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by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko , Anton Shilov
12/01/2004 | 05:58 AM
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.
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.
To have a clear understanding of the numbers from Mercury Research, let’s listen to the principal analyst of this Cave Creek, Arizona-based company.
“Mercury’s current estimates on DX9 and DX9c accelerators differentiate value and performance by transistor count, with devices at and about 100 million transistors being considered high end. This is the methodology used in the most recent data that NVIDIA cited, and was developed for the original DX9 series of products from NVIDIA and ATI, such as the GeForce FX 5x series and the RADEON 9500/9700,” Mercury’s principal analyst Dean McCarron told X-bit labs.
Mercury Research’s definition of a high-end chip differs somewhat from the one commonly used among PC enthusiasts and in mass media who consider price and performance as the two main factors of a product’s market positioning. The $399 - $499 price range is currently occupied by NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800 GT/Ultra as well as ATI’s RADEON X800 PRO/XT products. Additionally, ATI and NVIDIA are shipping the RADEON X800 SE and the GeForce 6800, 6800 LE products, respectively, for $250 - $300. These products offer performance similar or higher than that of the RADEON 9800 XT, earlier the topmost offering from ATI.
NVIDIA’s products that incorporate more than 100 million transistors and that are likely to be shipped in mass quantities are GeForce FX 5900 XT, GeForce PCX 5900, GeForce FX 5900, GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, GeForce 5950 Ultra, GeForce 6600, GeForce 6600 GT, GeForce 6800 LE, GeForce 6800, GeForce 6800 GT, and GeForce 6800 Ultra. NVIDIA’s GeForce 5900 and 5900 Ultra GPUs are unlikely to be officially supplied by NVIDIA anymore. Graphics processors like the GeForce 5900 XT and GeForce 6600 are usually considered as mainstream solutions because their speed is similar to ATI’s RADEON 9600 and X600 series that include GPUs made of about 75-80 millions of transistors.
ATI’s graphics processing units that contain more than 100 million transistors are RADEON 9800 SE, RADEON 9800, RADEON 9800 PRO, RADEON 9800 XT, RADEON X800 SE, RADEON X800 PRO, RADEON X800 XT, and RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition. The RADEON 9800 SE should also be considered mainstream since the speed it provides is close to the RADEON 9600 XT.
With such an abundance of graphics processors from ATI and NVIDIA that all claim to be called “high-end”, we think Mercury’s definition is rather loose and another factor – for example, the performance in some popular and widespread benchmark or the number of operations per second or price – would make a more reliable definition.
Anyway, even using that loose definition, we have reasons to think that NVIDIA with its GeForce 6800 chips owns a bigger share of the top-end graphics card market than ATI with its RADEON X800. This fact as well as the sudden growth of sales of high-end graphics cards in 2004 (for example, Tul Corp. reports a 100-percent growth of its sales, and ASUSTeK Computer talks about a 10-percent growth) has incited ATI Technologies to go for a considerable extension of its expensive RADEON X8xx series.
ATI’s habitual way of behaving in the desktop graphics market looks like that: they release a new graphics processor and graphics cards based on it. Then, some time later, a new version of the chip appears, usually with the same architecture, but capable of working at a higher frequency thanks to the improved tech process. They also launch a junior model, specifically for lower market tiers. Thus, ATI’s product range is constantly expanding, without any big effort on the company’s side.
You want examples? Just recall such successful modifications of the RADEON 9800 PRO and RADEON 9600 PRO as the RADEON 9800 XT and 9600 XT, respectively. The graphics processors called R360 and RV360 didn’t differ in anything from the R350 and RV350, respectively, except that they could work at higher frequencies, so ATI Technologies announced two new products with a higher performance.
Sometimes ATI just replaces one GPU with two different ones, intended for two different market sectors. Recalling the RADEON 9700/9500, the ATI R300 chip was first employed to make top-end (RADEON 9700 PRO) as well as mainstream (RADEON 9500/9500 PRO) graphics processors. In the latter case, the graphics cards were equipped with a 128-bit memory bus and had some of their pixel pipelines disabled (in the RADEON 9500). Of course, it’s not profitable to make mainstream graphics cards using a complex and expensive graphics chip, but ATI had no choice actually – the company needed mass and high-performance solutions. Moreover, some dies were defective anyway, so why not use them? But the tech process getting perfected, and the number of the defective dies diminishing, the company at last decided to split top-end and mainstream product lines by releasing two independent graphics processors: RADEON 9800 PRO and RADEON 9600 PRO.
