X-bit labs

ATI RADEON X850 Platinum Edition: Good Things Go Better

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko , Anton Shilov

[ 12/01/2004 | 05:58 AM ]

ATI, who has been very keen on being on the top spot it terms of 3D performance for the last two and a half years has released another addition to its high-end lineup. Now standing with nearly 9 graphics cards aimed at high-end ATI has extremely favorable position with its RADEON X8 product family. However, how far could ATI jump in terms of speed for its latest VPU?

Table of contents:

• ATI Attacks High-End Market Segment
  
• High-End Comes in Many Flavors
  
• GPU Evolution: ATI’s Strategy
  
• ATI Expands High-End PCI Express Line-up
  
• PCI Express Today: A VPU Mecca, or a False Step?
  
• RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition: Worth Your Time
  
• Cooling System Under Closer Look
  
• RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition: PCB Design
  
• Noise and 2D Quality
  
• OVERDRIVE 3: Dynamic Overclocking May Need a Fix
  
• Testbed and Methods
  
• Performance in Games
  
• First Person 3D Shooters
  
• Call of Duty: United Offensive
  
• Doom 3
  
• Unreal Tournament 2004
  
• Halo: Combat Evolved
  
• Far Cry
  
• Painkiller
  
• Half-Life 2
  
• Third Person 3D Shooters
  
• Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow
  
• Prince of Persia: Sands of Time
  
• Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne
  
• Simulators
  
• IL-2 Sturmovik: Aces in the Sky
  
• Lock On
  
• Colin McRae Rally 04
  
• Strategies
  
• Command & Conquer Generals: Zero Hour
  
• Perimeter
  
• Semi-synthetic Benchmarks
  
• Aquamark3
  
• Synthetic Benchmarks
  
• Futuremark 3DMark03, build 350
  
• Futuremark 3DMark05, build 110
  
• Conclusion
  

The Markham, Ontario-based ATI Technologies is doing just excellent today – thanks to the carefully devised marketing policy its products are popular as never before. Although in limited quantities, graphics cards based on the RADEON X800 GPU are available in retail shops as well as in computers from PC manufacturers like Dell or Hewlett-Packard. These cards are fast and often outperform their counterparts from the competing camp – NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800 Ultra and 6800 GT. Still, ATI doesn’t waste time enjoying the fruit of its earlier successes, but keeps on releasing new graphics processors in the RADEON X850 and RADEON X800 series.

ATI Attacks High-End Market Segment

Talking about desktop graphics only, Mercury Research claims ATI Technologies is the leader by the results of the third quarter of the current year, having 55 percent of the market against NVIDIA’s 42 percent. ATI owes much of this success to its highly competitive mainstream solutions; RADEON 9800, RADEON 9600, RADEON X600 and RADEON X700 families for AGP and PCI Express platforms are quite affordable and offer good performance that allows playing even the newest computer games like Far Cry, Half-Life 2 and others. For comparison: NVIDIA has only recently unveiled a worthy mainstream product, the AGP version of the GeForce 6600 GT, which is yet to become widespread in the markets of this globe.

But though successful with its RADEON 9800/9600/9200 series products as well as with the RADEON X600/X300, ATI doesn’t feel superior in the high-end market sector, as Mercury Research suggests. NVIDIA has recently announced it shipped approximately 1.5 million high-end DirectX 9.0 GPUs during the third quarter of the year, which amounts to 64 percent of the whole high-end market during the quarter. ATI Technologies, in contrast, supplied around 800 thousand high-end DirectX 9.0 GPUs, i.e. 36 percent of the market. A quarter before NVIDIA’s share was only 26 percent. Among 63.8 millions of mainstream and value DirectX 9.0 GPUs, the market share commanded by NVIDIA was also slightly higher compared to ATI’s: 51% versus 49%, as was reported by sources that based on Mercury Research’s data.