ATI's Radeon X800 XL 512MB - A toe in the 512MB pool

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• civilgeek - Thursday, May 5, 2005 - link

• aliasfox - Thursday, May 5, 2005 - link

  Actually, g33k, because nVidia's gotten lazy on the driver side of things, the X800XT is just as fast as the 6800 Ultra DDL in most instances, if not a little faster.
  
  I'd love to see nVidia put as much effort into its Mac OpenGL drivers as it does in its Windows OpenGL drivers... or, conversely, ATi should work as hard on its Windows OpenGL drivers as it does on the Mac.

• nserra - Thursday, May 5, 2005 - link

  512MB card is pointless I agree, but about the DOOM3 ULTRA mode require 512Mb of GPU memory, well maybe it’s correct. Only if you have an nvidia card!
  
  Ati cards use much less GPU memory for the textures and for AA and AF modes.
  
  See "past" bench’s of nvidia 5x00 256MB vs ATI 9x00 256MB, while there was some performance decrease on the nvidia cards on games (max details settings) when going from 256MB to 128MB with the Ati there was no difference.
  
  (Or performance increase if you do the opposite calculations [128 to 256])

• ET - Thursday, May 5, 2005 - link

  BTW, I agree that most evidence seems to point to ExtremeTech having made some mistake, but I love to verify things.

• ET - Thursday, May 5, 2005 - link

  Yes, Anand, if you could do a 2GB test in both High and Ultra modes, I'd love to see it. Thanks!

• geekfool - Thursday, May 5, 2005 - link

  Of course if this article benchmarked something that actually needed this memory, say Celestia (http://shatters.net/celestia/) /w a 64k texture set of Earth, the 512m of ram might have made a difference.

• flatblastard - Thursday, May 5, 2005 - link

  And I'll get more use out of mine over a longer period of time. Ahhhh, I feel better now...

• g33k - Thursday, May 5, 2005 - link

  "1) ATI is better at OpenGL than Nvidia"
  
  I know its been posted before, but you have this statement completely @ss backwards. Nvidia EXCELS at OPENGL. ATI tends to do better at DirectX games.
  
  So if you follow your logic about the Apple platform(which admittedly I know nothing about), the 6800 Ultra would be the best card for the Mac.

• flatblastard - Thursday, May 5, 2005 - link

  Now at least when someone tries to make me feel bad for "wasting" my money on an x850xt pe, I will have someone else to point the finger at.
  Yes, I'm talking to you, whoever read this review and still plans on buying one of these 512MB cards! lol...
  
  You know, I just realized.....with this new x800xl 512mb in the line-up, my x850xt pe starts to look like it was a good decision on my part.....I don't feel so cheated anymore. ;)

• Ged - Wednesday, May 4, 2005 - link

  "However, I disagree with your second post. If it were that simple, why do rendered games need so much RAM? I am pretty sure there are other things stored in video RAM when rendering the OS in 3D including textures. I think the days of the VRAM being used as JUST a frame buffer in the OS are numbered."
  
  It's true that you won't just need to store 'what the screen looks like' in VRAM; however, I cannot see how a clean desktop, which OSX is supposed to have, takes up 256MB or 512MB of VRAM.
  
  Another way to look at the 20 frames at 2560x1600x24bbp is that you could store that many textures at that resolution as well. That should be overkill for a desktop (consider that all the windows are textured they'd probably use the same texture and other objects on the desktop would probably also use the same textures).
  
  Take the best most complex 3D game with many textures on possibly hundreds of objects right now: They don't require over 256MB of VRAM and Apple's sleek, efficient Desktop will?
  
  Plus, with NVIDIA and ATI both using System Memory via PCIe, you don't need as much VRAM for a 2D/3D desktop because the cards could use System RAM (assuming Apple goes to PCIe at some point).
  
  "Graphics Cards for Apple OSX needing 256MB+ or 512MB of VRAM to display the OS well."
  
  I guess I will sum it all up by saying: "I'll believe it when I see it" :)