ATI Radeon x800 Preview

Introduction

Winter is over and as usual it is not only time for warm weather and green leaves on the trees. It is also time for new cards both from NVIDIA and ATI. Earlier in april we posted our first look at the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra and today it is time for us to talk about ATI's new chipset, the x800.

While we unfortunately couldn't get our hands on a GeForce 6800 Ulra for a preview ATI not only provided us with a referenceboard for benchmarking but they also invited us over to Toronto for a week to give us plenty of time to learn more about the new cards.

The Radeon x800 XT Platinum Edition and x800 Pro

With the new cards ATI has moved away from the Radeon 9x00 naming. The new cards are now called Radeon x800 XT Platinum Edition and Radeon x800 Pro.

The x800 XT Platinum Edition are the cards that goes head-to-head with the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra. Just as the 6800 Ultra, the x800 XT Platinum Edition has 16 rendering pipelines, DDR3 memory and high frequencies on both the VPU and the memory. The x800 pro is the little brother and 'only' has 12 rendering pipelines as well as a bit slower memory. Let's take a look at the specs:

With the Radeon 9600 XT ATI started to use a .13 micron process and it is now time for them to move the process to their high-end cards. The process allows ATI to reach their high filrlates and core-clock while still keeping the heat low as well as the wattage needs low. Looking at the transistor count we see that even though the x800 has ~45 million more transitors than the Radeon 9800 XT it still is ~ 60 million less than the GeForce 6800 Ultra. Most of you already know that the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra demands a new 480W powersupply and I know there were rumours that the same would happen with the X800. It is therefore good news that ATI has managed to keep the need to the powersupply at the same level as for the radeon 9800 XT, a 300W powersupply.

On the x800 ATI has decided, just as NVIDIA, to go with the GDDR3 memory.

Without going into any details GDDR3 not only allows for higher clockrates but it also has other minor improvements.

With the NV40, NVIDIA decided to add PixelShader 3.0 support. ATI instead chose to stay with PixelShader 2.0 although the did move up to PS2.0b. They have done some improvements like increasing the instruction lenght from 150 to 1500 but there are no new features. When speaking to them about why they didn't go with PS3.0 they claimed that they didn't think this was necessary right now and that most of the PS3.0 features could be accomplished with PS2.0b anyway. it is hard to speculate right now if this is a bad move or not on their part since we do not know how extensive gamedevelopers will use PS3.0 features in upcoming games but, NVIDIA is definitely working hard in trying to get developers use PS3.0; if only for performance gains.

Looking at the card you noticed that it actually looks almost exactly like the Radeon 9800XT. When packing it to ship it to the next reviewer I actually almost packed the 9800XT instead. The main difference to the Radeon 9800 XT is that it does not have the huge copper-plate on the back of the card. The whole card is a bit easier than the Radeon 9800XT. While NVIDIA went with 2 DVI-connectors ATI still uses 1 VGA and 1 DVI. Since you can use a DVI => VGA adapter I think it would have been nicer if they used 2 DVI connectors instead.