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
Feature Overview
There are quite a few exciting new features being introduced with ATI's new X1000 series. Of course, we have a new line of hardware based on a more refined architecture. But at the end of the day, it's not the way that a company implements a dot product or manages memory latency that sells product; it's what consumers can do with the hardware that counts. ATI will not disappoint with the number of new features thtat they have included in their new top to bottom family of graphics hardware.
To provide a quick overview of the new lineup from ATI, here are the key featuers of the X1000 series.
Running on a 90nm TSMC process has given ATI the ability to push clock speeds quite high. With die sizes small and transistor counts high, ATI is able to pack a lot of performance in their new architecture. As the feature list indicates, ATI hasn't just waited idly by. But the real measure of what will be enough to put ATI back on top will be how much performance customers get for their money. To start answering that question, we first need to look at the parts launching and their prices.
Along with all these features, CrossFire cards for the new X1000 series will be following in a few months. While we don't have anything to test, we can expect quite a few improvements from the next generation of ATI's multi-GPU solution. First and foremost, master cards will include a dual-link TMDS receiver to allow resolutions greater than 1600x1200 to run. This alone will make CrossFire on the X1000 series infinitely more useful than the current incarnation. We can also expect a better compositing engine built on a faster/larger FPGA. We look forward to checking out ATI's first viable multi-GPU solution as soon as it becomes available to us.
Rather than include AVIVO coverage in this article, we have published a separate article on ATI's X1000 series display hardware. The high points are a 10-bit gamma engine, H.264 accelerated decoding and hardware assisted transcoding. While we won't see transcoding support until the end of the year, we have H.264 decode support today. For more details, please check out our Avivo image quality comparison and technology overview.
There are quite a few exciting new features being introduced with ATI's new X1000 series. Of course, we have a new line of hardware based on a more refined architecture. But at the end of the day, it's not the way that a company implements a dot product or manages memory latency that sells product; it's what consumers can do with the hardware that counts. ATI will not disappoint with the number of new features thtat they have included in their new top to bottom family of graphics hardware.
To provide a quick overview of the new lineup from ATI, here are the key featuers of the X1000 series.
- Fabbed on TSMC's 90nm process
- Shader Model 3.0 support
- Fulltime/fullspeed fp32 processing for floating point pixel formats
- New "Ring Bus" memory architecture with support for GDDR4
- Antialiasing supported on MRT and fp16 output
- High quality angle independent Anisotropic Filtering
- AVIVO and advanced decode/encode support
Running on a 90nm TSMC process has given ATI the ability to push clock speeds quite high. With die sizes small and transistor counts high, ATI is able to pack a lot of performance in their new architecture. As the feature list indicates, ATI hasn't just waited idly by. But the real measure of what will be enough to put ATI back on top will be how much performance customers get for their money. To start answering that question, we first need to look at the parts launching and their prices.
| ATI X1000 Series Features | ||||
Radeon X1300 Pro |
Radeon X1600 |
Radeon X1800 XL |
Radeon X1800 XT |
|
| Vertex Pipelines | 2 |
5 |
8 |
8 |
| Pixel Pipelines | 4 |
12 |
16 |
16 |
| Core Clock | 600 |
590 |
500 |
625 |
| Memory Size | 256MB |
256MB |
256MB |
512MB |
| Memory Data Rate | 800MHz |
1.38GHz |
1GHz |
1.5GHz |
| Texture Units | 4 |
4 |
16 |
16 |
| Render Backends | 4 |
4 |
16 |
16 |
| Z Compare Units | 4 |
8 |
16 |
16 |
| Maximum Threads | 128 |
128 |
512 |
512 |
| Avaialbility | This Week |
11/30/2005 |
This Week |
11/5/2005 |
| MSRP | $149 |
$249 |
$449 |
$549 |
Along with all these features, CrossFire cards for the new X1000 series will be following in a few months. While we don't have anything to test, we can expect quite a few improvements from the next generation of ATI's multi-GPU solution. First and foremost, master cards will include a dual-link TMDS receiver to allow resolutions greater than 1600x1200 to run. This alone will make CrossFire on the X1000 series infinitely more useful than the current incarnation. We can also expect a better compositing engine built on a faster/larger FPGA. We look forward to checking out ATI's first viable multi-GPU solution as soon as it becomes available to us.
Rather than include AVIVO coverage in this article, we have published a separate article on ATI's X1000 series display hardware. The high points are a 10-bit gamma engine, H.264 accelerated decoding and hardware assisted transcoding. While we won't see transcoding support until the end of the year, we have H.264 decode support today. For more details, please check out our Avivo image quality comparison and technology overview.
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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?