Fall 2003 Video Card Roundup Part I - ATI's Radeon 9800 XT
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on October 1, 2003 3:02 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
The Newcomers
As we briefly mentioned, there are three new products to talk about today – the Radeon 9800 XT, the Radeon 9600 XT and then NVIDIA’s NV38.
The XT line of Radeon 9x00 cards is specifically targeted at the very high end of the gaming market. With AMD and their Athlon 64 FX, Intel and the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, it’s not too surprising to see even more companies going this direction. With an ultra-premium part like the Radeon 9800 XT the profit margins are high and more importantly, the PR opportunities are huge – claiming the title of world’s fastest desktop GPU never hurts.
The effort required to produce a part like the Radeon 9800 XT is much lower than a serious redesign. When making any kind of chip (CPU, GPU, chipset, etc…) the design team is usually given a cutoff point where they cannot make any more changes to the design, and that is the design that will go into production. However, it is very rare that manufacturers get things right on the first try. Process improvements and optimizing of critical paths within a microprocessor are both time intensive tasks that require a good deal of experience.
Once ATI’s engineers had more experience with the R350 core and more time with it they began to see where the limitations of the GPU’s clock speed existed; remember that your processor can only run as fast as its slowest speed path so it makes a great deal of sense to change the layout and optimize the use of transistors, etc… to speed up the slow paths within your GPU. This oversimplified process is what ATI and their foundry engineers have been working on and the results are encompassed in the R360 – the core of the Radeon 9800 XT.
The Radeon 9800 XT is able to run at a slightly higher core frequency of 412MHz, quite impressive for ATI’s 0.15-micron chip (yes, this is the same process that the original R300 was based on). Keep in mind that the Radeon 9800 Pro ran at 380MHz and you’ll see that this 8% increase in clock speed is beginning to reach the limits of what ATI can do at 0.15-micron.
The Radeon 9800 XT does receive a boost in memory speed as well, now boasting a 365MHz DDR memory clock (730MHz effective) – an increase of 7% over the original Radeon 9800 Pro and an increase of 4% over the 256MB 9800 Pro. ATI was much more proud of their core clock improvements as we will begin to crave faster GPU speeds once more shader intensive games come out.
The Radeon 9800 XT does have a thermal diode (mounted on-package but not on-die) that has a driver interface that will allow the card to automatically increase its core speed if the thermal conditions are suitable. The GPU will never drop below its advertised 412MHz clock speed, but it can reach speeds of up to 440MHz as far as we know. The important thing to note here is that ATI fully warrantees this overclocking support, an interesting move indeed. Obviously they only guarantee the overclock when it is performed automatically in the drivers, as they do not rate the chips for running at the overclocked speed in all conditions.
The OverDrive feature, as ATI likes to call it, will be enabled through the Catalyst 3.8 drivers and we’ll be sure to look into its functionality once the final drivers are made available.
The Radeon 9800 XT will be available in the next month or so and it will be sold in 256MB configurations at a price of $499 – most likely taking the place of the Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB.
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Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
I would like to see you guys useStarwars Galaxies: An Empire divided
I'm not sure if there's a benchmark for this game but i think you can come up with something...
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
#69 I agree that those areas should have been explored further, perhaps not in situations where frames were dropping very low but indeed you make a good pointAnonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
Great work, however in the relentless march forward the benchmarks lack the cards to compare the previous generation.For instance I own a Nvidia Ti4600. I'd potentially want to buy something new but to make a decision I want to see how my card performs against the newer cards shown.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
I have just came here from [H]ardOCP to read this article and I noticed something so glaringly obvious im surprised no one has mentioned it.How many of you play games at 1024X768, I know I dont, I play em at 1280X1024 or higher and where has Nvidias biggest drawback been lately, yes thats right you increase the screen size and Nvidia jumps of a cliff whereas ATI walks down a step.
I been a gamer who doesnt use 1024X768 means this review is of no use to me, the drivers used are questionable, the image quality is inferior, the setup is poor, and the results DO NOT compare to other sites (ive checked 4 sites so far not including NV38 part), also after looking over this site I have seen not one advertisement for ATI yet I have seen a few concerning Nvidia.
Anandtech from what I remember used to be impartial this something I dont think they are anymore.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
which bench's did that occur #65? im too lazy to go sorting thru em ;)if that is the case, then that has dodgy drivers written all over it
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
I'm most interested in hearing about MMORPG performance. I know you included Final Fantasy XI in this suite, but I was hoping that you select an established, popular game. MMORPG DX9 titles like Starwars Galaxies or Asheron's Call 2. And MMORPG DX8 titles like Dark Age of Camelot or Anarchy Online. These games represent more closely were MMORPGs are headed in graphics engine development. Upcoming titles like, like Middle-Earth Online (Turbine), D&D Online (Turbine), Everquest 2 (Sony Entertainment), and Mythica (Microsoft).Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
hey i'm interested in the benchmark from simcity4.i find it akward that since i have a radeon 9800PRO in my rig running a athlon 2600+ with 1gb of ram, i usually get 15fps with the updated patches from EA for simcity4. I've been searching around the internet about this problem of why simcity 4 just plain sucks with radeon cards and everyone on the forums says that its EA's fault for the way how they programed it. Anyways, why is it that Anand's benchmark of his radeons are all the way up to 52fps when most of his system setup is close to my specs?....anand? what drivers and patches are you using?
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
How do some cards (mostly nVidia, most evident on the 5600 Ultra) speed up in some benchmarks when AA and AF were turned on? Doesn't that raise a flag immediately?Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
I know that this is all about the newer technology, but it would have been nice if you would have thrown a couple of the older cards in for comparisions sake (and for those without the cash to purchase new cards every 6 months) like the Geforce 4 TI 4600 or 4200 and the Radeon 8500.Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
Any news as to why HL 2 benchmark was not out on 30.09 as it was supposed to?