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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DigitalFreak - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
CPU limited?DRavisher - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
Usually you are not CPU limited at such high resolutions. Though it would of course be possible. But my comment still stands; the XT is not showing any good scaling at higher resolutions in those benchmarks, rather the opposite.raj14 - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
i am not surprised, with 16 Pixel pipelins everybody knowed ATi was going to loose, ATi has Always sucked and continues to do so. even in Cross-FIre radeon 1800XTs won't come near SLied 7800GTXs. hats off to NVIDIA and thumbs down to ATi.utube545 - Tuesday, June 12, 2007 - link
Fuck off you dumbassmlittl3 - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
Excerpt from extremetech.com review of the X1800:"The Radeon X1800 XT fares much better against the GeForce 7800 GTX. It is faster, on the whole, whether you apply AA and AF or not (though the difference is tiny without them). The only reason the 7800 GTX remains less than 20% behind is because of the dominance of Nvidia in Doom 3. Without that game, ATI pulls even further ahead."
"With 8 fewer pixel pipelines, it's impressive to see this difference in performance, even though the X1800 XT runs at a much higher clock speed. We question whether it can be attributed to all the improvements in the new architecture for the sake of per-pipeline efficiency, or if it has more to do with the 25% advantage in memory bandwidth."
The 16 pipes vs. 24 pipes is not enough to draw a conclusion. At this site, the ATI cards wins with 16 pipes in most cases.
Griswold - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
I'm guessing you got your first PC last christmas.
LoneWolf15 - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
Too bad he didn't get his first Speak `n Spell last Christmas, it would have been a more useful gift.mlittl3 - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
I don't understand how Anandtech can complain about no products at launch when they post live review articles when they aren't even remotely ready. I know you guys are doing it because you want to post the article when the other sites do but if it isn't ready, it isn't ready. Come on. You are doing the exact same thing as ATI's paper launches.You have graphs showing the X1800xl beating x1800xt. You say there is good scaling with AA enabled but you don't show the data without AA. You also only tested like 5 games. Where is the 3dmark benches? Where are all the other games?
Anandtech review launch = ATI paper launch
I'm going to another review site. This is abysmal.
mlittl3 - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
Oh and one other thing. The cards picked for each section: budget, midrange, highend seem randomly chosen. Why don't we have 9200, x300, 5200, 6200, x1300 in the low end? 9600, x600, 5600, 6600, x1600 in the mid range? And 9800, x800, 5900, 6800, x1800, 7800 in the high-end? If you can't go back two generations of cards, then show some of the derivatives of last generation at least (xl, xt, xt pe, pro, ultra, etc.). Everything is so scatter-brained here no one can tell what card is faster than what.Go to extremetech.com. They show the ATI cards winning in almost every single test and they also have 3dmark scores. ATI did a great job with 16 pipelines and gives almost 1.5x performance over x800 series and beats the 7800. Don't use this site to determine the winner. Go to multiple sites.
bob661 - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
So you only look for benchmarks that show what you want to see? Besides, I checked extremetech.com and ATI did NOT win all of the benchmarks there. 2 fps is not a win as you will NEVER be albe to tell the difference. Besides, how the hell is 2 fps or even 10 fps worth $100?