X-bit labs

ATI RADEON X800: R420 Totally Exposed (page 34)

Category: Video

by Tim Tscheblockov , Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov

[ 05/04/2004 | 06:42 AM ]

Conclusions for Synthetic Benchmarking Session

Well, the new architecture of the ATI graphics processors proved to be a worthy competitor to NV40 from NVIDIA.

When we compared the results of the fastest models based on the new graphics chip architectures, i.e. ATI RADEON X800 XT and NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra, the leadership in most cases stayed with RADEON X800 XT: it boasts faster vertex processors and copes with pixel shaders rich in mathematical calculations just brilliantly. However, during textures processing RADEON X800 XT appeared less efficient than NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra: you could see it in complex pixel shaders (from the texturing point of view) as well as during trivial multi-texturing.

As for RADEON X800 PRO, its performance is evidently too low to be able to outperform GeForce 6800 Ultra: ATI’s concerns about 12 pipelines being too few to grant the new RADEON X800 architecture a victory over the new NVIDIA solution turned out absolutely justified. The direct competitor to ATI RADEON X800 PRO will be the non-Ultra GeForce 6800 working at lower clock frequencies and capable of processing the same 12 pixels per clock.

Nevertheless, we don’t have even the slightest doubt about RADEON X800 PRO being capable of outpacing the previous generation graphics cards in the gaming tests. At least, the synthetic benchmarks indicate clearly that it look much more advanced than the previous generation solution from almost all points of view.

Well, we are about to face a real clash of strong wills. You will be able to learn everything about the results of this battle from our next article devoted only to the performance of the new generation graphics solutions in gaming applications.