ATI Radeon X1950 Pro: CrossFire Done Right
by Derek Wilson on October 17, 2006 6:22 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Power
The current generation of ATI GPUs have been very power hungry. With much higher transistor counts and larger die sizes than competing NVIDIA products, ATI has lagged behind NVIDIA for quite some time in the area of performance per watt. The trade off has been that ATI's parts are more feature complete than NVIDIA's. The price for full time 32bit processing in pixel shaders, angle independent anisotropic filtering, antialiasing of floating point textures, and fine grained branching must be paid somehow. A more power hungry, hotter running chip is certainly a fine trade off to get the performance ATI is capable of delivering.
But with the RV570 that powers the X1950 Pro, we expect to see a little better power consumption. Additional transistors are used for the integrated CrossFire compositing engine, but with fewer pixel shaders and a smaller fab process the X1950 Pro comes in much smaller. R580 weighs in at 384 Million transistors with a 352mm2 die size, while the RV570 GPU is 330 Million transistors and 230mm2. What does all of this translate to in terms of power? Let's take a look.
While the X1950 Pro does show a drop in power from the X1900 GT, the decrease isn't huge. Part of this is due to the fact that the X1950 Pro uses faster memory than the X1900 GT (1380MHz as opposed to 1200MHz). Taking the fact that the X1950 Pro is also higher performance than the X1900 GT, we can certainly be happy with what ATI has delivered. Compared to the 7900 GS, the X1950 Pro is higher performance, but also higher power. We'll have to wait until we see an 80nm high end part to see if there will be a decrease in power where it is needed most.
The fan used isn't really louder than the X1900 GT, but the aural quality isn't as desirable in our opinion. The new fan on the X1950 Pro is a little higher pitched and whiny. We would also love to see the 4-pin fan control employed on the rest of the X1950 series here as well, but the control is more important on a larger fan anyway.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
45 Comments
View All Comments
Spoelie - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
It might be a good idea to use omega's drivers, they do not include catalyst control center but instead use ati tray tools OR the old control panel slightly updated. The only downside to this is that omega's are sometimes one or two releases behind the official ones.if you're not comfortable with omega's drivers (even though they're rock solid :)) you can always download just the driver from ati and install ati tray tools seperatly. it includes every option you need to change driver settings etc but is a sleek minimalist fast 1mb tool :)
JarredWalton - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
Unfortunately, CCC is required to enable CrossFire. I don't know if Omega gets around this requirement somehow, but the standard ATI control panel drivers do not have the CrossFire checkbox anywhere.Aikouka - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
The awkward drivers is actually the main reason I steer clear of ATi still. Also, I get a bit annoyed at the company as they only seem to care about their graphics sector and ignore all of their other products. My ATi TV Wonder Pro Remote Control Edition had so many problems over the years that it was barely worth owning. The Remote Control software just crashes randomly still.Although, I have yet to try the newest version of the software, because I removed the card from my system and it won't let you install the main software without it.
So... with my experience, it leaves me a bit wary.
But I do also have to admit how much I also don't like the newer nVidia control panel, but at least I can go back to the original one with one mouse click :).
DerekWilson - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
Right on.Zaitsev - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
Typo on page 2, third paragraph."It is hard enough for us to sort things out when parts hit the selves at different speeds..."
RamarC - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
suggestion: replace Q4 and B&W2 with Prey and Company of HeroesDerekWilson - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
We are planning on doing exactly that starting in early November.spe1491 - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
Possible typo?-
Basilisk - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
Further clue: try "heartily"; "hardily" means "ruggedly", etc..Spoelie - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
After browsing through some other reviews, all which seem to use the Catalyst 6.9 drivers, it occured to me that they all have significantly lower performance for the ATi camp then what anandtech is reporting.Most reviews place 7900gs performance well above that of the x1950pro in quake 4. Can anyone explain to me why that is, and the supposed opengl/doom3 optimisations are only being seen by AT and not by sites such as bit-tech, hardocp, the tech report, firing squad, etc. ??