X-bit labs

ATI RADEON X800 XL 512MB Graphics Card Review. 512MB: Today’s Need or Reserve for the Future? (page 26)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov

[ 05/05/2005 | 02:10 PM ]

Conclusion

So, has our testing of the ATI RADEON X800 XL 512MB answered all the questions? One thing is certain: 512 megabytes of graphics memory on board a graphics card doesn’t bring any significant performance advantages in modern games, with rare exceptions. In our tests such exceptions were Half-Life 2 that operated with many high-res textures and F.E.A.R. Yet even in Half-Life 2 the performance gain would only show up in highest resolutions with enabled full-screen antialiasing and it never exceeded 20%. In all other cases the new device didn’t have any advantages over the ordinary RADEON X800 XL in typical resolutions.

A greater gain may possibly be got in resolutions above 1600x1200, but the bulk of today’s mass-user monitors do not support them. The native resolution of 17” and 19” TFT monitors is 1280x1024, while widespread CRT models rarely support resolutions higher than 1600x1200 at a comfortable refresh rate.

Besides that, the performance of the RADEON X800 XL may be too low to ensure comfortable play in 2048x1536 with 4x-6x full-screen antialiasing. At least we can guess it by the results of the tests in 1600x1200 and are going to check this highest resolution in practice soon.

That said, the market perspectives of the RADEON X800 XL 512MB seem obscure. Priced the recommended $449, it doesn’t give the user any tangible advantages in comparison with the ordinary RADEON X800 XL but it is noticeably costlier than the RADEON X850 PRO which works at higher clock rates but has only 12 pixel pipelines against the RADEON X800 XL’s 16 pipelines. These graphics cards should perform similarly, but the RADEON X800 XL is going to be somewhat better in pixel shader-heavy games and somewhat worse when the GPU clock rate is important, like in scenes with complex geometry.

Does the RADEON X800 XL 512MB suit people who want to play next-generation games? It depends on what games belong here. This year is to bring us such titles as Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, Quake 4, F.E.A.R. and others that use engines oriented towards the current-day hardware. As the developers employ ever more complex textures, normal maps and environment maps, a 512MB local buffer may become needed in some cases. As for games of a more distant future, like those scheduled for 2006 and later, we expect them to require a lot of graphics memory. But when they do arrive, the performance of the RADEON X800 XL processor proper may prove too low, and this performance rather than the memory amount may become the bottlenecking factor. Yet it’s too early to make any predictions. Such games don’t exist, while nearly all modern games are quite satisfied with 256MB of graphics memory if you use typical resolutions.

The new product from ATI may be interesting for PC enthusiasts who just want to have a graphics card with 512MB of memory at any cost, and for owners of big monitors that support resolutions above 1600x1200. But if you just want to enjoy the current day, it would make sense to consider cheaper devices with 256MB of memory.

However, this situation may change because the lifecycle of the RADEON X800 XL 512MB is expected to be at least one year since the date of its announcement. Its price may drop considerably in the meantime as ATI Technologies has resources for driving it down.