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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Staples - Wednesday, December 1, 2004 - link
Yay for another dumb naming convention. ATi did this intentionally and I hope it turns people off to the brand. They did this with the R300 too but it is even worse this time, they all have 850xx in the name. As for me, I will be sticking with my 6800GT, these new cards are not much faster and the cost for the small performance gain is ridiculous.ShadowVlican - Wednesday, December 1, 2004 - link
thanks for the great review Anand!i particularly liked the way you compared X800XL, X800, and X850Pro... that was very well done and to the point... i've yet to see another review site do that...
however i do wish to see the X700 and 6800 in there
flexy - Wednesday, December 1, 2004 - link
>>>Keep an eye on the x800 XL. That's the interesting card of the bunch. At a $349 suggested MSRP (you know we'll shortly see deals for $300 for the card), this is a great card.
>>>
its not a GREAT card, it merely has the best price/perf ratio of ALL these current cards.
Two/Three years $350 got you the cream of the high-end top-of-the line cards....and TODAY $350 dont even give you a new GPU, just a a refresh of what is BASICALLY the 9700, 9800, X800 etc...all the same old **** with the same shaders and the same tech (basically).
Ironically, i caught myself TOO thinking that $349 is a good price - well just as proof how brainwashed "we" already are....
flexy - Wednesday, December 1, 2004 - link
>>>Maybe they wanted to throw out some product to see how well it sold and in which flavor (AGP or PCI-e)?
>>>
WHAT products ? :)
* nonexistant cards ?
* cards for $500 - $800 ?
ALso..the question AGP/PCI is irrelevant since AGP is dead..sorry to bring the news :)
ViRGE - Wednesday, December 1, 2004 - link
#35, HDTV is MPEG2; both companies have had working MPEG2 decoding abilities for some time. Even the 68xx's broken processor still does MPEG2.skunkbuster - Wednesday, December 1, 2004 - link
#41 i've read an article not too long ago that ati had not updated their openGL drivers in over a year.also, add to the fact that their fireGL video cards, while theoretically ~should~ have had better performance than nvidia's(higher clock speed/emory pipelines), consistantly were OUTPERFORMED(by a good bit too) by nvidia and their older tech.
i'm specifically talking about the fire gl cards that were based off of the 9700/9800 gpu vs. the workstation cards using geforce4/fx gpus.
these reasons make me believe that its lack of driver optomization; that is not using the card's capbilities to full potential more than anything.
this might not conern many people, but it does me, since i work with maya.
realist - Wednesday, December 1, 2004 - link
also ati is coming out with there SLI type ati cards ownage!!carldon - Wednesday, December 1, 2004 - link
I was looking at the SLI benches and the 6600GT in SLI has almost the same performance as the X800XL, X850Pro and of course the X800. The SLI option is great for people who want to upgrade later and also want the SM3.0 option. But the cost of Nforce4 motherboards, if high, could tip the scales in Ati's favour. This is going to an interesting price war over the next month.CD.
Noli - Wednesday, December 1, 2004 - link
Am I right in thinking that nvidia big lead in doom3 performance is because its latest cards carry out that shadow occlusion thingie whereby a the shadows for a lightsource pointing out of a scene aren't calculated? That's a huge advantage and I never got the feeling that ATI was doing the same. If I'm right and ATI OGL drivers are not that bad but it's just the shadows thing, could ATI not steal and implement this idea too?Pollock - Wednesday, December 1, 2004 - link
I'd have to agree that the X800 XL is looking quite nice, especially if they overclock well and have good ram on them. Too bad PCIe is taking forever to get here for the Athlon 64...