by Alexey Stepin
10/20/2004 | 04:34 PM
It’s been a long time since ATI Technologies, the major developer and manufacturer of graphics processors, lowered its gaze to the bottom of the market where entry-level DirectX 9 solutions dwell. In fact, this market sector has been wholly left for NVIDIA with its GeForce FX 5200. ATI could only offer the value RADEON 9200 GPU, which traces its origin to the RADEON 8500 and only supports DirectX 8.1. Considering that there have appeared a lot of DirectX 9 games, the GeForce 5200 has become the best-selling DirectX 9 compatible in the value category, and NVIDIA practically has had this market all for itself.
<%BANNER[article]%>ATI and its card-manufacturing partners have realized their fault and introduced inexpensive RV350/360-based graphics cards, from the RADEON 9600 SE with a cut-down memory bus to the RADEON 9550 that works at very low clock rates. But these are all artificially cheapened solutions, created by stripping the RADEON 9600 PRO/XT of its technical characteristics, while there have still been no independent chip in ATI’s lineup targeted at this market segment.
Developing the GPU series for the PCI Express platform, however, the company marked its past errors and created a chip especially for the low-end market sector. It is the X300 processor, the first GPU manufactured with 0.11-micron tech process.
We shouldn’t be surprised at the first try of a new advanced manufacturing technology in an initially budget solution since the company did the same thing in the past, introducing its 0.13-micron tech process in the mainstream RV350 graphics core first, whereas more complex top-end processors R300 and R350/360 were made with 0.15-micron process. It is only with the RADEON X800 series that ATI started using its 0.13-micron tech process in powerful GPUs. We might call this discreetness – it’s logical to polish the new technology off on simpler chips, mastering all the related intricacies, getting rid of all defects and boosting the chip yield. After that the new tech process is ready for complex and expensive chips. Moreover, if the tech process were first employed for making complex chips, their cost would only grow up.
When developing the X300, ATI’s engineers made a good use of their existing architecture, so the technical characteristics of the new chip are almost identical to those of the X600 as well as of the RADEON 9600 PRO/XT – these GPUs all have four pixel pipelines and two geometry-processing units each, but work at different frequencies. Like the X600, the X300 GPU got native support of the PCI Express bus – so far, only products from ATI Technologies can boast this.
Today we’re going to examine one incarnation of the new RADEON X300 graphics processor on the example of the PowerColor X300 SE graphics card. Like with other RADEONs, the “SE” suffix denotes a cut-down memory bus. This time its width is reduced from 128 to 64 bits, and this graphics card is the cheapest discrete solution whose competitors are integrated solutions from NVIDIA, Intel and even from ATI Technologies itself.
But why would you want a $100 and cheaper card, and do such products have any future? We would compare the current trends in the low-end graphics market with those that made cheap discrete sound cards vanish some time ago. As the integrated sound was becoming perfected, only expensive and high-quality devices could live on, because inbuilt codecs are no match for them by their very nature. But the evolution of integrated audio is still going on, by the way – recall the Intel High-Definition Audio technology as an example.
It is practically the same to what we see now in the world of cheap graphics. Until recently, integrated graphics solutions (save for the NVIDIA nForce2 IGP, probably) were so slow and unpractical for anything but office use that even a slowest standalone graphics card would provide a much better performance in 3D games and applications. A graphics card could also give you hardware DirectX 8.1 or even DirectX 9 and save from 8 to 64 megabytes of system RAM which would otherwise be used by the integrated graphics core. Thus, graphics cards priced at $100 and below had their customer and felt at their ease.
But the release of Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900, the new-generation integrated graphics core from Intel, poised a threat to inexpensive add-on graphics cards. It is the first time that an integrated graphics core can almost match discrete solutions. Purchasing an i915G-based mainboard, the user also receives a full-featured graphics subsystem capable of processing four pixels per clock and providing support of version 2.0 pixel shaders. The ATI RADEON 9100 IGP chipset is on the same level of performance, by the way, although lacks the DirectX 9 functionality.
