ATI Radeon X1000 Series Preview

Reviews: Hardware

Motherboards | Power Supplies | Memory | Systems | Video Cards

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Kurtis Kronk
Brian
ATI
Oct. 5, 2005

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Test Setup

For our preview, we will be using four popular games for benchmarking: Half-Life 2, Doom3, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, and the newly released Day of Defeat: Source. These games vary greatly in their use of shader effects, so our testing should give you a good idea of the performance you can expect in many of the latest games.

I'd like to note that we chose to add Day of Defeat: Source at the last minute when we realized that it was available and that it supported HDR. Whereas we use a batch file to run our Half-Life 2 timedemo, I had no choice but to manually run the timedemo from within the game for Day of Defeat: Source because I couldn't get the timedemo to run from a batch file. The biggest impact with this is that I was unable to disable sound like I do with the batch file for HL2 (-nosound), so performance may be less than what we would see had I been able to batch this benchmark.

The system we are using for benchmarking consists of a Gigabyte K8N-SLI motherboard which utilizes the nForce4 chipset. An AMD Athlon64 3500+ is used along with 1 GB of Corsair PC-3200 XMS XL Pro memory running in dual channel (2-2-2-5 timings). Every component of the system is at stock or default speeds set by the manufacturer.

Windows XP was installed onto a freshly formatted Seagate Barracuda 160 GB SATA hard drive connected via on-chip SATA. All the latest Windows Updates were downloaded and installed. The latest video drivers at the time of testing were installed - Catalyst beta drivers for the ATI cards, Forceware 78.01 drivers for the NVIDIA cards.

In the video card control panel V-SYNC was disabled and the cards were set to "quality" over "performance." For the ATI cards that means the "Texture Preference" and "Mipmap Detail Level" were both set to "High Quality" while Anti Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering were custom for each test. For NVIDIA cards, the "Image Settings" slider was set to "High Quality." V-Sync was disabled for all testing. Everything else was left to the default settings.

Through our testing, we want the cards to display their best image quality as fast as they possibly can. This usually requires a few basic tweaks to the card's settings through the graphics control panel. However, we do not want to go too in depth and start tweaking variables that the average user wouldn't even touch. Our benchmarking results display how well each card performs when displaying the best image quality possible.

To ensure the best possible results, we run each benchmark three times for each test and average the results. All of the games we have used for this preview allow us to play a recorded time-demo, which prints the average FPS (frames per second) when finished running.

Test Computer:

Gigabyte K8N-SLI
AMD Athlon64 3500+
1 GB Corsair TwinX PC-3200 XMS XL Pro Series (Dual Channels @ 2-2-2-5)
Seagate Barracuda 160 GB SATA hard drive (Donated by Seagate)
Antec 480W NeoPower Power Supply (Donated by Antec)
Windows XP Professional SP2 w/ DirectX 9.0c and latest updates (Donated by Microsoft)

When analyzing the performance graphs on the following pages, I will sometimes refer to settings that offer the best gaming experience. To me, a good gaming experience offers the right mixture of speed and image quality as well as smooth gameplay. Playing a game at 50 FPS with smooth edges and crisp textures would offer a better overall gaming experience than playing at 100 FPS with "jaggies,' noticeable texture filtering and bogging-down in certain parts of the map. Personally, I think 40-50 FPS generally allows for a smooth experience and my comments will stem from that belief. Your opinions may differ.

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Page 6 of 11

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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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