ATI Radeon X1900 Series Preview

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Kurtis Kronk
Brian
ATI
Jan. 24, 2006

Specifications

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Benchmarks - Half-Life 2

Our Half-Life 2 benchmark consists of a timedemo we recorded in the canals level (map d1_canals06). In this timedemo Gordon is in a boat and emerges from an enclosed area into a canal. He maneuvers through several obstacles and eventually comes across some enemies. Some Combine dropships fly by overhead and a couple of Combine soldiers on the ground fire their weapons. There is a lot of water in this scene.

All of the in-game graphical settings were set to high. The "Reflections" drop down menu was set to "Reflect All." The "HDR" drop-down menu was set to "None." Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering were controlled through a batch file which changes the in-game settings. After the batch has finished running, the average frames per second for each test is output to a file. For each test, the timedemo was run three times and the results were averaged.

Half-Life 2 @ 1280 x 960
(Show All Graphs)

No AA / No AF

4x AA / 8x AF

ATI X1900 XTX 512 MB

ATI X1800 XT 512 MB

XFX 7800 GTX 256 MB

ATI X850 XT PE 256 MB

XFX 6800 GT 256 MB

104

102

100

FPS

120

No AA / No AF

4x AA / 8x AF

ATI X1900 XTX 512 MB

ATI X1800 XT 512 MB

XFX 7800 GTX 256 MB

ATI X850 XT PE 256 MB

XFX 6800 GT 256 MB

103

FPS

120

Half-Life 2 @ 2048 x 1536
(Show All Graphs)

No AA / No AF

4x AA / 8x AF

ATI X1900 XTX 512 MB

XFX 7800 GTX 256 MB

ATI X1800 XT 512 MB

ATI X850 XT PE 256 MB

XFX 6800 GT 256 MB

101

FPS

120

No AA / No AF

4x AA / 8x AF

XFX 7800 GTX 256 MB

XFX 6800 GT 256 MB

ATI X850 XT PE 256 MB

ATI X1800 XT 512 MB

ATI X1900 XTX 512 MB

FPS

120

At 1280x960 the X1900 XTX stays in the lead, but the 7800 GTX doesn't trail far behind. At 2048x1536 the X1900 XTX pulls ahead a bit more and then stops in its tracks when errors pop up with 4xAA/8xAF on all the ATI cards. Had the ATI cards not all failed the last test, this benchmark would tell us a lot more about whether having 48 pixel pipelines really helps much. It will be interesting to see how the card performs at more moderate resolutions such as 1600x1200 with all of the settings cranked up, and I'm also curious to see Adaptive AA and High Quality AF performance both speed-wise and visually.

Errors

I'm not sure of the cause, but it is worth mentioning that with all of the ATI cards, when my benchmark batch file for HL2 tried to run our timedemo at 2048x1536 with 4xAA/8xAF, my system would crash to desktop and the following errors would show up. This is not a new problem, since I also noticed it with the X1800 XL in my X1000 series preview, but I still am not exactly sure why it happens. The NVIDIA cards did not have this problem.

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 5 of 10

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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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