Talking about owners of mainboards with the i915G or RADEON 9100 IGP – will they want a $100 graphics card? It depends on the user and his/her specific needs, of course. As yet, discrete graphics cards have a number of advantages over integrated solutions. Particularly, they have from 64 to 256MB of dedicated graphics memory – this is a nice chunk if you’ve got less than 512MB of system RAM installed. The dedicated memory accessed across a dedicated bus also positively affects the performance of the graphics subsystem since the graphics processor doesn’t share this bus with any other device.
Besides that, external graphics cards, even inexpensive, usually have DVI and TV outputs and display a 2D image of a higher quality; many cards also support output to two monitors at once. These things are still unavailable even for most advanced integrated solution like Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900, not mentioning others.
Another important fact is that discrete graphics cards don’t have any driver-related problems and usually construct a correct 3D scene in games and applications – both ATI and NVIDIA have long solved such problems, while Intel is still facing them. As yet, Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900 shows numerous artifacts in modern games that make a wide use of DirectX 9 capabilities. This is no good for a user who wants to enjoy the beauties of Far Cry, for example.
Of course, inexpensive add-on graphics cards are going to lose their appeal in the future, but not till integrated chipsets offer the user all the necessary functionality and stable drivers. Until that, the sector of 100$ and cheaper graphics cards will be flourishing, although the pressure from Intel with its i915G is already felt.
The package with the graphics card is of a decent size, rather:
The box resembles the package of the PowerColor X600 XT with blue changed for green in the color scheme. The tabs tell you some technical info like the graphics memory amount and the memory bus width. The rather large and easily readable label “64 Bit” won’t let you purchase a card with a cut-down memory bus without even knowing that. The back of the package describes the advantages of the product within in seven languages of this world. The package contents are:
This is a nice accessories pack for a budget product – there’s everything necessary, including a game. But the choice of the game is rather strange, as Hitman: Contracts demands a powerful graphics card to run well.
The PowerColor X300 SE looks curious due to the compact size of its low-profile PCB. You can install the card into low-profile cases if you have an appropriate mounting bracket.
Well, there’s no such bracket among the accessories, and you probably won’t find one easily. The PCB is rather simple, but with a lot of tiny elements, concentrated in a dense area. Some elements are not installed, however, as there are several empty landing spots at both sides of the PCB. The device’s belonging to the low-end class is evident from the components employed. The quality of manufacture is high, though. The soldering is neat and the PCB edges are carved out smoothly. The video-out mode – PAL or NTSC – is selected with an onboard jumper. In the year 2004, on a PCI Express device, this thing looks a sheer anachronism as today most graphics cards can switch between the video-out modes on the software level.
A rather bulky needle heatsink is mounted on the graphics core; it is fastened to the PCB with two standard spring clips. The heatsink touches the GPU die through a layer of white-color thermal paste. There is no protective frame around the die, although the heatsink isn’t very firm and shakes when you touch it with your finger. The memory chips on the face side of the PCB are not cooled at all, although they could easily implement it by installing a pair of elastic heat pads. The memory on the back side of the PCB is not cooled, either.
The memory chips on the PowerColor X300 SE most probably come from ProMOS, judging by the markings. According to the documentation, the memory has an access time of 5 nanoseconds and is rated to work at a frequency of 200 (400DDR) MHz. And the chips do work at this frequency on the PowerColor card. The bandwidth of the graphics memory subsystem is 3.2GB/s as in the PC3200 standard, since the memory bus is 64 bits wide. Considering the complexity of modern computer games, this is too little – we shouldn’t expect the PowerColor X300 SE to run modern games fast. The graphics core is clocked at 325MHz. Made with 0.11-micron tech process, this chip should be highly overclockable and cool, but we’ll check this out in the next section.
Overall the card resembles some low-profile RADEON 7000 models, but unlike them it doesn’t support multi-monitor configurations. The last fact is strange for a modern device, now that even integrated graphics solutions are starting to support output to two monitors. The PowerColor X300 SE has one DVI-I connector and one S-Video output, and you can attach one PC monitor with DVI-I or the D-Sub interface and one home device, for example a TV-set, to this graphics card simultaneously. So keep this fact in mind – no multi-monitor configurations with the PowerColor X300 SE.
