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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ChanningM - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
Where is the AA info and AF info on each test?You list 4x AA for the High End cards at 1600x1200. What about other levels of AA, and various levels of AF?
What about other resolutions? and varying levels of AA and AF at different resolutions and how they compare image quality wise? Okay, so the X1600XT loses at 1280x960 with no aa or af. What about at 1028x764 with AA and AF on? And how does that compare image wise?
Where is the discussion of the results? You just throw out graphs at me, and don't do a real disucssion of them.
In otherwords, where is the rest of the review?
Peldor - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
At this point, a fairly weak review from Anandtech, especially compared to the 7800GTX review when it appeared. Hot Hardware and Tech Report have a bit better coverage IMO.Looking at other reviews around the web, my conclusion is the X1800 cards are viable competitors in performance to the 7800 cards, but the street prices will have to come down near the 7800 cards to be a good value.
The X1600 cards look dead in the water when the 6600GT is under $150 and available in AGP and PCIe, while the 6800GT is far beyond it in the ~$250 segment.
The X1300 cards will only survive in the ~$100 and under market.
ATI is going to need that R580 sooner rather than later.
ChanningM - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
The format of the hardocp articles has grown on me, especially after reading there review + the anandtech + another.There are all kinds of AA and AF options for a reason. They look different. How do the affect peformance though? What works best?
That obviously varies by game, card and resolution. But anandtech and others just don't do the comparisons and I think that makes it difficult to compare. Especially when image quality differences between nvidia and ATI come into play with there various settings.
DerekWilson - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
We will have tables of all the data with all the numbers we ran across all the resolutions with 4xAA and 8xAF up shortly.Quite a bit of data was collected and it has taken some time to organize. You are absolutely right to want more, and we are working on getting it out the door as soon as possible.
Thanks,
Derek Wilson
jeffrey - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
Derek,You really need to evaluate your situation at this website. You are listed as "author" of the "NVIDIA's GeForce 7800 GTX Hits The Ground Running" and "ATI's Late Response to G70 - Radeon X1800, X1600 and X1300" articles. Both of these articles are not up to Anandtech standards and have prompted numerous posts for readers to visit other websites.
I am a long-time reader of the site and am only posting this because I don't want to go anywhere else. I just don't believe that your articles have been up to snuff. The posts for proofreading, wrong labels, incomplete data, etc keep appearing and back up my opinion.
If Anand did not finish your mentoring, please let him know. I know that you put a lot of time and effort into this site, but the two biggest articles of the year for GPU's have left me shaking my head in dissapointment. Please work more with Anand, or do your own homework and read some of his old reviews. If you need another person, or co-author to help you ...please swallow your pride and ask for it.
Respectfully,
Jeffrey
drifter106 - Thursday, October 6, 2005 - link
What credentials do you have to make such an accusation? What indicators do you use to support such a statement? On the contrary, considering the time frame and the rush to provide us with information it is obvious for the coherent, that he has done a good job. Glad to see information provided that will futher support my next video card selection.erinlegault - Thursday, October 6, 2005 - link
That is exactly the point! He shouldn't be rushing. The Techreport and Xbit Labs and many others offer much more informative reviews.Do you want my credentials? It shouldn't matter a report is a report is a report. You don't have to have a PhD or be a CEO to have an opinion. Any person with a University or College degree knows how to write a report that is complete and accurate.
The fact of the matter is Anand's graphics reviews have been not up to par. Period.
Tamale - Saturday, October 8, 2005 - link
lol.. the 'fact' is that this 'opinion' isn't up to 'my standards'sounds like a real fact, folks.. this guy is serios business
Madellga - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/X1800_Serie...">http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/X1800_Serie...AdamK47 3DS - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
I absolutly hate obvious marketing fluff!"16 ultra efficient extreme pipelines"
Those pipelines are about as extreme as a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is extreme. Try harder next time Ati!