ATI's New Radeon X850 and X800 Lines: A Smorgasbord of GPUs
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on December 1, 2004 9:41 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Lightning Fast, and CPU Bound
The high performance of cards like the Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition dictate that, even on today's fastest CPUs, they will be CPU bound at resolutions lower than 1600 x 1200. To prove this we've taken three GPU limited benchmarks, Half Life 2, Doom 3 and Far Cry, and showed their performance scaling vs. resolution using the X850 XT PE on an Athlon 64 4000+:
So what does this tell us? It tells us that these high end cards are CPU bound up until 1280 x 1024. It is only at 1280 x 1024 that the X850 XT PE becomes GPU limited and even more so at 1600 x 1200. It's for this reason that we conducted all of our performance tests today at 1600 x 1200.
ASUS nForce4 A8N-SLI Deluxe Motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 4000+
1GB Corsair DDR400
NVIDIA ForceWare 67.02 Drivers
ATI Beta Catalyst Drivers 8.08-041111a-019256E (no Catalyst version has been assigned to this package yet)
Windows XP Service Pack 2 with DirectX 9.0c
All performance tests were run at 1600 x 1200, some benchmarks were also run at 1600 x 1200 with 4X AA and 8X AF enabled.
To continue our recent trend of looking at head to head comparisons between GPUs first and then looking at the broad spectrum of performance we begin by evaluating the impact of each one of ATI's new GPUs individually starting with the flagship, the Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition.
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Araemo - Thursday, December 2, 2004 - link
While I'm an ATI fan, I'll fully admit that this refresh was disappointing, unlike the poster above who is 'so tired' of people complaining about the X800 being old technology..I seem to recall that being the same complaint leveled against the Geforce3 series back around the same time the (New) 8500 series came out?
And the Geforce 4 MX..
that is still essentially a Geforce 2?
This is what these companies do. This time around, nVidia wins. Next round... who knows?
segagenesis - Thursday, December 2, 2004 - link
I remember when a good SVGA card would have cost $500 or more... prices are all relative. But yeah, it is disappointing that say 2 years ago $400 would have bought you the highest of the highest end and now you would have to spend $500+ to achieve that. Bleech! And why are these companies competing with themselves? (6600GT vs. 6800?)ruxandy - Friday, October 23, 2020 - link
Hehehe... You should see card prices in 2020 :-)))Momental - Thursday, December 2, 2004 - link
#50 I can understand what #47 was saying about being "brainwashed". It wasn't too long ago when $350 really woulda gotten you the SuperDuper Ultra MackDog 730Xi 120G viddy card. It's like the price of gas: I can remember when I thought $1.83 per gallon was highway robbery and now, when I see $2.09, I practically run over joggers as I cross the sidewalk to be next in line at the pump. Knowhuddamean? ;)We're all so used to thinking that $350 is a "great" price whereas 3 years ago, we woulda been hard-pressed to spend that much. But, who am I kiddin'? I'd gladly fork over #349.95 plus shipping for a card that allowed me to fly with my hair on fire down some zombie-infested corridor with hellspawns in tow if I knew it'd get me an excellent frame rate! :D
xsilver - Thursday, December 2, 2004 - link
also forgot to add -- I just think that its ATI giving more info on their processess while nvidia just say its a kickass card and keep the manufactuiring secrets to themselvesxsilver - Thursday, December 2, 2004 - link
I would like to ask why ATI has all this hoopla about using TMSC "low k" process or some other crap -- doesn't Nvidia also use TMSC -- therefore they would both have the same processes availble to them? or is TMSC favouring ATI? If I was nvidia and that was the case -- id be pissed and take my buisness elsewhereAtaStrumf - Thursday, December 2, 2004 - link
The whole point of today's launch is the X800 XL. It's a good enough competitor to 6800 GT and that I think is what ATi needed the most. Let's just hope the price is really $350 or less and that we can acctually buy these things soon.And AGP in NOT DEAD! WTF are you talking about man?!? At present ALL AMD market is still 100% pure AGP and not too many people will be switching over to nForce 4 anytime soon, because without SLI there is little point and with SLI it's just too prohibitive due to price (for now) and PSU requirements (forever). 5 molexs just too run a card that's at lest worth running in SLI - not the 6600GT? Mind you I have a VERY good PSU and I don't have 5 spare molexs. Do you?
PCIe won't take off until untill we get a good reason. They wanted to force us by only offering new cards as PCIe, but nVidia screwed them with the bridge chip (6600 GT AGP - ATi only has an old R9800Pro to compete with here) so now they're playing catch up. Looks like they still have some way to go -- january 05. And then before availability picks up, .... man we're looking at spring 05 before ATI gets at lest close to nVidia and then we get R520 with SLI, and a new nVidia lineup ... blah too much of everything. Let's just wait and see. I'm preety happy right now (NF3 250GB,A643200@3400+(220FSB)/R9800Pro), I can wait.
KoolMonkey - Thursday, December 2, 2004 - link
ATI it seems wants to bury AGP but will be forced to release new cards in the spec as the market is still hugley AGP at present and won't change in drastic numbers for quite awhile. I have an ATI X800XT PE AGP card and would have liked to have seen Anandtech include this in their comparisons. Why didn't you include ATI's best AGP card vs ATI's best PCI-E card?Avalon - Thursday, December 2, 2004 - link
Also, forgot to note the X850XL is a PCI-e only part, so that will also be a determining factor in which card you'll buy. Regardless, if it can overclock like I have a good feeling it can, it will be arguably the best bang for the buck card in ATI's arsenal.Avalon - Thursday, December 2, 2004 - link
Brainwashed? What are you talking about? You just admitted the card was the best price/performance ratio of all the current ATI cards, and then go on to say it's not a great card? I guess that means the 6800GT is not a great card either. I'm tired of people complaining about the ATI cards being "old tech". It's a video card. It performs. What else do you want? It's not a great card because it doesn't support SM3.0? Give me a break. A lot of people could care less about that feature. It's certainly not widespread enough for the average gamer to care. If you want SM3.0, get an Nvidia card. Otherwise, the X800XL is very close to the 6800GT in most benchmarks, and is $50 less, PLUS it's a 110nm chip. Slap a good HSF on the thing and you should have some GREAT headroom, assuming the 110nm process isn't a disaster for ATI, which I doubt it'd be, since they've toyed with it before.