We guess this graphics card will suit almost ideally for inexpensive multimedia PCs that serve as a home entertainment center. The support of VideoShader technology, missing in the RADEON 9200, will add to that, too. The PowerColor X300 SE can play videos in DVD or DivX formats and can run games in low resolutions. That’s the maximum it is actually intended for.
The noise parameter is completely out of place when we’re talking about the PowerColor X300 SE – the card is equipped with a passive cooling system and is always absolutely silent.
We could only speed the GPU up (from 325 to 400MHz) in our overclocking tests. Of course, we applied additional cooling – the heatsink was scorching hot even at the regular frequency. So, our supposition of a low heat dissipation of the X300 was never confirmed. Well, the X300 is a much more complex chip than the RV280 (RADEON 9200) and works at a higher frequency, and even the thinner tech process cannot compensate for that. The passive heatsink is anyway enough for the graphics card when it’s at its normal frequencies; additional cooling is only necessary for overclocking.
The memory wouldn’t be stable even at 210 (420DDR) MHz, the card hanging up in 3DMark03. The high access time and the simplified PCB deign must have led to this poor result.
The 2D image as outputted by the card was crisp in all resolutions up to 1600x1200@75Hz inclusive. The PowerColor X300 SE is of course unlikely to be used with monitors that support such a high resolution, but it wouldn’t disappoint you in this case anyway.
We investigated the performance of the RADEON X300 SE on our new testbed configured as follows:
This configuration can’t be called an “inexpensive” one, but our aim is to provide the general picture of the performance of the simplest PCI Express graphics card now available in the market. We used the following games and applications in our tests:
First Person 3D Shooters:
Third Person 3D Shooters:
Simulators:
Strategy:
Semi-synthetic benchmarks:
Synthetic benchmarks:
The highest graphics quality settings were selected in each particular application. The rendering quality was set up identically for ATI’s and NVIDIA’s GPUs through the drivers; we enabled anisotropic and tri-linear filtering optimizations in NVIDIA’s GPUs. Due to the overall low performance of the PowerColor X300 SE and its orientation toward the budget market, we adjusted our testing methodology accordingly and excluded some display resolutions and modes for certain games.
This game is among the simplest in our set of benchmarking applications. Since complex pixel shaders do not live here, the texturing speed becomes vitally important – and it is closely connected to the graphics memory bandwidth. The low result of the PowerColor X300 SE shouldn’t be any surprise considering its using a 64-bit bus to communicate with its memory. The card even fell behind the RADEON 9200, which is a representative of an obsolete architecture, but features a 128-bit memory bus. It is only through overclocking that the PowerColor is capable of overtaking the 9200 model.
When full-screen antialiasing is enabled, the 64-bit bus becomes the bottleneck that prevents the PowerColor from showing any advantages of the X300 architecture. Overclocking helps to catch up with the 9200, again.
Doom 3 is a hungry consumer of all system resources of your PC; it is definitely not for systems with low-end graphics cards, so the poor results of the PowerColor X300 SE are quite natural. The performance grows somewhat in the Low Quality mode, but not enough for a comfortable play, while all the reduced-size textures of this mode often look rather ugly.
The PowerColor card turns in a better result on the d3dm4 map which is intended for multiplayer. Anyway, this performance is still not enough for you to have a comfortable play. Well, it’s hard to expect anything better from an entry-level device because Doom 3 belongs to the latest generation of PC games.
The popular online shooter Unreal Tournament 2004 may be called simple due to the specifics of its engine. Operating with a complex geometry and an abundance of high-res textures, the engine does not use pixel shaders and is friendly towards even the simplest of modern graphics cards. We say “modern” deliberately as the PowerColor evidently profits by its advanced architecture compared to the one the RADEON 9200 is based on. On the other hand, it is the same simplicity of the game engine that increases the influence of the 64-bit memory bus on the results of the PowerColor X300 SE both in the pure speed and the eye candy modes.
It is the same on the Metallurgy level: the architectural specifics – particularly, its four vertex processors clocked at 325MHz – help the X300 SE a lot here in its race with the RADEON 9200. The negative effect of the narrow memory bus is felt here, too.