Thus, ATI trumpets the release of a new graphics architecture with a release of new high-end GPUs, and while these high-performance chips are attacking the top of the market, a special team of ATI engineers are tailoring the available high-end hardware to create something that suits a typical PC user. This policy has its downside, though. On the one hand, ATI has much time to adapt the graphics architecture for the needs of each particular market sector (high-end, mainstream, entry-level), getting a relatively inexpensive chip with an appropriate performance for each market segment. On the other hand, the adaptation and the design of the mainstream and entry-level chips take some time and this doesn’t allow the users who spend $100 for their graphics cards to have the same capabilities as those who pay $400-500. But practice shows that ATI users can usually choose from a dense group of same-functionality products priced within a range of $150-500 after 4-6 months since the release of a new GPU architecture.
Today we’re going to talk about the addition to ATI’s line-up of graphics processors with the PCI Express interface, namely about the new RADEON X850 processor which is to replace the RADEON X800 as the topmost PCI Express solution. The X800 moves down, so the assortment of ATI’s PCI Express chips looks like follows (from top to bottom):
These five GPU families cover the entire range of desktop solutions, from the cheapest devices to super-extra-high-performance monsters that cost you as much as half a thousand bucks and more. Like with the X800, there will be several graphics card models based on the RADEON X850 chip. The premium model, the RADEON X850 Platinum Edition, will have 540/1180MHz frequencies (core/memory), 16 pixel pipelines, and a recommended price of $549. The less expensive ($499) RADEON X850 XT will differ in the frequencies only – 520/1080MHz. The RADEON X850 PRO stands somewhat aloof as it will only have 12 pipelines (like the RADEON X800 PRO), but the frequencies will be the same as those of the “XT” model. Besides that, the junior model (by the way, its recommended price is $399) won’t be equipped with two DVI connectors and VIVO functions like the RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition or RADEON X850 XT.
The RADEON X800 family will change, too. The X800 XT Platinum Edition and the X800 XT seem to be retiring; their place is to be occupied by the RADEON X850 XT PE and the RADEON 850 XT. Moreover, ATI is getting ready to answer to GeForce 6800 GT and GeForce 6800-class products with its new RADEON X800 XL (16 pipelines, 400/1000MHz clock rates, $349 recommended price) and the RADEON X800 that costs $249. The latter will have 12 pipelines, 400/700MHz frequencies and a reduced amount of onboard memory (128MB). Thus, the X800/X850 family tree will look as follows:
The new graphics processor – R430, not the R423 – will be installed on the new graphics cards (RADEON X800 XL and RADEON X800). The new version of the RADEON X800 will also be manufactured with 0.11-micron tech process; this is going to positively affect the heat dissipation of the chip and to permit the use of a simpler cooling system. Judging by the snapshots provided by ATI Technologies, the additional power connector will also vanish from the new RADEON X800. So, the RADEON X800 is following the fate of the RADEON 9700/9500 chips – as one product series is being divided into two new ones, each of which will use an independent graphics processor.
But back to the RADEON X850. As had been expected, the new GPU retained all the functionality of the RADEON X800. The same 16-pipelined highly efficient architecture from ATI is the foundation of the new chip – this is a guarantee of a highest performance, especially in hard game modes. We described all the particulars of this architecture in our RADEON X800 review.
In fact, the RADEON X850 only differs from the RADEON X800 in the improved tech process (that allows for higher operational frequencies) and in the availability of enhanced power-saving functions. Besides that, ATI has come up with a new and very efficient cooling system, which we will discuss later on. All the technologies implemented in the X800 silicon are of course present in the RADEON X850 chip, SMARTSHADER HD, SMOOTHVISION HD, HyperZ HD and VIDEOSHADER among them. New 3Dc normal map compression algorithms which allow to increase the level of detail through laying a more complex relief are also supported. For more details about these technologies follow this link.
