ATI Radeon X1000 Series Preview

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Kurtis Kronk
Brian
ATI
Oct. 5, 2005

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Image Quality

Unfortunately I just didn't have enough time to do image quality testing for this preview. However, I will be looking closely at image quality in the full reviews of these cards. One thing I'm particularly interested in is seeing the competition's image quality (7-series). The reason is that I've heard rumors of horrible texture shimmering and just all-around poor texture image quality. In fact, ATI provided me with some videos where they ran timedemos in HL2 and BF2 demonstrating the texture shimmering problem with a 7800GTX, and then they ran the same timedemo on the X1800 XT. Obviously, I will not jump to any conclusions based on their videos alone, but they're not telling me anything I haven't heard elsewhere, so it's worth showing. Click the links below to download the corresponding videos. By the way, excuse the large file sizes, I tried DivX encoding the videos at high quality, but it degraded the quality just enough so that you couldn't really tell the difference between the different cards.

BF2 - 7800 GTX (11.9 MB)
BF2 - X1800 XT (9.77 MB)
HL2 - 7800 GTX (9.83 MB)
HL2 - X1800 XT (9.78 MB)

Closing Thoughts

A few weeks ago ATI launched Crossfire and promised to ship the cards at launch. To put it simply, they failed to deliver. Today ATI is announcing the X1000 series and is launching three cards: the X1800 XL, X1300 Pro and X1300. Again, ATI is promising to "Volume Ship at Launch," but I'm not going to get my hopes up. From my talks with Newegg yesterday, it would seem that ATI is going to at least miss their launch by a little bit - the question is by how much? Unfortunately, all we can do is just wait and see.

Overall, the performance of ATI's new cards was good, but I certainly wouldn't say that they've blown away the competition -NVIDIA was superior in some cases, especially in our Doom 3 benchmark. With that being said, it's hard to judge the cards when I'm not able to do optimal testing. For one thing, there is most definitely a CPU bottleneck as a result of using a 3500+, so I couldn't see drastically different results on the higher-end cards. I'm also dealing with beta drivers, which I can only assume contributed to some of the stability issues and bugs I noticed. Additionally, the performance of the cards will likely be improved with the release of the WHQL certified drivers. Also, you must keep in mind that NVIDIA has yet to release their mid-range and low-end 7-series cards. For the moment, all we can do is compare to their existing products, but the deciding factor in these market segments will obviously be how the competition performs.

Pricing is another important thing to take into consideration. The X1800 XT 256MB is slated to sell at the same price as the card we're comparing it against, the XFX 7800 GTX 256MB. If you want to upgrade to a 512MB card, it will cost you an additional $50. While I wouldn't say it is a necessary upgrade, it is certainly more reasonable than the $100 premium ATI placed on the 512MB version of the X800 XL. Games like Call of Duty 2, which take advantage of 512 MB video memory, are just now starting to appear and it will still be some time before 512 becomes the new 256.

I would have liked to see the X1800 XL priced closer to the $400 mark to better compete with the 7800 GT. The X1600 XT 256MB is priced right in between the 6600 GT and 6800 GT, giving a nice cost to performance ratio. With the X1300 Pro, you get okay performance at low resolutions with low image quality settings, but it will only cost you $150 and you will be able to play the latest games (albeit not in their full glory).

All in all, I'm excited to see ATI step up to the plate and compete with NVIDIA, I just wish they would have done it a little sooner. In the coming weeks I will be re-benchmarking all of these cards with the FX-55 in our test system, and I will cover many more games across many more settings than what we have shown here today. I look forward to seeing how things go with product availability, and I really hope ATI comes through and learns from their mistakes. I also hope to see NVIDIA's competing cards in the mid-range and low-end segments soon.

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Page 11 of 11

Home >>

Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: Re-Introducing R520 / Availability
Page 3: Architecture & New Features
Page 4: Question & Answer Session
Page 5: The Cards
Page 6: Test Setup
Page 7: Benchmarks - Half-Life 2
Page 8: Benchmarks - Day of Defeat: Source
Page 9: Benchmarks - Doom 3
Page 10: Benchmarks - Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
Page 11: Image Quality / Closing Thoughts

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8 User Comments

1 - Posted by Frosty on October 5, 2005 - 5:37 pm

i am gonan keep my 7800gtx thank you very much, i really dont feel the need to upgrade now......

2 - Posted by sean478 on October 5, 2005 - 7:37 pm

Hi :) thanks for the review dude :)

I was wandering if you could email me the bioses for these cards?

i was planing on makeing flash mod guides for them :)

for example x1300np to x1300 pro mod and x1800xl to x1800xt mod ect. :)

my email is rswisfamly@cox.net :)

getting the bioses:

try using a bootable dos disk with flashrom.exe on it
http://www.techpowerup.com/bios/bios/flashrom240.z...
also try ati flash
http://www.techpowerup.com/bios/bios/atiflash309.z...

command to enter: atiflash -s 0 .bin

you could also try dumping the bios from ati tool (try the latest beta)

http://www.techpowerup.com

ati tool/settings/misc./dump bios

btw do you have access to the demos for the x1800s? do you think i could get ahold of them? :)

Edit: you could also try winflash for ati :)
http://www.techpowerup.com/bios/bios/winflash105.z...

3 - Posted by Dyrewolph on October 5, 2005 - 9:27 pm

Haha... hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha hahahahah... oooo that's a good one Kurtis! almost made me wet myself!

4 - Posted by Kurtis on October 5, 2005 - 10:29 pm

hehehe... glad someone catches my little funnies. :-D

of course, it's true... but it sounds funny! ;-)

5 - Posted by Frosty on October 13, 2005 - 7:27 am

it amazes me that with just 16 pipelines they are able to beat the 7800gtx...

6 - Posted by handrail on October 13, 2005 - 10:52 pm

the x1800xt does have a higher mem and clock speed though. maybe they can just muscle their way through to higher performance?

7 - Posted by Brian on October 13, 2005 - 10:54 pm

This is a good read:

http://www.thetechlounge.com/news.php?id=7669

Looks like ATI put a lot of work into the new chip and have plenty of room to grow.

8 - Posted by JGFgKnnI on March 18, 2008 - 11:28 pm

Nice site!

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