Halo depends heavily on the speed of pixel shaders. The width of the memory bus doesn’t greatly impede the PowerColor here while the GPU overclocking brings in a substantial performance gain, equating the X300 SE to the X300. We don’t publish RADEON 9200’s results here since this GPU doesn’t support DirectX 9 and can only run version 1.4 pixel shaders. The DirectX 8.1 mode of Halo produces a picture of quite another image quality, with many special effects missing. So, comparing the RADEON 9200 to the other cards would be incorrect. That’s why we don’t publish the results of this card in the rest of games that use version 2.0 pixel shaders, either.
With its high-resolution textures and numerous pixel shaders, this 3D shooter requires high texturing speed (and, accordingly, high graphics memory bandwidth) and fast pixel shader execution. This beautiful game is hard on the graphics subsystem of your computer – the RADEON X600 PRO was the only participating graphics card to maintain a frames-per-second rate of 26 and higher. The rest of the devices, and the PowerColor X300 SE among them, have much lower results.
Even the RADEON X600 XT cannot provide playability at the maximum settings of Far Cry, since the performance would bottom out to 15fps and lower. Like Doom 3, this game belongs to the new generation, and the poor performance of the low-end graphics cards shouldn’t come as a surprise. To say something good about the PowerColor X300 SE – it shows the speed of the GeForce PCX 5750 in this game, although the latter belongs to a higher class of products.
The mystical game Painkiller is a nice exception among the crowd of first-person 3D shooters. The game is visually appealing, but its well-designed engine is capable of working fast even on low-end graphics cards, including the PowerColor X300 SE. This card subjectively provides a playable fps rate even in 1280x1024. In 1600x1200, and in the eye candy mode, the new card is hindered by its 64-bit memory and the fps rate sometimes falls below the comfortable level. The effect from overclocking is also small in the last case since it is the memory subsystem speed that mostly affects the performance of a graphics card in modes with full-screen antialiasing and anisotropic filtering.
Even the beta version of this game we’re all looking forward to play soon is heavy with pixel shaders, so the memory bus doesn’t play a big role, as in other tests. The speed of execution of pixel shaders depends mostly on the GPU clock rate, so the gap between the PowerColor X300 SE and the RADEON X300 is small. It is even eliminated by overclocking the PowerColor card.
The same thing happens on the second level of the game, since there are too many complex shaders here, although the texture and geometrical loads are much lower.
The second beta version of this upcoming game is simple, without any complex pixel shaders. The main performance-determining factors are the fill rate and the geometry processing speed. It’s more or less all right with the PowerColor X300 SE’s geometrical performance, but its fill rate is limited by the narrow graphics memory bus. Overclocking doesn’t practically help both in the pure speed mode and in the eye candy one.
It’s the same on the Escape Run level, since the scene we have written on it only has somewhat more complex geometry than the Danger scene.
This time the PowerColor X300 SE is just slightly slower than the RADEON X300, because the game requires a high pixel shader speed and the two graphics cards are the same in this respect, their GPUs working at the same frequency (325MHz). Benchmarking is performed manually in this game (it doesn’t have a benchmarking mode and cannot record demos), the results above are approximations.
The successor to the legendary Prince of Persia doesn’t benefit much from the 128-bit bus of the RADEON X300. There are few complex textures in the game, but an abundance of pixel shader-based effects. This game is also tested manually, so the results may be slightly imprecise.
Max Payne 2 cannot be referred to as a new-generation game. The maximum it uses are version 1.4 pixel shaders, so the results are quite expectable. The PowerColor X300 SE is noticeably slower than the RADEON X300 due to the obvious reason – its twice-narrower memory bus.
The latest version of IL-2 Sturmovik needs a wide and high-frequency memory bus as well as a high pixel shader speed. The game renders water surfaces with the help of 2.0 pixel shaders at the maximum graphics quality settings – this looks quite pretty and realistically, but puts a bog load on the graphics card. All the participating graphics cards have bad results at the maximum graphics quality settings. Even the RADEON X600 PRO, the fastest of the tested devices, cannot offer a comfortable play here, not mentioning weaker devices.
This flight sim is even more demanding than Aces in the Sky in some respects. Lock On seems to have simpler graphics, but it’s not quite so: the game engine can create and display impressive effects like realistic compound clouds and weather effects. So, although there are practically no complex pixel shaders, the game requires a fast graphics card. The memory subsystem bandwidth is of much value here as the diagram suggests: the PowerColor X300 SE is slower than the X300, not mentioning the RADEON X600 PRO.
