X1800xt Is A Mc Beast

[Paradoxxx]

BEFORE WE walk into silent weekend we want to let you know about the R520XT performance. The card clocked at 625MHz core and 1500MHZ memory can score 9100 or even more in 3Dmark05.

We learned that ATI can do even more but at this time its cat and mouse game as nvidia equipped its reviewers with its new 81.sometihng driver. this driver is suppose to get some performance but ATI still has some juice to fight it.

We heard that ATI can do as much as 9500 in 3Dmark 05 which is not bad at all, so 10000 screenshot that I saw some time ago means that you can go sky high with overclocking. µ


OMG!!! Ultra rape in dey mc.
I feel i might still buy the GTO2 and wait on the R580, get ORN ATI!

In additional news seems ATi is using a 'smart technique' to assigning jobs to pixel quads.

ATI DOESN’T want to talk about pixels. It wants to talk about Shader processors and ATI actually has four quad pixel Shader cores. This means that four Pixel Shader cores can process four pixels each. When you do the maths, you will get sixteen as a final number of pixels that the R520 can process per clock.

Before the data comes from the setup engine to be processed in the pixel Shader engine, it will meet an "Ultra" threading dispatch processor. It’s a key part of the chip that will tell R520 data where to go, and the data will hear and obey. There is a choice of four quad pixel Shader core or texture address units. Texture addressing Unit will later send its processed data's to texture units and later if not stored in texture cache those data's will go to General Purpose Register Arrays and further. If it sounds complicated that’s because it is.

RV530, the Radeon X1600 has three Pixel Shader cores each, processing four pixels and that’s how you get 12 pipelines or should we say twelve pixels per clock.

The RV515, Radeon X1300 has one Pixel Shader core capable of processing four pixels and that’s how you get four pipelines or should we say four pixels per clock. Now it all kind of makes sense, right?

Each of the Rx5xx chips will have this Ultra threading dispatch processor that will process the data prior to sending them to the pipes. This means that ATI might really do something about multi threading this time. µ


A lil schema


http://www.theinquirer.net/images/articles/r520s.jpg

[mojo]

ploy @ ATi tearing pages from AMD books!

first 90nm vpu process and now an equivalent of quantispeed architecture!

GJ ATi I am really impressed by this ultra gosu tech advancements!

[bushman]

hnmmmmmm i was about to invest my money in a 20" dell monitor [ same money i had saved for 2 x1800xt but hmmm

[Itachi]

omg, ah well this doh concern me, i was goin X800GTO in de first place :( no more dual 7800s

[CRaZYMoFo]

6hrs 37 mins to go
and counting!
i wud stay awake for the deadline buh dat is a waste of my time lol

[Paradoxxx]

hehe, i checking for info already

[w1ntry]

We got some first reviews...
Radeon X1800XT 512MB reviewed

Review Scores too tight, no one kicks another's but

By Fuad Abazovic: Wednesday 05 October 2005, 13:51
ATI FINALLY launched its highly anticipated R520 core and it's finally ready to share the details with the world. The company had many problems and delayed this product massively but now when the cards are out things are going to get better for them.

R520 will have two variations and just as we said in our articles R520XT, Radeon X1800XT will be clocked at 625MHz core and 1500MHz memory and Radeon X1800XL clocked at 500MHz, 1000MHz. The card has sixteen pipelines or sixteen Shader cores - that's how ATI likes to call its pipes nowadays. The chip of sixteen pipelines has 321 million transistors.

ATI taped out its card back in November 2004 and it took it many re-spins to fix all that needed to be fixed. It had some transistor problem that took seven months to be fixed. The chap that fixed it got a nice big bonus, we understand.

Back in late August we learned that ATI will reveal the whole generation of cards in early October and that’s exactly how it happened. ATI also revealed RV530, Radeon X1600 XT or PRO and its entry level RV515, Radeon X1300XT pro or Hypermemory.

