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.
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DerekWilson - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
First of all, every site uses their own benchmarking techniques and sequences in the games. Numbers between review sites won't be comparable.For Quake 4 we used ultraquality mode, and this seems to give ATI the advantage over NVIDIA. We don't have a problem with this because we would prefer to tip the scales in favor of the product that can deliver the best performance at the highest image quality.
munky - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
Would you rather Ati continued to ship the x1900gt with the original specs, and then a bunch of the cards would have to be RMA'd?DerekWilson - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
We would rather they just run out of x1900 GT cards. They're discontinuing the line anyways, so it seems a little strange to try to increase supply by underhanded means.sri2000 - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
They should ship it under a different model number. Call is the X1900 GTA or something like that (or some other alphabet soup combo that's not already taken) so that people can tell that the different model# = different performance.Goty - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
You guys are ragging on this CF implementation like it's some sub-par solution. The transfer speed may be lower than that used by NVIDIA's SLI bridge, but SLI is simplex while this implementation is full duplex. Being able to send data in both directions at the same time should provide a huge speed boost while using ATi's SuperAA modes.JarredWalton - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
Scalability is the key factory. In most benchmarks, SLI gets more of an improvement than CrossFire, indicating that the compositing engine is not an optimal multi-GPU solution. There's almost certainly a decent amount of overhead involved. We do like the new CF connector, but the proof is in the pudding. If 7900 GS is clearly slower in single card configs but often faster in dual-GPU configs, clearly SLI is scaling better than CF.mesyn191 - Friday, October 20, 2006 - link
I don't think its possible to comment on the new CF at all, they've clearly got screwed up drivers for it ATM, but then its ATi so what else is new...I hope AMD cleans up thier driver team because still even after all these years ATi does a half assed job on its drivers.
Goty - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
Are you guys thinking of doing any testing with any of either vendor's multi-card AA modes any time soon? I really think the full duplex connection would really help there (i.e. the cards may not scale as well with the number of cards, but what about as the image quality increases?)Rza79 - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
The Tech Report had problems with this motherboard and Crossfire which made them switch to the Asus P5W DH.You aren't expiriencing any problems with this board?
Second thing, why no AA with games like B&W2 and FEAR?
DerekWilson - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
No problems with the motherboard.AA performance under Black and White 2 and FEAR were excluded because we decided framerate was already at a minimum for the resolution we were testing.