ATI's Late Response to G70 - Radeon X1800, X1600 and X1300
by Derek Wilson on October 5, 2005 11:05 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Final Words
Today's launch would have been more spectacular had ATI been able to have parts available immediately. Of course, that doesn't mean that their parts aren't any good. As we can easily tell from the feature set, ATI has built some very competitive hardware. The performance numbers show that the X1000 series are quite capable of handling the demand of modern games, and scaling with AA and AF enabled are quite good as well.The one caveat will be pricing. The 7800 GTX is already available at much less than where the X1800 XT is slated to debut. Granted, the 7800 GTX fell from about $600 to where it is today, but the fact of the matter is that until ATI's new parts are in the market for a while and settle into their price points they won't be viable alternatives to NVIDIA's 6 and 7 series parts.
After market forces have their way with ATI and prices come out more or less on par with performance characteristics, the new X1000 lineup will have quite a bit of value, especially for those who wish to enable AA/AF all the time. While the X1800 XL can be competitive with the 7800 GT, it won't matter much if the street price remains at near the level of the 7800 GTX.
Yes, the X1800 XT is a very powerful card, but it won't be available for some time now. With its 512MB of onboard RAM, the X1800 XT scales especially well at high resolutions, but we would be very interested in seeing what a 512MB version of the 7800 GTX would be capable of doing. Maybe by the time the X1800 XT makes it to market we will have a 512MB 7800 GTX as well.
In the midrange space, the X1600 XT performs okay against the 6600GT, but it is priced nearer the 6800 GT which performs much better for the money. Again, testing the lower clocked or smaller RAM parts would give us a much better idea of the eventual value of the X1600 series of parts.
Until we test the extremely low end X1300 parts, we can't tell how competitive ATI will be in the budget space. It certainly is easier to make a card perform worse, but again the question is the price point ATI can afford to set for their parts.
As far as new features go, we are quite happy with the high quality anisotropic filtering offered by ATI and we hope to see NVIDIA follow suit in future products as well. As for ATI's Adaptive AA, we prefer NVIDIA's Transparency AA in both quality and performance. Unfortunately, Transparency AA is only available on NVIDIA's 7 series hardware while Adaptive AA is able to run on all recent ATI products.
In case we haven't made it quite clear, the bottom line is price. The X1600 and X1300 cards will have to sell for much less than they are currently listed in order to be at all useful. API support is on par, but as developers get time with hardware we will be very interested to see where the performance trend takes us. The features both parts offer are quite similar with the only major advantage in ATI's court with their angle independent AF mode. CrossFire won't be here for at least another month or two, but when it does we will certainly revisit the NVIDIA vs. ATI multi-GPU competition. The newer version of CrossFire looks to fix many of the problems we have with the current incarnation.
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HamburgerBoy - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
Seems kind of odd that you'd include nVidia's best but not ATi's.cryptonomicon - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
I was expecting ATI to make a comback here, but the performance is absolutely abysmal in most games. I dont know what else to say except this product is just gonna be sitting in shelves unless the price is cut severely.bob661 - Thursday, October 6, 2005 - link
LOL! I wouldn't say abysmal. Abysmal would be the X1800XT performing like a 6600GT. The card that doesn't do well is the X1600. X1800's are fantastic performers and certainly much better than my 6600GT at displaying all of a games glory. It just wasn't the ass kicker most everyone hyped it up to be. But technically speaking, it IS an ass kicker.flexy - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
i am a bit disappointed - while at work i overflew the other reviews and then, as the crowning end of my day i read the AT review.I (and probably many others) were waiting for this card like it's the best think since sliced bread - and now, WAY too late we do *indeed* have a good card - but a card which is a contender to NV's offerings and nothing groundbreaking.
Don't get me wrong - better AF/AA is something i always have a big eye on, but then ATI always had this slight edge when it came to AF/AA.
The pure performance in FPS itself is rather sobering - just what we're used to the last few years...usually we have TWO high-end cards out which are PRETT MUCH comparable - and no card is really the "sliced bread" thing which shadows all others.