Of all the cards it announced today, the Radeon X1800XL and X1300 will be available while it will ship X1800XT one month later in retail. Nvidia will insist that this is a paper launch and we can say that it's kind of right as not all of the products are available, still we saw them up and running so they exist and are just delayed.

We had just enough time to plug Radeon X1800XT clocked at 625/1500 MHz to our test bed and compare it with Geforce 7800GTX clocked at 430MHz core and 1200MHz memory. We used ATI pre release drivers and Nvidia's 78.01 as Nvidia didn’t want to send us its 81.84. Nvidia is not happy with the INQ as it implies that everyone that is not following its PR story tips has been brainwashed by ATI. NV30 all over again.

R520, Radeon X1800XT has a massive dual slot cooler and the air coming from it turns out to be the hottest that we ever experienced. Nevertheless, the card can be heavily overclocked and it turned to be very stable during all of our testing.

ATI used an Ipod-like very fancy looking white cooler and as we said it gets its job done. The card has internal 512 Mbit memory ring and features 512 MB of memory.

Test bed
We used Athlon 4800+ as the fastest CPU that we had in our hands and a DFI Lanparty Nforce 4 SLI motherboard powered with 1GB of Corsair CMX 3200XL Twinix memory. We also used Western Digital 160GB S-ATA hard drive.

We were running our usual test suite that we plan to update with couple of new games, but we just didn’t have time to do it for this specific review. We were running Doom 3, Half Life 2, Far Cry, Counter Strike source, Unreal Tournament and the 3Dmarks and here is what we got.
http://img383.imageshack.us/img383/3535/x18006tb.jpg
http://img383.imageshack.us/img383/9048/x1800comp2vo.jpg
In Doom 3, Nvidia dominates as it of course designed its chip as MR. Carmack requested it. ATI wins by two frames at 1024x768 while it's losing as much as 10 FPS at 1600x1200.

The tables have turned in Far Cry 1.3 as Nvidia is two FPS faster in 10x7 while ATI is winning the higher resolution by less than one frame, oh dear. ATI is faster in Half Life 2 for a frame or even two but again in 10x7 Nvidia wins by a small margin, by less than a frame.

Counter strike Source test has mixed emotions but Nvidia managed to win 10x7 and 16x12 by a two frames while Radeon X1800XT is faster by two and a half frames at 12x10.

Unreal Tournament is completely on Nvidia's side, but it's again one or two FPS advantage only. When it comes to Doom 3 with 4X FSAA and 8X Aniso, Nvidia wins by a significant ten to twelve frames and this is by far the highest difference that we saw in the entire test. Half Life 2 with 4X FSAA and 8X Aniso is on ATI's side but again it's one of two frames of the difference.

Counter Strike source with 4X FSAA and 8X Aniso shows the same scenario seen before as ATI is faster, just, in 12x10 but again the difference is two to four FPS.

It's interesting to notice that the game had almost the same scores with FSAA and Aniso on and off and it would be a crime not to use those effects when you play.

When it comes to 3Dmark 03 Radeon X1800XT turns out to be faster but not by that much - it's faster in game 2, and again significantly faster in game 4 again in nature test while Nvidia wins the game 3 test by a few frames. ATI can perform just a little bit more single texturing but Nvidia can do a few more multi texturing stuff. Again ATI dominates Vertex shader while Nvidia is almost a twice faster in Pixel Shader test. We wonder why Nvidia wins Shader and loses the Vextex tests and vice versa.

Radeon X1800XT scores almost 9000 in our test bed and it's the fastest 3Dmark05 single score that we've ever seen. It beats Nvidia by a significant 1400 marks but this is just a test not a game. Still people like it, and especially Dell likes this tool. In every single game ATI ends up faster and it's significantly faster in very complex Nature test. When it comes to theoretical numbers you can clearly see that Nvidia and ATI are almost matching there and that explains such tight scores. Nvidia turns out to be significantly faster in Pixel Shader while ATI wins both Vertex Shader tests by a huge margin.

