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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Wellsoul2 - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
I really prefer ATI so this is a disappointment.The 1300 and 1600 are pretty weak.
Might as well keep my 9600XT versus the 1300 - Can still play HL2 with noAA/AF.
The only good thing is maybe the price will drop on the x800/850 line.
The X1800 seems like a good card but why pay that money.
Why bother with the shared memory cards? It's dumb.
Cookie Crusher - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
grammar is actually spelled with an "a" ;)OvErHeAtInG - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
Yes, I have a feeling it'll be one of those cases where they make some editions and fixes to the article. Not that horrible, come on - I do agree the graphs are confusing. More important than graphs of benches, though, for me is the examination of the new AA, the architecture, features etc. Which they did a fair job ofOne remark: the bulleted lists are missing the bullets ... e.g. on page 2 the list of new features.
bldckstark - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
Yes, this is the worst article I have ever seen posted on Anandtech. Will Anandtech continue to be my first stop on my daily hardware fix? Yes. Will I ever make Toms Hardware my first stop again? No. JEEEEZ toms sucks now. If you want to complain about a site as a whole take a look at them. They actually posted articles about how to pick up chicks while gaming! Multiple articles! Good Lord.Houdani - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
Agreed! They did do a nice analysis of the new architecture.Agreed! Where are the bullets? (page 2 feature list, page 7 games list).
tfranzese - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
Everyone's always surpised by this. Why? They've done this countless times now as if it's acceptable. Seriously, don't post an article until it's done and have it proofread carefully before posting it. I honestly doubt your (Anandtech) editors are doing more than just skimming articles sometimes with the number of typos and gramatical errors I come across.I hope the quality goes back up, because it will eventually hurt your reputation.
tfranzese - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
I'll add, Anandtech is almost always my first stop to read a breaking review. Unfortunately, truths such as that below could someday change that. Today, Tech Report had the better article.Not their worst article, but things should be improving - not getting worse.
AnandThenMan - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
I agree. VERY WEAK REVIEW! Terrible. Honestly, what happened? Anandtech is usually much, much more with it. Disappointed.As for the R520, I think I'm like most people and just feel, meh.
misterspoot - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
Since the X1800 SKUs will not have the AGP bridge available (PCI-E) only, that leaves the X1600XT to attempt to give us AGP users a performance boost.Sadly, the X1600XT performs barely on par with a GeForce 6600GT -- which can be had for $150. Then, looking at the performance of the X1600XT, and comparing it to the X850 XT-PE -- surprise surprise, the year-plus old X850 XT is considerably superior.
So if you're like me and built your box nearly 2 years ago, and have no choice but to buy an AGP part, it looks like the X850 XT-PE is going to be the highest performance part you can buy. Looks like I'll be grabbing one this weekend, so my performance in raids on Molten Core is drastically improved (runs a 6600GT at 1600x900 with minimum detail settings -- suffers from mid 20fps all the time while trying to tank).
DRavisher - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
The review states: "With its 512MB of onboard RAM, the X1800 XT scales especially well at high resolutions,". From what I see it scales very poorly at high resolutions compared to the 7800GTX 256MB card. Just look at what happens in SC:CT and FarCry. The XT goes from having a substantial lead in 1600x1200 to being about equal with the 7800GTX at 2048x1536.