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ATI Radeon X1800 GTO 256MB Preview
Introduction
As you may recall, I wrote a preview of ATI's top-of-the-line X1900 XTX at the end of January, about a month and a half ago. In an interesting move, today ATI is taking a small step back and announcing a new card in the X1800 line-up, the Radeon X1800 GTO 256MB PCI-Express. Notice that I said announcing, not launching; I'll come back to that! One might ask why ATI would seemingly make the X1800 series obsolete only to announce another card in that series a month later. I assure you, however, that it was not a random drunken decision by an ATI executive to pump new blood into the X1800 line. Last summer NVIDIA launched their 7 series of video cards, first the 7800 GTX, and then the 7800 GT, and until today, there was no mid-range segment in the new series (and there is still no low-end part). Today NVIDIA is launching three new video cards: the 7900 GTX, 7900 GT, and 7600 GT. Perhaps worried that the 7600 GT would kick their existing X1600 XT's keister, ATI decided to take action and the X1800 GTO was born. In terms of architecture and features, the X1800 GTO is identical to the X1800 XL with the exception of the pipeline count: rather than 16 pipelines, it has 12. When asked whether there was any difference aside from pipelines that distinguish the XL from the GTO, ATI said "it's R520 [X1800 XL] with 75% of the pipes." So basically, it's the slightly slower (or to be PC, "special") sibling to the XL. The product placement for the GTO is below the X1800 XL and above the X1600 XT. See the table below for more details. I have added NVIDIA's new cards' specifications for reference.
As I alluded to earlier, while ATI is officially announcing the X1800 GTO today, they are not going to be launching (in the sense that we're becoming used to, anyways) today. In fact, ATI won't be selling any ATI-brand X1800 GTOs at all; they will only be made by Add-in-Board partners (AIBs). The official word is that you should be able to purchase a GTO made by one of the board partners by March 31st, and I was told that is a conservative estimate - we may start seeing them available in the 2nd or 3rd week of this month. Now, some people may call ATI out for not shipping at launch, but the fact of the matter is that we're getting spoiled with hard launches, and we have to be realistic. Sure hard launches are great, but as long as they don't mess up again like they did with R580, no biggie. What I was told is something to the effect of "Since this isn't the launch of a new generation of cards, there isn't as much need to do a hard launch" and also that "the fact that ATI is not going to be producing any of these cards puts all of the weight on the shoulders of the board partners, and we don't want to impose strict deadlines on them and their processes, we'd rather have a more flexible deadline for a launch like this. We still intend to do hard launches for new-gen products in the future." However, my intuitions tell me that this "soft launch' is a result of ATI getting wind about the 7600 GT and how it performs a little later than they would have liked, and then they scrambled to get out a competing product. That's just a guess, but hey, it sounds good. The last thing I'd like to mention before I move on is something moderately exciting ATI told us about the GTO. Not only is it compatible with the currently available X1800 Crossfire card, but a future driver release (in the near future?) will enable a dongle-less peer-to-peer crossfire configuration with two standard X1800 GTOs on ATI's Xpress 3200 chipset. I asked whether this future driver release would open up the same capability for other X1800 series cards, and I was told no, however, I see no reason why it couldn't be done since it is basically an X1800 XL anyways. Of course, we also have to wonder what the performance implications are of foregoing the dongle connector with a moderately high-end part. Please bear in mind that since this is a preview our goal is not to come to a conclusive statement recommending or not recommending the X1800 GTO, but rather to give some insight as to what we can expect from our full review. Unfortunately, I do not have NVIDIA's new cards on-hand for testing yet, but I'm expecting a 7900 GT and 7600 GT from XFX early next week, but for now I can not offer any direct comparison to the competition. Today I will be comparing the X1800 GTO to the X1600 XT, 7800 GT, and X1800 XT. For my full review of this card I'll have the 7600 GT to compare with, and I'm going to try to get my hands on an X1800 XL as well to see how much difference the pipeline-cut made with an otherwise identical card. I'll also have some various other video cards benchmarked, for reference. In addition to the benchmarking you will see here today, we will test more games, more cards, evaluate image quality in several leading games, and see what the overclocking potential is in our full review. So make sure to keep an eye out for that in just a couple of weeks. Note: Since I've already covered the X1000 series architecture and features in our X1000 Series Preview and X1900 Series Preview, I won't bother copy-pasting the same information in this review and take up another page for nothing.
Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: The Card Page 3: Test Setup Page 4: Benchmarks: Half-Life 2 Page 5: Benchmarks: Quake 4 Page 6: Benchmarks: Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay Page 7: Closing Thoughts 
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