Conclusion
I promised both Nvidia and ATI that if ATI wins I will title the article "R520 Fudo kicks Nvidia's butt" or if Nvidia ends up faster I would write "Nvidia kicks R520 Fudo's butt". I could not use either, as in most of the tests the scores were tight. They were too tight that I just could not give the credit to any of the cards. X1800XT is a fast and a nice card and when it comes to gaming will provide you all that you need. But so will almost the identically performing Geforce 7800GTX. The only difference is that you can buy 7800 GTX now and you could get this kind of performance back in July, while it will take four more weeks to get a new Radeon X1800XT in your machine.

Radeon has 512MB of memory, but Nvidia is coming out with such a card and you can clearly see that 512MB doesn't make any kind of significant difference in all of the tests. As Nvidia likes to say, SLI is still faster than any X1800XT card but ATI's Crossfire is just around the corner.

You can overclock Nvidia but I suspect that X1800XT can go much higher to 700 MHz easily and we will let you know what happens when that takes place. Be aware that whatever you buy is a top notch card and will let you drive your games at sick resolutions and with every, I really mean every effect on.

R520, Radeon X1800XT is finally out but it's too close to Geforce 7800GTX to crown any of the cards as the performance king. X1800XT turns out to be faster in many cases, but do you really care that much about being one to two FPS faster? If you do, the Radeon X1800XT is the card for you but than again you will lose in Doom 3. Whichever you buy, you will be happy.

[CRaZYMoFo]

hmmmm
so far i found the 7800gt pwnz the XL, need too see final prices and availability.
1 month to wait on the XT and then more time for price drops? that is difficult
plus driver support...
its too early to tell still oui
more reseaching to be done, in between and during classes lol
:)

[w1ntry]

Umm mofo that is supposed to be the XT not XL... but since the XT isn't available right now it might be the XL unless they got a refernce XT... which I can believe. Now something else u ppl forgetting, this is a DUAL SLOT solution plus its VERY HOT. Its funny to me that Nvidia was the cuprit in those cases with the 59xx and 68xx series... funny now that ATI is the heat culprit and guys lets be honest unless yuh have ac in TRINIDAD yuh machine GO FRY with dat kinda heat in yuh system imagine X1800XT in Crossfire... daz 2x heat plus u loose the 1x PCIe (if yuh mobo have on between the cards) + the PCIe or PCI slot below the second card.... I know pplz doh generally put anything there but its always nice to have the space. I think based on the fact that this is supposed to be the XT and that nvidia's solution was tested with the drivers available NOW (not the 80 series beta drivers which are supposed to increase its performance substantially) that nvida's solution still looks better. My room get up to 94 degrees in the day without meh AC on... can u imagine having a X1800x.. with dat kinda heat? can u spell system LOCK UPS.

[CRaZYMoFo]

i was comparing the XL and the GT, not XL and GTX
the GT owns the XL but only time will tell, things may change due to drivers etc.

is anyone seriously considering going crossfire?

[G_Pinkie]

Me thinks x1000 cards are not viable options right now. Maybe by early next year prices would drop reasonably to compete with nvidia. Also a few drivers later to increase performance abit and whatever bugs concerning these new gpu's.

Bushman is the only man i know sayin he jumpin on crossfire, buh that makes no sense for me atm.

[w1ntry]

*wintry wonders why X1800XT and 7800GTX appears over and over in his post with the red, orange and pink benchmarks* Ah well must be my dislexia or something... cause I seeing XT and GTX (reffering to my post, I take it u didn't look at that??? )

[CRaZYMoFo]

lol oh ho
yea i read ur post but i didnt refer to it
i referred to other reviews lol
small thing

[Paradoxxx]

X1800XT owns, but as pinkie said it just doesn't make sense... R580 immc heard its easier to make and faster with maybe more pipelines.

