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
Budget Performance
For budget performance, we feel that 1024x768 is the proper target resolution. People spending near the $100 mark can't expect to acheive performance at high resolutions. But with current hardware, we can play games at moderate resolutions without loosing any features.
The X1300 is targeted at the budget market, but we focued on testing our X1300 Pro against slightly higher performing parts because of it's pricing. The X1300 does quite well versus the traditional low end 6200 TC and X300 parts, but can't really compete with the 6600 GT which is priced near the $149 MSRP of the X1300 Pro.
Under Doom 3 (and many OpenGL applications) NVIDIA holds a lead over ATI hardware. While it is understandable that the X1300 Pro isn't able to match preformance with NVIDIA's $150 6600 GT, the $250 MSRP X1600 XT laggs far behind as well. It is quite interesting to note that the X1600 closes that gap (and performs slightly better than the 6600 GT) when 4xAA and 8xAF are enabled at this resolution. But at such low res, the better bet is to increase the setting to 1280x1024 with no AA where the 6600 GT maintains about a 20% performance lead. Doom 3 is also a fairly low contrast game, meaning that jagged edges are already hard to see.
Under Valve's Day of Defeat: Source, the latest resurrection of a past title by Valve (and also the first to feature HDR), The 6600 GT and X800 perform on par with what we would expect while the more expensive X1600 XT lags behind and the X1300 looks to perform where a budget card should. Enabling 4xAA and 8xAF on this game closes the gap between the 6600 GT and X1600 XT: they both run at about 48 fps under this setting, followed by the X800 at nearly a 43 fps average.
Far Cry provides a victory for the X1600 XT over the 6600 GT, but we still have the expensive X1300 Pro lagging it's closer cost competitor by a large margin.
Everquest II on very high quality mode shows the X1600 XT to lead this segment in performance. Current ~$100 parts are shown to perform horribly at this setting scoring single digit framerates. The X1300 Pro is definitely playable at very high quality at 1024x768 (which we would recommend over a lower quality setting at a higher resolution). Extreme quality still doesn't perform very well on any but the most expensive cards out there and really doesn't offer that much more interms of visual quality.
When testing Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, the new X1000 series of cards give a very good performance. This time around, the X800 and 6600 GT don't perform equally, and it looks as though the additions to the RV5xx architecture can make quite a difference depending on the game being played.
To see the continuing saga of the X1600 XT, we will take a look at midrange performace numbers at 1280x960.
For budget performance, we feel that 1024x768 is the proper target resolution. People spending near the $100 mark can't expect to acheive performance at high resolutions. But with current hardware, we can play games at moderate resolutions without loosing any features.
The X1300 is targeted at the budget market, but we focued on testing our X1300 Pro against slightly higher performing parts because of it's pricing. The X1300 does quite well versus the traditional low end 6200 TC and X300 parts, but can't really compete with the 6600 GT which is priced near the $149 MSRP of the X1300 Pro.
Under Doom 3 (and many OpenGL applications) NVIDIA holds a lead over ATI hardware. While it is understandable that the X1300 Pro isn't able to match preformance with NVIDIA's $150 6600 GT, the $250 MSRP X1600 XT laggs far behind as well. It is quite interesting to note that the X1600 closes that gap (and performs slightly better than the 6600 GT) when 4xAA and 8xAF are enabled at this resolution. But at such low res, the better bet is to increase the setting to 1280x1024 with no AA where the 6600 GT maintains about a 20% performance lead. Doom 3 is also a fairly low contrast game, meaning that jagged edges are already hard to see.
Under Valve's Day of Defeat: Source, the latest resurrection of a past title by Valve (and also the first to feature HDR), The 6600 GT and X800 perform on par with what we would expect while the more expensive X1600 XT lags behind and the X1300 looks to perform where a budget card should. Enabling 4xAA and 8xAF on this game closes the gap between the 6600 GT and X1600 XT: they both run at about 48 fps under this setting, followed by the X800 at nearly a 43 fps average.
Far Cry provides a victory for the X1600 XT over the 6600 GT, but we still have the expensive X1300 Pro lagging it's closer cost competitor by a large margin.
Everquest II on very high quality mode shows the X1600 XT to lead this segment in performance. Current ~$100 parts are shown to perform horribly at this setting scoring single digit framerates. The X1300 Pro is definitely playable at very high quality at 1024x768 (which we would recommend over a lower quality setting at a higher resolution). Extreme quality still doesn't perform very well on any but the most expensive cards out there and really doesn't offer that much more interms of visual quality.
When testing Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, the new X1000 series of cards give a very good performance. This time around, the X800 and 6600 GT don't perform equally, and it looks as though the additions to the RV5xx architecture can make quite a difference depending on the game being played.
To see the continuing saga of the X1600 XT, we will take a look at midrange performace numbers at 1280x960.
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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?