Although there are still not so many platforms with PCI Express bus, which definitely has significant influence over the retail availability of the PCI Express x16 graphics adapters, ATI pins a lot of hopes upon its PCI Express solutions. Why so? Well, they do have a lot of trust in the high sales volumes of their graphics cards used in ready computer systems.
ATI is shipping about 100% of their PCI Express x16 graphics cards to such companies as Dell, HP, etc. and according to their vision, the share of PCI Express graphics solutions has already got just a little below 50% of all ATI’s VPUs in the beginning of 2004. By the early Q1 2005 over 50% of ATI’s graphics chips will be designed for PCI Express computers.
All in all, the relatively fast distribution of the PCI Express technology among the system builders is quite understandable: all new and actively promoted platforms from Intel, the major CPU supplier in the today’s market, already use the new bus to connect the system components with one another. However, it is considered that only a relatively small number of ready PCs use high-end expensive graphics cards, that is why ATI’s idea about offering a range of 5-9 graphics accelerators priced from $249 to $549 can hardly be regarded as great. Nevertheless, the demand for gaming PEG x16 graphics solutions should inevitably grow up, especially, after more and more chipsets with PCI Express support for AMD64 processors have arrived into the gaming market. And it definitely means that ATI is going to look pretty competitive today.
However, many users out there still have their AGP systems and are planning to simply upgrade the graphics accelerator. Also, many system integrators are still shipping expensive high-end PCs with AGP interface to the market. Keeping in mind that ATI turned out less successful in the high-end AGP 8x graphics card market than NVIDIA this year, the new RADEON X850 and X800 are very unlikely to bring ATI that many laurels.
This way, we can draw the following conclusions:
Taking into account everything we have just said above, it is pretty easy to guess that ATI’s major goal this time will be to stimulate the demand for its PCI Express graphics solutions. Especially since NVIDIA cannot yet boast wide availability of ready products for this interface in its high-end product families, such as GeForce 6800 and faster, thus making ATI’s advantage in this market segment ever more evident.
Now that we have discussed the market prospective of the new RADEON X850 and X800 in such a great detail, it is high time we actually introduced our today’s main character: RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition VPU.
All high-end solutions developed by ATI technologies have always been very compact in size and featured pretty modest cooling system onboard. Of course, some graphics card developers did use their own designs, but we have to admit that ATI’s reference coolers have always been relatively small. However, now it looks like this distinguishing feature of ATI’s products is about to sink into oblivion. The RADEON X850 Platinum Edition, which we managed to get into our lab looks very impressive. It is for the first time in our lab that a reference graphics card from ATI does feature a massive cooling solution occupying two-slot space and blowing the hot air outside.
The cooling system blower takes the air from the PC case, blows it through the copper heatsink giving away the heat generated by the VPU and memory chips and blows it outside the case through the grids in the retention bracket. I assume the ATI engineers could have made the entire cooling somewhat more efficient if they had arranged the cooler to get the air from the outside the case initially, however they didn’t do it this way. We removed the cooling system from the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition in order to take a closer look at it:
The design is very smart and thorough and at the same time very simple. The heatsink cut from a solid chunk of copper is fastened to a massive aluminum base: the ribs are not stuck or soldered to it: it is all a solid construction. The fan is equipped with a thermal sensor unlike the solutions from NVIDIA, which theoretically allows managing the fan rotation speed more flexibly. Such technical enhancements as heatpipes, for instance, are absent, which will definitely have a positive effect on the price of this solution.
As you see, the new cooling system developed by ATI Technologies is fastened to the PCB in 6 locations, so that there is hardly any risk resulting from improper contact with the cooled components. The aluminum base features a specially shaped cut, through which the copper heatsink contacts the VPU surface. The contact surface is generously covered with thick dark-gray thermal paste. According to our experience, this is a really high-quality paste, ensuring efficient heat dissipation from the VPU surface and proper thermal resistance in the contact area of the heatsink base and the VPU die.