For now as i mentioned i'll handle on a GTO2. Should have my PC ready by the end of next week.

[CRaZYMoFo]

^^lovely
im still seriously considering going 7800GT or GTX this round
single slot cooling is a big plus for my SFF plans.
well para you know we waiting for pics/benchies/oc stuff whenever u do it

i want to know ur specs :)
spoilt and opi have me feeling bad bout my pent M intel integrated lappy

[Paradoxxx]

the 7800GT is indeed a real good choice, a score of 7gs :) on 3dmark05. I am buying the GTO2 to hold me till next year when i'll look @ selling the GTO2 and buying a R580 or whatever Nvidia has to offfer.

I will just hate to buy a card and have the better model come out for the same price in mere months. ATi really has done alot of changes and I really feel that their next iteration with more pipelines etc is going to be worthy of being in my machine ;)

[Paradoxxx]

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/dis...deon-x1800.html (http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/radeon-x1800.html)

Benchmarks iwmc from a reputable source

[CRaZYMoFo]

good review from Xbit
from the review
ATI RADEON X1800 XT 512MB

Highs:

* Unmatched performance in loads of applications, primarily Direct3D;
* Supreme performance under “high load” with FSAA and anisotropic filtering;
* Alpha-textures antialiasing;
* Avivo video engine and hardware H.264 and other HD formats, such as HD WMV decoding;
* Future proof – 512MB of onboard memory as well as efficient Shader Model 3.0 implementation;
* Support for FSAA with HDR.

Lows:

* Excessive power consumption;
* Dual-slot cooling system;
* Outperformed by competitors in OpenGL and some other titles;
* Drivers still require polishing off;
* Late to market.

ATI RADEON X1800 XL

Highs:

* High performance in loads of applications, primarily Direct3D;
* Normal performance under “high load” with FSAA and anisotropic filtering;
* Alpha-textures antialiasing;
* Avivo video engine and hardware H.264 and other HD formats, such as HD WMV decoding;
* Future proof – efficient Shader Model 3.0 implementation;
* Support for FSAA with HDR;
* Single-slot cooler.

Lows:

* Excessive power consumption;
* Only matches, but does not outperform, rivaling GeForce 7800 GT in majority of applications;
* Outperformed by competitor in OpenGL and some other titles;
* Late to market.


Waiting for a driver update and some comments from consumers :)
im leaning more toward the 7800GT than the GTX now though, also planning a good vid card now and upgrade later but i think i want something a lil higher end than the GTO2. The crazy techie want to flash, OC and mod like a mofo but it all depends on the money oui. The 7800GT easily pwnz the X850XT PE anyway and i studying the heat etc. Going 7800GT will give me more time to save for the next gen stuff :)
I even studying to hold off the X2s...
Decisions decisions

I not seeing any more GTO2 on newegg....hmmm
waiting for more NV Tforce microatx mobos

also waiting for a certain muslim to flash and OC a certain sapphire vid card :)

[w1ntry]

This sounds like the X8xx series vs the 68xx series all over again. Nvidia was first to market with blow mind performance only to be slightly (in non OpenGL) outperformed or in some instances quite outdone... but never enough to warrant it being the best of breed. Now we have the same thing again, Nvidia was first to market and had incredulous increases in performance and here's ATI with a high clock beast doing the same thing. Save and except Nvidia is a single slot and is less power hungry whereas the X18xx is like Prechott... yet kinda like AMD with quantispeed stuff.. ah well to each their own.. I would stick with 78xx though... less power==smaller psu==less cost + less power==less cooling req in case.

[CRaZYMoFo]

X1800XT OCING
12116 3DMark05 for para :kakashi4:
he didnt post the results of OCing the mastercard though :)
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=76137

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16814102595 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814102595)
X800GTO2 for $299? LOL
almost a 7800GT

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16814102610 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814102610)
ATi X1800XL $479

hehehe
NV my money is coming
would take too long for the XL to drop to 7800GT prices :)

also
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16814102611 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814102611)
X850XT Crossfire Master card $450 for those who wish to waste..uh.. spend their money on crossfire

[Paradoxxx]

Thats some good OC scores :) can't wait for the R580, the r520 has its shortcomings and as w1ntry mentioned its better to go nvidia this rounds unless you looking to pwn the competition in benchmarks and fork out the cash.

