 5.7GP/sec versus 6.4 for the NVIDIA card. Beyond that, think of these two new products from ATi as build-outs of the scalable architecture of the original R350 but with significant enhancements that alleviate performance bottlenecks, provide better efficiency and new features as well. We'll dig into the chip level architecture a bit shortly. Let's have a closer look at the cards first.


DriverHeaven - ATI X800XT
To demonstrate the power of the new X800 cards ATI have worked with a production company called Rhino FX to product a technology demo called "Double Cross" staring a futuristic style Lara Croft named "Ruby". This demo pushes even the XT800 cards to their full with 400,000 polygons being rendered in each scene. This demo uses multiple light sources as well as many movie based special effects like depth of field to give incredible visuals. To give an indication of relative performance ATI state this runs 2-3x as fast on the X800 series cards as the last generation 9800XT boards.


AScully - ATI Radeon X800 Series Preview
ATI are touting High Definition as the future of gaming. This does not strictly mean they are shooting for HDTV gaming. While this is possible with the X800 series of cards, HD means a better quality of game. "Games with the wow effect." You know the first time you fired up Far Cry and "oohhed" and "ahhed" over the lush landscape and smooth pixel shaded graphics? They want to bring that feeling to everything you play.


Hexus - ATI's Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition
There's nothing like giving the game away on the first page, but there's also no point beating around the bush. X800 XT is all kinds of fast, arriving at that speed using roughly the same methods as 6800 Ultra. It's a GPU of epic performance proportions. Consumer graphics is about to get one hell of a kick up the arse when both GPUs hit retail.


NeoSeeker - ATi R420 Revealed - X800 XT Platinum Edition and X800 Pro Preview
The X800 XT Platinum Edition (which we will simply refer to as the XT from here on) and the X800 Pro look a lot alike; in fact we could not tell the two cards apart visually and had to plug them in to figure out which was which. The X800s are the same size as the 9800XT. The X800 features a similar heatsink to the 9800XT. Something that is surprising is that the back of the card no long has the copper heatsink for the memory. We will see why this is the case later on in the article. The X800 requires only a single molex connector like its predecessor and ATI claims that the X800 will work on a regular 300W powersupply, not a wallet busting 485W one that Nvidia is requesting for the NV40 series.


Lost Circuits
One other interesting feature of the RADEON X800 architecture concerns the Antialiasing techniques used. Among the techniques used are Centroid sampling to avoid bleeding of surrounding colors into the anti-aliased pixel blocks. More interesting is the so-called temporal sampling, which includes programmable sparse sampling patterns that are then alternated. In other words, instead of taking e.g. 8 samples, only four samples out of these eight are taken per frame, however, the sample points will vary in a preprogrammed pattern between frames. That means, that either four sparse samples will alternate with four different sparse samples or else, there will be overlap between the two samples in any possible pattern and degree.


TrustedReviews - ATI Radeon X800 reference boards
Looking at the clock speeds on both the cards, you can see that ATI has really pushed the boat out, especially with the XT flavour. But amazingly, despite the higher clock speeds, ATI has managed to keep the power consumption to a minimum. Even the X800 XT card draws less power than the Radeon 9800XT.                    

[Rampage]

OWNAGE ABSOLUTE OWNAGE ABSOLUTE OWNAGE ABSOLUTE OWNAGE
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 ownage ....

and half of you guys went GAGAAa over the 6800 and lost faith in ATI one time....
the X-800 pro has only 12 pipes, the 6800 has 16, the difference is more GPU power than most of the 32mb cards had...

 didn't AMD teach you ANYTHING about clock speed : IT DOESN't MATTER, all that matters is real world performance..

how much i bet joo that te X-800 pro will sell 4 less dan de 6800.. and de X-800XT will sell for de same price

you're an ass. cant describe you better than that                    

[Rampage]

trinigamer do u even relaise what kind of crap u posting the clock rate to real world speed is when comparing low clock to device with higher clocked ones and getting same speed . ie last gen of ati cards kicked ass becuase of there slower clock speed to nvidia
nvidia got about 200 Mhz playing room with this gen of graphics card while ati got 75 mhz .

also when one talks about ownage look @ 6800 score on COD  it old but ownage

Nvidia going to come strong with the 6900 series we all know it coming dec or early next year
ATI with current line either got to reduce circuitry size or they lose to nvidia

i've looked at over 6 sites that have the benchmarks, and in none of them did the 6800ultra kick as much a$$ in COD as it did in tomshardware. infact in some of the benchmarks the ati card blowout the 6800ultra. word to the wise....do not trust toms. if you doh believe me i doh mind putting the cod benchmarks pics from the other sites right in this thread just to make you look like an a%% and see you cry. that enjoyment will be enough for me for a week                    

[trinigamer]

trinigamer do u even relaise what kind of crap u posting the clock rate to real world speed is when comparing low clock to device with higher clocked ones and getting same speed . ie last gen of ati cards kicked ass becuase of there slower clock speed to nvidia
nvidia got about 200 Mhz playing room with this gen of graphics card while ati got 75 mhz........

Ahem, coldstorm, please don't confuse TrinireturnoftheGamez with me, I haven't posted anything on this matter. Until now.                    

[coldstorm]

sorry i didn't mean u i meant TrinithereturnofGamez                    

[Czar]

All I can say is that I'm simply amazed at what ATI has been able to produce with the R420...I honestly didn't think they'd be able to trump nVidia this time, but it would seem that their decision to stick with Shader 2.0 and optemise it further etc has paid off, much like their R300 decision to go with partial (24-bit) precision over full (32-bit) precision. I'm absolutely impressed. Way to go ATI

Ahem, coldstorm, please don't confuse TrinireturnoftheGamez with me, I haven't posted anything on this matter. Until now.