We’ve got strange results in Colin McRae Rally 04: the PowerColor X300 SE is far behind the RADEON X300 in the lowest resolution, but the gap diminishes in higher resolutions, although the load on the memory bus is growing up in them. Usually, we see an opposite picture, of course, but we must make allowances on our testing this game in the manual mode, too.
The results suggest that this real-time strategy prefers both a high speed of pixel shaders and a fast memory, especially in high resolutions. The diagrams can speak for themselves: the members of the RADEON X300 family are far behind the RADEON X600 PRO.
This game is probably among the most beautiful RTS games we’ve ever seen, but it is also the most exacting on the overall performance of the graphics card and its pixel shader performance in particular. The requirements are so high that there’s no talk about playability with entry-level graphics cards – even the result of the RADEON X600 PRO is far from the acceptable minimum.
The PowerColor is less speedy in Aquamark3 than the RADEON X300, although there are few complex pixel shaders in this test. The memory frequency seems to play the main part here, and the RADEON X600 PRO with 300 (600DDR) MHz memory on board turns in a much higher score than the members of the RADEON X300 family.
Well, you hadn’t expected the PowerColor X300 SE to set any new records in 3DMark03, had you? It is still an entry-level graphics card. The RADEON 9200 gets an even lower score due to its inability to pass the fourth gaming test (this GPU cannot execute version 2.0 pixel shaders).
There are no pixel shaders in the first game test, but the textures are complex, so the PowerColor X300 SE falls behind the ordinary RADEON X300 in this race. Overclocking helps little, since it is not the GPU but the memory bandwidth that bears the main load here.
Version 1.4 pixel shaders appear in the second gaming test of 3DMark03. Specific rendering algorithms also increase the load on the graphics memory subsystem. This affects the results accordingly: all X300 series cards and the RADEON 9200 are out of competition here. The GeForce PCX 5750 with its UltraShadow technology and the RADEON X600 PRO with its relatively fast memory are on top.
We see the same situation in the third gaming test, but fast memory is of even bigger effect here as the RADEON X600 PRO surpasses the GeForce 5750.
The RADEON 9200 doesn’t take part in the fourth gaming test from the 3DMark03 suite as it lacks DirectX 9 support. The GPU frequency is vitally important for this test as it directly affects the speed of complex pixel shaders the test scenes abound in. That’s why we get a nice performance boost by overclocking the PowerColor X300 SE.
As we had feared before the tests, the 64-bit memory bus of the PowerColor X300 SE graphics card influenced its performance in the most negative way. Take a look at the cumulative diagram:
The described product fall farthest behind the full-featured RADEON X300 version in games that don’t use complex pixel shaders: it is the fill rate that affects the performance in them, and the narrow memory bus hits at this parameter most severely. The PowerColor X300 SE roughly delivers the performance of the RADEON 9200, but the full support of DirectX 9 makes it a more interesting product. Well, the RADEON 9200 and X300 SE just can’t meet anywhere: the former only supports AGP, while the latter is for PCI Express platforms solely.
We actually liked this particular graphics card model from PowerColor. It is a well-made product that ensures good performance for its class. The only thing it lacks is support of multi-monitor configurations, which has already become a standard even for entry-level cards.
Is this card going to attract owners of systems with integrated graphics? Priced at about $80, it really can, in those special cases exposed early in this review when the integrated graphics core like i915G, nForce2 IGP or RADEON 9100 does not satisfy the owner with its low-quality 2D picture, lack of DirectX 9 support or missing TV output. The i915G system has one more unpleasant trait – Intel’s graphics driver is full of bugs yet. You might also want to purchase the PowerColor X300 SE to save your system RAM for other tasks.
Cutting it short, the PowerColor X300 SE can be characterized like this: a high-quality inexpensive graphics card for users who don’t need fast 3D but want to have the functionality missing in integrated graphics solutions.
As the PCI Express bus is gaining in popularity, there will appear inexpensive computers with this interface. Many of such computers will probably be equipped with OEM versions of RADEON X300/X300 SE graphics cards, also from PowerColor.