The memory chips also contact the heatsink surface through special square raised portions covered with thick pink thermal pads. To tell the truth we are a little bit skeptical about the efficiency of these pads. NVIDIA in this case uses special fibrous pads soaked in thermal paste, but their coolers are very carefully adjusted for each board, which allows using pretty thin pads this way. In our today’s case we do not see a really thorough piece of work here that is why it makes perfect sense that they used thick rubber-like pads instead to guarantee that the memory chips get all the cooling they need. In fact we were very pleased to see such extensive approach to memory cooling, because the entire RADEON X800 family never boasted memory cooling at all. Those memory chips that are located on the reverse side of the PCB are also equipped with some kind of a heatsink. It is an L-shaped aluminum plate, which also serves as a cooling system fastening element. A thick bracket made of spring steel, which used to be around the VPU has now been removed, and the rigid fastening is guaranteed by the above described plate.
All in all, the new cooler looks pretty simple and efficient. However, we are going to find out later how efficient and quiet it actually is. And now let’s take a closer look at our today’s heroes and see what the differences are between RADEON X800 and RADEON X850 in greater detail.
The graphics card doesn’t practically differ from the ordinary RADEON X800 XT for the PCI Express bus, but why should they replace a well-designed PCB with anything new? The GPU die carries the R480 label and the PCI Express logo:
Our sample was manufactured in the 39-th week of 2004, i.e. at the end of September. Thus, it is about two months old and this means ATI has no evident problems with manufacturing the R480. The PCB carries eight GDDR3 memory chips from Samsung with an access time of 1.6 nanoseconds. Such a fast memory is required to reach 1180MHz frequency, which is only 20MHz below the maximum clock rate these chips are rated for. The amount of the memory is 256 megabytes, although the GPU can address up to 512MB. Right now, however, such amounts are not called for; adding 256MB more memory to the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition would make it even more expensive without giving much in terms of functionality or performance.
As for the outputs, we’ve got the most up-to-date configuration with two DVI-I connectors for two LCD monitors. The second output is realized through a Silicon Image SiI1162 transmitter. This configuration isn’t new for ATI, though, as the PCI Express version of the RADEON X800 XT uses it, too.
A traditional 6-pin connector supplies additional power to the device. So far, PSUs are not equipped with such a connector, so you have to use a special adapter, but as the PCI Express platform becomes widespread, PSUs will surely add a separate power rail specifically for high-power graphics cards.
Before proceeding to the tests, let’s first check the efficiency of the new cooling system, and its noise level, too.
The first launch of the system with an installed RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition brought us recollections of the legendary GeForce FX 5800 Ultra – the full-speed fan was very loud. The noise tended towards high frequencies, thus being the more annoying. The sealed casing played a bad trick, too. It seems to be a kind of resonator, amplifying the sound of the fan and adding a plastic-like tone to its melody. Standing close to the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition was not for people with weak nerves then.
Fortunately, this nightmare was over in less than 5 seconds as the card dropped the fan speed, also reducing its noise, although not completely. The fan was working at the reduced speed hereafter, in spite of the heavy job the graphics card did in our tests. The card never attempted to increase the fan speed in our tests, so we should consider the noise of the new cooling system from ATI as acceptable. Moreover, our testbed is in fact a mainboard on a soft stand – in order to quickly install and uninstall various graphics cards we don’t put this mainboard into a system case as normal users do, and in a PC case the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition is going to be even quieter.
So, ATI’s new cooling system did well enough, providing efficient cooling at a comfortable noise level.
The image quality in 2D applications was traditionally good in all the resolutions up to 1600x1200@85Hz inclusive.
Along with the release of the RADEON 9600 XT and the RADEON 9800 XT a little bit more than a year ago ATI Technologies introduced its OVERDRIVE capability that allowed dynamic overclocking of VPUs when that was possible. The first incarnation of the technology was not a real success: it granted very tiny performance boost and did not work on some graphics cards. With the release of the RADEON X850 XT and some other upcoming products ATI brings OVERDRIVE back under the name of OVERDRIVE 3, pledging to give higher performance boost via substantial overclocking and with valid warranty.
The new OVERDRIVE boasts with auto-detection of the maximum speed and ability to allow overclocking up to 648MHz/1292MHz for chip/memory, which is not that high, but pretty notable. In case your graphics card is over-overclocked, VPU recover is supposed to down the speeds to the default levels. Certainly, performance level provided by the OVERDRIVE 3 is expected to be much higher compared to previous version of the technology.
Unfortunately, current hardware and software complex in our possession did not allow OVERDRIVE to operate well: even with auto-detection of overclock levels (567MHz/1202MHz from 540MHz/1180MHz by default is not an extreme overclocking, isn’t it?) the desktop was corrupted and the FarCry game was displayed with massive amount of artifacts. Furthermore, when we tried the 3DMark05 and the Doom III, we got the same situation with artifacts and, more importantly, the graphics card froze.
We attribute the failure of the OVERDRIVE 3 to problematic BIOS version, immature graphics card or certain issues with the software. Probably finalized products will not run into such problems, but customers should be aware of potential issues of the OVERDRIVE 3 in certain configurations.
In overall, the OVERDRIVE 3 is a good idea, even though you should not expect performance increase of more than 5% - 6% when OVERDRIVE is activated. However, there is some work to be done with it.
Since the new graphics card works across the PCI Express interface, and we’ve got almost the full range of cards for that platform, we are going to use our PCI Express testbed only. It is configured as follows:
The following system software is installed on the testbed:
And here’s the list of our benchmarks:
First Person 3D Shooters:
Third Person 3D Shooters:
Simulators:
Strategy:
Semi-synthetic Benchmarks:
Synthetic Benchmarks:
It is the first time that we use Valve’s recently released masterpiece Half-Life 2 as well as Futuremark’s new benchmarking suite 3DMark05. Then, we have also replaced the online Call of Duty shooter with its improved version called Call of Duty: United Offensive. The new version has better graphics and additional dainties in the gameplay; particularly, you can now control tanks other armoured vehicles of World War II.
We selected the maximum possible graphics quality settings in each application – the same for cards on GPUs from ATI and NVIDIA (we disabled the Anisotropic mip sample optimization for NVIDIA’s GPUs). We won’t perform theoretical tests since the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition is in fact just a faster version of the RADEON X800 XT, so such tests won’t have anything new to say to us.
We are sorry to say that we didn’t have a PCI Express 16x version of the GeForce 6800 Ultra at our disposal during the tests (its market availability might be better, by the way), and we had to take a GeForce 6800 GT as a representative of the opposite camp to compare ATI’s new graphics card with. Of course, this is no fair play at all, because the GeForce 6800 GT resides one tier lower in the market and costs $150 less. Just keep this fact in mind when reading the test results.
The new version of Call of Duty is more complex than the earlier one. Although still based on the Quake 3 engine, it is now more visually attractive. United Offensive isn’t strict with the graphics card – all the top-end devices have a speed of over 150 frames per second in it.
You shouldn’t take the results of the two first resolutions seriously as they are obviously limited by the performance of the system’s central processor. This level of this limit differs between ATI’s and NVIDIA’s cards, which is indicative of the difference in their OpenGL drivers. The graphics subsystem becomes the bottleneck in 1600x1200 only, and the GeForce 6800 GT, the RADEON X800 XT and the newcomer, the X850 XT Platinum Edition, have almost the same speeds there.
With enabled full-screen antialiasing and anisotropic filtering we have a different picture – ATI’s graphics cards win the resolutions above 1024x768, but they have always been good in such hard operational modes! There’s a difference of 10fps between the two top RADEONs, although it looks negligible against the absolute speeds of about 120-130fps.
Doom 3 is NVIDIA’s domain, being perfectly suited to NVIDIA’s graphics architecture and OpenGL driver.
The GeForce 6800 GT wins all resolutions. Despite the frequency bonus, the new RADEON cannot overtake the competitor, at least until ATI Technologies gets its new OpenGL driver ready.
It doesn’t look that hopeless for ATI in the eye candy mode. Yes, the GeForce 6800 GT is on top, but the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition has the same speed in 1280x1024 and almost the same speed in 1600x1200.
The second level we use in Doom 3 is for multiplayer games and thus has no monsters. The numbers are overall bigger here, but the situation remains the same: the GeForce 6800 GT keeps its first place. The RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition is better than its predecessor, but not too much. The frequency growth isn’t big enough for an impressive performance breakthrough.
Unlike on the Hellhole level, the new graphics card cannot reach the level of the GeForce 6800 GT, but is close to that in 1600x1200 resolution.