LMFAO!!!! You right to correct d man dey!!! You definitely don't want to be confused with the likes of him                    

[Crixx_Creww]

not impressed
saw a demo of this so called power, and its so clear that they are really pushing the limit of PS2.0 in a 3.0 world.

and as has eben stated in  few tests. there is a $200 price difference in the ati high and mid end cards but only a 50 mhz speed difference, thats kinda weak, since the speed is what they are trying to hold of over nvidia.

If nvidia... no scratch that., WHEN nvidia decides to take its clock speed up to comparable ati speeds. lol, i fear we may see yet another doubling of performance.

But to be fair, they are prettty even on alot of things. simply because ati wins a few tests and nvidia wins a few.

I will say this though, nvidia is thinking ahead with their 32bit supoprt and ps3 plus DX 10 suppor.
While ati is asking yu to shell out 400 plus US dollars for technology that will not be able to stand the test of time when things change.
AND WE KNOW HOW FAST CHANGE COMES IN OUR DIGITAL WORLD>                    

[Rampage]

steups, man when things actually start using dx10, which aint anytime soon since the nextgen engines using ps2, the 6800ultra wont be able to cut it. is like the fx 5200...support for the dx9 but cant do anything with it. make no sense adding features to fool people and when is time to really use the features it aint gonna do its job properly. i like what ati did and i stand by them on it                    

[Flippant]

what can i say? competition is good. i really must congatulate both ati and nvidia.

nvidia for putting out an evolutionary new design that looks like it has a long upgrade path well into the future.
and ATI for creating an elegant design that perfects its current architecture and manages to use LESS power than its previous top of the line card.
When pci-x come out maybe i can put one of each in my system...
*Drools*                    

[TrinireturnofGamez]

trinigamer do u even relaise what kind of crap u posting the clock rate to real world speed is when comparing low clock to device with higher clocked ones and getting same speed . ie last gen of ati cards kicked ass becuase of there slower clock speed to nvidia
nvidia got about 200 Mhz playing room with this gen of graphics card while ati got 75 mhz .

also when one talks about ownage look @ 6800 score on COD  it old but ownage

Nvidia going to come strong with the 6900 series we all know it coming dec or early next year
ATI with current line either got to reduce circuitry size or they lose to nvidia

coldstorm.. did you read the ENTIRE review..

ATI cards run on the .130 LOW K process, more advanced than Nvidias .130 plain . Thats the reason why they are cooler, need less power, and they will be able to clock higher. The .130 Low K process is still the most advanced process currently used in graphic card production.

 Due to how much COOLer and LESS power the ATI cards [ even at higher than stock speed ] use they will be able to clock MUCh higher in the future revisions of their cards.

 ATi has already stated in their 5xxx cards may use .110 or .90 process technologie.

and did anyone notice? its happening again
 transistors on X-800XT: 160million
                      X-800 pro : 160 million..

we can usume that its the SAME chip but with 4 pipes disabled, possibly we will be able to flash it to unlock the pipes like we can a 9800SE

 its generally the same story all over again, ATi faster for Direct X9 and shader games, Nvidia for openGL and shadowy games . [ CoD is neither openGL or DX9, it uses a hybrid of the 2 in order to get high performance and good graphics ]

and do not forget that NVIDIA DOES NOT MAKE CARDS... these reference cards will NEVER make thier way onto store shelves.... you may find companies like Asus and BFG making cards as fast as refernce but the bulk of them will be slower .                    

[TrinireturnofGamez]

comparing highly clocked devices to lowly clocked ones?

the P4 3.4 GHZ EE... is ALWAYS compared with either the 2.3ghz Athlon FX, or the 2.2ghz A64.

and ownage in COD? the human eye can't see more than 60 FPS.... so who will notice 15 fps differnce @150 FPS?

  and to all those who will shoot down ATI for lack of shader 3.0 support : ATi's quality IS STILL BETTER.. ATi's 96 bit colour quality is BETTER than Nvidias 128bit, the same will go for ATi's 24bit shader precision vs Nvidias 32 bit..
 ATi still has the IQ crown.. you don't need a NEW power supply to use their cards, the card will not generate nearly as much heat as the 6800, the card will not take up a PCI slot like the 6800... The 6800 GT might be a LOW END card to sell at the same price as the X-800 Pro....

   within the next 6 months we probably will see a new line of Low and Medium end cards that are faster than the previous ones and cheaper to produce .                    

[Rampage]

 its generally the same story all over again, ATi faster for Direct X9 and shader games, Nvidia for openGL and shadowy games . [ CoD is neither openGL or DX9, it uses a hybrid of the 2 in order to get high performance and good graphics ]

um, pal. COD uses the q3 engine. quake3 engine is opengl. what shit you talking about hybrid of the dx9 and opengl? you want me hit you some slap or wha?                    

[Chronos]

 its generally the same story all over again, ATi faster for Direct X9 and shader games, Nvidia for openGL and shadowy games . [ CoD is neither openGL or DX9, it uses a hybrid of the 2 in order to get high performance and good graphics ]

um, pal. COD uses the q3 engine. quake3 engine is opengl. what crap you talking about hybrid of the dx9 and opengl? you want me hit you some slap or wha?

LOL, hit him d slap!

 :afro: