ATI Radeon X1900 Series Preview

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Kurtis Kronk
Brian
ATI
Jan. 24, 2006

Specifications

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Closing Thoughts

It was only a few months ago that ATI unveiled their X1000 Series of video cards. If it seems like it's too soon for there to be a refresh product, it's because there were horrible delays on the X1800, so the launches are a little closer together than you would usually see. That said, I'm not complaining, and I'm sure nobody else minds either (well, at least not consumers).

The X1900 Series which is being launched today consists of 4 cards: Radeon X1900 XTX, Radeon X1900 Crossfire, Radeon X1900 XT, and the All-In-Wonder X1900. After running some preliminary benchmarks, things look somewhat promising for the X1900 XTX, and we haven't even ran Crossfire tests yet. It will be very interesting to see how things look after we run the full gauntlet of tests, including more games (Black & White 2, Riddick, Call of Duty 2) with more resolutions and video quality settings, image quality tests, Crossfire vs. SLI, and of course the mandatory overclocking. Just for kicks, we -might- throw in 3DMark'06 scores, but I'll have to play with it and see if it's at all respectable. We tend to stay far, far away from synthetic benchmarks for video cards especially, but since so many people like to compare 3DMark scores, we're considering using it. That said, if we do use it, it won't factor into our conclusive statements at all.

So what have we learned today? Well, we saw that the 48 pipelines and Fetch4 do actually help in some situations, but so far it seems like it won't always make a difference. As newer games are released that are more aggressive in their use of pixel shaders, however, I think the X1900 XTX will start to shine more. Until I've run the new cards through our full testing suite, however, I'll reserve my judgement. Keep an eye out for the full review in the weeks to come.

We'd like to thank Directron.com for donating the ASUS A8N-SLI Premium Socket 939 Motherboard which we used for testing.

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Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: Introducing the X1900 Series (R580) / Architecture & New Features
Page 3: The Card (X1900 XTX)
Page 4: Test Setup
Page 5: Benchmarks - Half-Life 2
Page 6: Benchmarks - Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
Page 7: Benchmarks - F.E.A.R. First Encounter Assault Recon
Page 8: Benchmarks - Quake 4
Page 9: Benchmarks - Need for Speed Most Wanted
Page 10: Closing Thoughts

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3 User Comments

1 - Posted by J2T on May 31, 2007 - 5:53 am

??? time warp?

2 - Posted by Kurtis on May 31, 2007 - 12:17 pm

i'm sure there was a spam post, then the spam was deleted, leaving a bumped thread. =]

3 - Posted by J2T on June 1, 2007 - 6:07 pm

haha, excuses excuses :)

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