Looking Back Pt. 2: X800 & Catalyst Under The Knife
by Ryan Smith on February 22, 2006 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
R420 & The Test
As previously mentioned, the R420 occupies an interesting position in ATI's GPU history, as it's neither something completely new, nor is it a complete rehash of a previous GPU. The R300 was a very strong design for ATI, so they had no need to replace the design completely when it only needed to be moderately upgraded to meet ATI's needs. The end result, of course, was additional pipelines, some new features, and expanding the pixel shading abilities of the card past the base Shader Model 2.0 specification. In theory then, the R420 should behave fairly similar to what we saw in the R300.
While the R420 launched when there was already ample and growing support in the marketplace for pixel and vertex shading, virtually all of our games this time around use shaders to some degree. The specific games/benchmarks tested this time were:
All tests were done at 1280x1024 unless otherwise noted.
As previously mentioned, the R420 occupies an interesting position in ATI's GPU history, as it's neither something completely new, nor is it a complete rehash of a previous GPU. The R300 was a very strong design for ATI, so they had no need to replace the design completely when it only needed to be moderately upgraded to meet ATI's needs. The end result, of course, was additional pipelines, some new features, and expanding the pixel shading abilities of the card past the base Shader Model 2.0 specification. In theory then, the R420 should behave fairly similar to what we saw in the R300.
While the R420 launched when there was already ample and growing support in the marketplace for pixel and vertex shading, virtually all of our games this time around use shaders to some degree. The specific games/benchmarks tested this time were:
- X2: The Threat
- Final Fantasy XI, Benchmark 2
- Doom 3
- Half-Life 2
- Far Cry
- Battlefield 2
- 3dMark 2005
- D3DAFTester
| Benchmarking Testbed | |
| Processor: | AMD Athlon 64 3400+(S754) |
| Motherboard: | Abit KV8-MAX3 |
| Memory: | 2GB DDR400 RAM 2:2:2 |
| Hard Drive: | 120GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 |
| Power Supply: | Antec TruePower 430W |
All tests were done at 1280x1024 unless otherwise noted.
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mino - Thursday, February 23, 2006 - link
What they can do is provide Control panel.Had they provided CP at least once a quarter, many customers would be happier and it would not require so much resources after all.
As a result of CCC being the only option, we have decided to abandon all planned purchases of X1000 based graphics cards recently.
The slowness is not the only issue, we've had also problems to meke CCC run at all(it is needed for multi-display configs).
MrJim - Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - link
Hopefully ATI will come to their senses about CCC, as its now it isnt working for the demanding users at all. Average joe maybe dont know you can replace CCC with ati tray tools to help speed up things and thats sad. Please bring back the old control panel, please?Lonyo - Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - link
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2701...">http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2701...The "mouseover" comparison at the bottom has one 3D Mark shot, and one HL2 shot.
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - link
Fixed, thanks.