This is kind of sad.
The price also plays a HUGE factor - and amongst the nice AA/AF features i have a hard time to legitimate say spending $500 for "this edge"...especially as someone who already owns a X850XT .
Not as long i am still playable in HL2/DOD/Lost Coats etc....i dont think i will see FPS fall *that quick* - in other words: I can "afford" to wait longer (R580 ?) and wait for appropriate Game engines (UT2K4 ??) which would make it necessary for me to ditch my X850XT because the X850 got "slow".
D3/OpenGL performance is still disappointing - but then i dont know what NV-specific code D3 uses - but still sad to see this card getting it in the face even if it now has SM3.0 and everything.
Availability:
Well..here we go again....
Bottomline: If i were rich and the card would be orderable RIGHT NOW i would get the XT - no question.
But since i am not rich and the card is *a bit* a disappointment and obviously NOT EVEN AVAILABLE - i will NOT get this card.
It's time to sit back, relax, enjoy my current hardware, watch the prices fall, watch the drivers get better...and then, maybe, one day get one of those or A R580 :)
I WISHED it would NOT have been a day making one "sit and relax" but instead burst out in joy and enthusiasm....but well, then this is real life :)
Wesleyrpg - Thursday, October 6, 2005 - link
summarised very well mate!Regs - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
They were likely better off trying to market that we didn't need new video cards this year and save their capital for next year. These performance charts, especially the "mid range" parts are awfully embarrassing to their company.photoguy99 - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
I assume it was not one of the cards that come overclocked stock to 490Mhz?It seems like it would be fair to use a 490Mhz NVidia part since manufacturers are selling them at that speed out of the box with full warrenty intact.
Evan Lieb - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
"Unless you want image quality."There is no image quality difference, and I doubt you've used either card. Fact of the matter is that you'll never notice IQ differences in the vast majority of the games today. Hell, it's even hard to notice differences in slower paced games like Splinter Cell. The reality is that speed is and always will be the number one priority, because eye candy doesn't matter if you're bogged down by choppy frame rate.
Right now, there is zero reason to want to purchase these cards, if you can even find them. That's fact. Accept it and move on until something else is released.
Madellga - Thursday, October 6, 2005 - link
Quality includes also playing a game without shimmering. I can't get that on my 7800GTX.Before anyone replies, the 78.03 drivers improve a lot the problem but does not fix it.
The explanation is inside Derek's article:
"Starting with Area Anisotropic (or high quality AF as it is called in the driver), ATI has finally brought viewing angle independent anisotropic filtering to their hardware. NVIDIA introduced this feature back in the GeForce FX days, but everyone was so caught up in the FX series' abysmal performance that not many paid attention to the fact that the FX series had better quality anisotropic filtering than anything from ATI. Yes, the performance impact was larger, but NVIDIA hardware was differentiating the Euclidean distance calculation sqrt(x^2 + y^2 + z^2) in its anisotropic filtering algorithm. Current methods (NVIDIA stopped doing the quality way) simply differentiate an approximated distance in the form of (ax + by + cz). Math buffs will realize that the differential for this approximated distance simply involves constants while the partials for Euclidean distance are less trivial. Calculating a square root is a complex task, even in hardware, which explains the lower performance of the "quality AF" equation.
Angle dependant anisotropic methods produce fine results in games with flat floors and walls, as these textures are aligned on axes that are correctly filtered. Games that allow a broader freedom of motion (such as flying/space games or top down view games like the sims) don't benefit any more from anisotropic filtering than trilinear filtering. Rotating a surface with angle dependant anisotropic filtering applied can cause noticeable and distracting flicker or texture aliasing. Thus, angle independent techniques (such as ATI's area aniso) are welcome additions to the playing field. As NVIDIA previously employed a high quality anisotropic algorithm, we hope that the introduction of this anisotropic algorithm from ATI will prompt NVIDIA to include such a feature in future hardware as well. "
Phantronius - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
Unless you a fanboy