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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Gigahertz19 - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
On the last page I will quote"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."
Based on the results in the benchmarks I would say 512MB barely does anything. Look at the benchmarks on Page 10 the Geforce 7800GTX either beats the X1800 XT or loses by less then 1 FPS. SCALES WELL AT HIGH RESOLUTIONS? Not really, has the author of this article looked at their own benchmarks included? When the resolution is at 2048 x 1536 the 7800GTX creams the competition except in Farcry where it loses by .2FPS to the X1800XT and Splinter Cell it loses by .8FPS so basically it's a tie in those 2 games.
You know why Nvidia does not have a 512MB version because look at the results...it does shit. 512Mb is pointless right now and if you argue you'll use it for the future then will till future games use it and then buy the best GPU then, not now. These new ATI's blow wookies, so much for competition.
NeonFlak - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
"In some cases, the X1800 XL is able to compete with the 7800 GTX, but not enough to warrant pricing on the same level."From the graphs in the review with all the cards present the x1800xl only beat the 7800gt once by 4fps... So beating the 7800gt in one graph by 4fps makes that statement even viable?
FunkmasterT - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
EXACTLY!!ATI's FPS numbers are a major disappointment!
Questar - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
Unless you want image quality.bob661 - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
And the difference is worth the $100 eatra dollars PLUS the "lower" frame rates? Not good bang for the buck.Powermoloch - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
Not the cards....Just the review. Really sad :(yacoub - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
So $450 for the X1800XL versus $250 for the X800XL and the only difference is the new core that maybe provides a handful of additional frames per second, a new AA mode, and shader model 3.0?Sorry, that's not worth $200 to me. Not even close.
coldpower27 - Thursday, October 6, 2005 - link
Perhaps a up to 20% performance improvement, looking at pixel fillrate alone.
Shader Model 3.0 Support.
ATI's Avivo Technology
OpenEXR HDR Support.
HQ Non-Angle Dependent AF User Choice
You decide if that's worth the 200US price difference to you, Adaptive AA, I wouldn't count as apparently through ATI's driver all R3xx hardware and higher now have this capability not just R5xx derivatives, sort of like the launched with R4xx feature Temporal AA.
yacoub - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
So even if these cards were available in stores/online today, the best PCI-E card one can buy for ~$250 is still either an X800XL or a 6800GT. (Or an X800 GTO2 for $230 and flash and overclock it.)I find it disturbing that they even waste the time to develop, let alone release, low-end parts that price-wise can't even compete. Why bother wasting the development and processing to create a card that costs more and performs less? What a joke those two lower-end cards are (x1300 and x1600).
coldpower27 - Thursday, October 6, 2005 - link
The Radeon X1600 XT is intended to replace the older X700 Pro, not the stop gap 6600 GT competitors, X800 GT, X800 GTO, which only came into being because ATI had leftoever supplies of R423/R480 & for X800 GTO only R430 cores and of course due to the fact that X700 Pro wasn't really competitive in performance to 600 GT in the firstp lace, due to ATI's reliance on Low-k technology for their high clock frequencies.I think these are sucessful replacements.
Radeon X850/X800 is replaced by Radeon X1800 Technology.
Radeon X700 is replaced by Radeon X1600 Technology.
Radeon X550/X300 is replaced by Radeon X1300 Technology.
X700 is 156mm2 on 110nm, X1600 is 132mm2 on 90nm
X550 & X1300 are roughly around the same die size, sub 100mm2.
Though the newer cards use more expensive memory types on their high end versions.
They also finally bring ATI's entire family as having the same feature set, something that hasn't been seen ever before by ATI I believe. I mean having a high end, mainstream & budget core based on the same technology.
Nvidia achieved this item first with the Geforce FX line.