WAW @ price hike on the GTO2, I fortunately got it for a cheap price. It was obviosu that this would occur, high demand (newegg sold out 3times last week-early this week).

I don't mind a price hike I'll be able to sell my card @ little loss when I intend to make the move.

Crazy if you really intend to do the same think I am, GTO2 is your best bet, look around for a cheap source other than newegg.com and doh stick.

[CRaZYMoFo]

well im still observing the scenes
i hav a few weeks to wait
but that is the present situation
best bang for buck= 7800gt

[Paradoxxx]

Best high end bang for yah buck=7800GT, Mid/High =GTO2 Using our pal 3dmark05

Results in marks per $
7800GTX = $450 = $8000pts => 17.78
7800GT = $350 = 7000pts => 20
GTO2 = $230(current) = 6000pts => 26.1 With unlock and flash that is.

I can't see myself investing in a card now with this feeling that ATI is going to pwn with the R580 next year, look @ the R520 imagine what it can do with more pipelines. Lots of ppl rushed the winchester some waited for Rev E, Rev E owned :)

As you mentioned Crazy you really eh know if you are going to do that upgrade, getting 'stuck' with a 7800GT isn't bad at all.

[CRaZYMoFo]

exactly :)
higher end bang for buck= more time to save for next gen.
i would be in a much better position to wait then than now when i running stuff on an intel integrated lappy :)

also OC=more heat=not a great idea for sff, i doh mind, d SFF could handle it but it would b nice to avoid

awaiting flash and OC results
Ramp getting one too but he flashing/OCing in 2 years lol

[Paradoxxx]

I heard he is getting one... the hold off on the unlock is kinda 'weird' it doesnt add heat or anything bad, you can always flash back should anything bad happen.

The OC supposed to produce more heat, i assume with an AC5 it would counter that effect.

[w1ntry]

Read dis:
Single X1800XT card can beat SLI

When it's heavily overclocked


By Fuad Abazovic: Monday 10 October 2005, 12:21

ONCE YOU move to overclocking, the R520 - Radeon X1800XT starts to look much better. When you test the card side by side with a 7800 GTX you kind of get almost the same performance but only when you overclock.
We managed to get one of the screenshots of the overclocking that took place last week at Ibiza, European capital of parties. If you cool it properly, the R520, X1800XT can reach some magnificent speeds and performance.

Finish overclocker Maki managed to overclock the card to 12278 in 3Dmark05. He overclocked the card from a default 625MHz core/1500MHz memory to a magnificent 877.5MHz core and 1980MHz memory. He used dry ice and he cooled the FX 57 to 3617.5 MHz to reach this score.

This score is higher than normal non overclocked two Geforce 7800GTX in SLI as we tried to play with those two cards here. This little experiment shows one totally unexplored part of R520 chip as it can be overclocked sky high. Maybe this can help you make a buying decision. We've even heard you can reach 10000+ in 3Dmark05 with normal air cooling. Stay tuned, we're trying to do just that.

http://img439.imageshack.us/img439/1/maki7vi.jpg
All I have to say is WOW!!!! :blink:

[CRaZYMoFo]

lol
3DMark05 BS
I know people who doing 12k+ with 7800GT SLI an thing
Real world benches are the stuff :)
y didnt they OC the GTXs?
OCed GTXs hitting 15k and thing :)
all that is pretty stuff oui
interesting but pointless in the end
anybody really goin and run a dry ice system?
the card performs well but this is just pretty stuff lol
im a more practical techie :)
3DMark05 is just for fun and idleness

would have liked to see some real world benches