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
Doom 3
Even the GeForce 6800 GT outperforms ATI’s new highest end $550 offering under Doom 3. The 7% performance lead the 6800 GT holds over the Radeon X850 XT PE is not insignificant. This OpenGL powered, shadow heavy, texture intensive game clearly favors NVIDIA’s architecture, even over all the brute strength ATI can pack into one of their ASICs.
Enabling 4xAA and 8xAF closes the gap between the X850 XT PE and the 6800 GT, as the more expensive card as more memory bandwidth to throw at the problem. It’s hard to keep framerates above a playable 30fps under Doom 3 with these settings, but many of the cards on this list can handle it.
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Booty - Wednesday, December 1, 2004 - link
Yeah, this product naming is getting out of control - I don't even want to take the time to try to get them straight. I'll wait until everything's actually available, then try to see what the best option in each price range is. Right now, though, I have to go lie down - trying to remember what product is which gave me a headache.bob661 - Wednesday, December 1, 2004 - link
#16I would like to know too since we 6800GT's in a CAD environment and haven't had ANY problems with them.
BenSkywalker - Wednesday, December 1, 2004 - link
Any chance of seeing high res testing again?Alphafox78 - Wednesday, December 1, 2004 - link
#9, how is the 6800GT "slightly unreliable"?? Ive had one for months and have no "reliability issues."D0rkIRL - Wednesday, December 1, 2004 - link
I'm looking into that X800 now, as a possible budget upgrade, so I don't have to switch over to nVidia and get the 6600GT AGP.Entropy531 - Wednesday, December 1, 2004 - link
The X800 XL has some potential if it OCs well. The 6800GT is still the best option though, if you go PCI-E.shabby - Wednesday, December 1, 2004 - link
Worst refresh release ever! A minor bump in core/mem does not equal 50 bucks more.Im thinking that the agp x800 cards are not going to fall in price at all, these pcie only cards are not competing against them so it makes sense(for ati) to keep prices high for both the x800 and x850 cards.
Now lets hope nvidia comes out with a 500/1200 6900 ultra :)
istari101 - Wednesday, December 1, 2004 - link
Considering the fact that both ATI and Nvidia are technological think tanks, you'd think they could do a less confusing job of naming their cards. :|flexy - Wednesday, December 1, 2004 - link
pricing for the "high end" cards is utterly ridiculous...the (so called) high-end (X850) which is only a refresh of current tech is totally overprized, has dual slot cooling etc.....And...R520 is already taped out...
Who pays $520 for this stupid card which, not even has SM3.0 and is only marginally better than previous versions ? Retards ?
jkostans - Wednesday, December 1, 2004 - link
I miss the days of $200-$300 video cards being the top of the line (Voodoo2, TNT2, Geforce 1-4). I dunno why anyone would want to spend any more than this on a video card unless they've got money to burn.