The latest version of Unreal Tournament cannot be considered as a demanding new-generation game. All modern top-end graphics cards show a similar performance in this test, being limited by the performance of the system’s CPU. The diagram above confirms this fact, at least for an Intel Pentium 4 560 processor.
There’s no big difference in the eye candy mode, either, save for 1600x1200 resolution where the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition reaches the performance ceiling imposed by the CPU, while the GeForce 6800 GT seems to fall short of it.
The Metallurgy level is less CPU-dependent, so mainstream cards like the RADEON X700 XT and GeForce 6600 GT have worse results in 1600x1200.
With full-screen antialiasing and anisotropic filtering enabled, the RADEON X800/X850 cards are ahead of the GeForce 6800, but this is still only noticeable in 1600x1200.
Halo can hardly be called a masterpiece in a company of such games as Half-Life 2, Far Cry and Doom 3, but it actively uses pixel shaders and thus makes a good benchmarking tool. Here we can witness a phenomenal performance growth of the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition. We are not sure, but the new drivers we received with the new ATI card probably contribute much to this success.
Far Cry is a recently released title, a game that features beautiful textures and complex geometry as well as numerous sophisticated pixel shaders. Still, the record we made on the Pier level cannot say anything to us as the graphics cards, save for the GeForce 6600 GT, hit the performance ceiling set by the central processor.
There’s more competition in the eye candy mode: the GeForce 6800 GT and ATI’s best solutions have the same speeds in the low resolution. The advantage of the latter is already visible in 1280x1024. The gap between the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition and the RADEON X800 XT is growing along with the resolution to become 10 percent at most.
We have re-recorded the demo on the Research level, making it longer. Now it includes a run along the coastline as well as a stroll in the cave. The results have changed, too. The RADEON X800/X850 cards are much better than the GeForce 6800 GT in all resolutions. The difference between the RADEON X800 XT and the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition is almost invisible.
Enabling full-screen antialiasing and anisotropic filtering puts a bigger load on the graphics memory subsystem, so every extra megahertz of memory frequency can be of great help. That’s why the new RADEON enjoys a bigger advantage over the predecessor than in the previous case.
This is a beautiful and complex shooter with a small appetite – modern graphics cards produce up to 200-300fps in it. It is only in 1600x1200 resolution that we see any difference among the participants. The top-end RADEONs are the best here, the new product being about 10 percent faster than the X800 XT.
The cards from ATI Technologies have increased their gap to the GeForce 6600 GT in the eye candy mode.
The first level of Half-Life 2 is all about water. In fact, the record shows a trip on a hovercraft along an old and long-abandoned system of canals. The shaders that render the water surfaces are considered among the most complicated ones. They require hard math1ematical computations, but such computations are an easy meat for the RADEON X800 cards! Then, we also enabled the Reflect All mode, increasing the load on the graphics card further. The RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition and the RADEON X800 XT excellently perform the task. The GeForce 6800 GT is lagging behind them.
ATI’s advantage becomes even bigger in the eye candy mode thanks to the most efficient algorithms of using the available graphics memory bandwidth.
The second game scene of Half-Life 2 (it is a battle in the streets of City 17) relies heavily on the performance of the CPU which is calculating the physics. All relatively fast graphics cards have usually the same results here, especially on Intel Pentium 4 processors that are inferior to AMD Athlon 64 CPUs as concerns running Half-Life 2.
The same goes for the eye candy mode – the top-end graphics cards are perfect equals.
Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow also requires a high pixel shader performance to run fast. It’s unclear who’s the best in 1024x768 resolution, but the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition and the RADEON X800 XT win 1280x1024 without doubts. The difference between the two is small, less than 10 percent.
There’s parity between the GeForce 6800 GT and the RADEON X800 XT, but the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition is anyway faster than both of them. This is one of those cases when the newcomer delivers a much higher performance than the X800 XT.
The two top RADEONs reach the performance ceiling in Max Payne 2 in all the resolutions. The game is just too easy for the fastest graphics cards of today. Let’s try to enable full-screen antialiasing and anisotropic filtering.
The RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition and the RADEON X800 XT can’t run the game any faster just because the CPU doesn’t allow them to do that, although the gap between these two cards is visible in 1600x1200. The GeForce 6800 GT quite expectedly loses to the top-end ATI cards in all resolutions.
Aces in the Sky requires a high texturing speed as well as fast execution of pixel shaders. The GeForce 6800 GT is better in the first parameter, but the RADEON X800 XT and X850 XT PE are superior in the second. As a result, NVIDIA’s card is slightly ahead of the ATI cards, but the increased frequencies of the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition help it to keep on about the same performance level.
The RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition and the GeForce 6800 GT have the same results in all the resolutions of the eye candy mode; this must be due to an insufficient speed of the central processor. The RADEON X800 XT is behind the leading duo.
Lock On doesn’t use complex pixel shaders, but takes any graphics hardware to task at the maximum quality settings. Few graphics cards can yield more than 20 frames per second in this mode. The GeForce 6800 GT and the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition are equals in this test; the RADEON X800 XT keeps a distance behind them.
The same goes for the eye candy mode with its full-screen antialiasing and anisotropic filtering.
This racing simulator abounds in pixel shaders, thus feeling a predilection towards ATI’s graphics architectures.
The top RADEONs have the same result in the first two resolutions (the CPU is playing a bottleneck again), but differ in 1600x1200: the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition is noticeably quicker than the RADEON X800 XT.
With antialiasing and aniso-filtering on, ATI’s graphics cards grab the top places again. The RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition has a hefty advantage of about 10 percent over the RADEON X800 XT here.
The graphics cards from ATI all keep the same pace in this game; the NVIDIA camp behaves alike, but the performance ceiling is lower for them somehow. Anyway, the pure speed mode of this game can’t tell anything as to the strong and weak sides of the graphics hardware because the performance is limited by the CPU and the quality of the drivers.
It’s only in the high resolutions of the eye candy mode that we see some difference in the results: the RADEON X800 XT and the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition are superior here and differ but slightly between themselves.
A complex and resources-hungry game, Perimeter likes graphics cards with a high pixel shader performance. ATI’s products are traditionally the best in this test, just like we see today. The advantage of the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition over the RADEON X800 XT is big enough considering the overall low fps rates.
Nothing interesting happens as we turn on full-screen antialiasing and aniso-filtering. The speeds are overall lower, but the leaders remain the same – the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition and RADEON X800 XT.
Aquamark3 features complex scene geometry and a high overdraw coefficient, but has few pixel shaders. These are favorable conditions for NVIDIA’s graphics cards, but the GeForce 6800 GT has to share its top place with the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition now.
As often happens, ATI’s cards reveal their potential fully in modes with enabled full-screen antialiasing and anisotropic filtering: the top RADEON models are the winners, aided by their HyperZ HD technology.
Not so long ago a 3DMark03 score of 10 000 points was viewed as an enormous achievement, but modern top-end graphics cards have no problems overcoming this barrier. Moreover, the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition even steps above the 13 000 mark, without any tricks or overclocking.
Let’s see what this result is comprised of.
The first game test is very simple as it lacks any modern technologies and uses the capabilities of DirectX 7 only. NVIDIA’s cards are usually better here, but this time the GeForce 6800 GT makes a draw with the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition.
Enabling full-screen antialiasing and anisotropic filtering we give an advantage to ATI’s cards: the GeForce 6800 GT is slower than the RADEON X800 XT as well as the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition. The difference between the graphics cards is rather small, though. It’s 11-20fps while the absolute speeds are something like 150-300fps.
The second game test has traditionally been favorable towards NVIDIA’s cards, but the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition has an excellent performance here, leaving the GeForce 6800 GT behind. Once again, you should keep in mind that these two cards belong to different categories. We just hadn’t a PCI Express version of the GeForce 6800 Ultra for these tests, while the available GeForce 6800 sample just refused to overclock to the frequencies of its elder mate.
The GeForce 6800 GT feels more confident in the eye candy mode, being a little faster than the RADEON X800 XT. The RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition retains its top position.
The third game test resembles the second one in its specifics: the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition is on top, and the RADEON X800 XT shares the second place with the GeForce 6800 GT.
It’s absolutely the same in the eye candy mode.
With its complex pixel shaders the fourth game test, on the contrary, is ATI’s playground. The advantage of the RADEON X8x0 cards over the GeForce 6800 GT is overwhelming here.
The same is true for the eye candy mode. The difference between the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition and the RADEON X800 XT doesn’t exceed 10 percent again. So the new graphics card should be considered the overall winner of the 3DMark03 tests.
The new 3DMark is far more demanding than the earlier version and a score of 10,000 points is still unattainable for a single non-overclocked graphics card.
Still, the 6,000 points of the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition are an achievement. Let’s examine the results of 3DMark05 in more detail.
3DMark05’s first game test represents a battle on the Proxycon space station. We’ve got a typical 3D first-person shooter environment – closed, with many light sources and numerous enemies. The scene also uses complex dynamic shadows.
Although the GeForce 6800 GT can use Shader Model 3.0 to its advantage, the RADEON X800 XT and the X850 Platinum Edition win here. The latter is about 10 percent faster than the former.
The same graphics cards win the test with full-screen antialiasing and anisotropic filtering enabled, but the gap between them is negligible this time.
The second game test shows you a glow-worm in a forest. There’s a lot of vegetation generated dynamically, depending on the camera position. Complex dynamic shadows and lighting effects are also employed here.
ATI’s RADEONs triumph once again in this test, the difference between the two top models amounting to 8-10 percent.
The gap between the RADEON X800/850 and the GeForce 6800 GT is increasing as we turn on full-screen antialiasing and anisotropic filtering. Unlike in the first test, the X800 XT and the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition behave differently in the eye candy mode, too. We don’t publish the results of the GeForce 6600 GT because this card has only 128 megabytes of graphics memory on board, and 3DMark05 requires 256MB of memory to work in the eye candy mode in resolutions above 1024x768, at least on the PCI Express platform.
The third game test of 3DMark05’s may not be the most beautiful one, but it is certainly the most effective. A zeppelin is flying along a canyon, over waters that conceal various monsters. The sides of the canyon and the water surface are the most complex objects here. The cliffs are rendered with a sophisticated pixel shader, while water uses the so-called depth fog for more realism. There’s only one light source here – the sun – but the shadows are no less complex than in the previous two tests, as the action is going on outdoors.
Graphics cards from ATI Technologies win this test, too.
The same goes for the eye candy mode, but don’t forget that it’s not correct to directly compare the results of the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition and the GeForce 6800 GT which belong to different weight categories. But like in 3DMark03, the victory of the new graphics card from ATI Technologies looks well deserved.
Since ATI RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition is not something completely new, but a revamped version of the RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition product with slightly increased clock-speeds and perhaps higher overclocking potential, it is hardly possible that we can talk about the novelty as about something completely extraordinary.
ATI RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition, just like any other R480-based product, inherited all the pros and cons of ATI’s latest RADEON X800 graphics architecture. Having implausibly efficient pixel processors, RADEON X850 XT PE will clearly outperform competing GeForce 6800 Ultra graphics card in DirectX 9.0 games like FarCry and Half-Life 2, thus, are also likely to lead in upcoming titles with heavy usage of Shader Model 2 effects. Unfortunately, lack of technologies like NVIDIA UltraShadow and truly efficient texturing modules don’t let ATI’s X800 XT PE to lead in the Doom III game.
There are no clear drawbacks with the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition, in case you do not consider dual-clot cooling system as a disadvantage. However, the RADEON X850 XT PE also has very few benefits over the predecessor RADEON X800 XT PE: slightly higher speeds and dynamic overclocking capability OVERDRIVE 3 are hardly enough to be considered as significant leap forward.
The most interesting thing about the new R480 and R430 VPUs and RADEON X850 XT, RADEON X800 graphics cards is higher availability level of the parts. ATI recently told analysts that they had addressed possible yield issues with the new R430, R480 chips, thus, we may see such products available more widely. However, given that the retail market is pretty lukewarm today for PCI Express, quite some time will pass before such boards will be in demand. The time will tell then whether we are correct with our assumptions on better availability of the RADEON X850 parts compared to X800 parts or not.