Performance will probably continue to improve with new drivers considering the flexible memory controller the R580 has. It's probably still optimized toward the lower bandwidth conditions of GDDR3 so there should be a boost once they reconfigure and optimize it toward the higher bandwidth GDDR4.

Still, I'm disappointed that ATI didn't try to bin higher and launch the X1950XTX at 675MHz core. With all that extra bandwidth, the core could have easily been made more hungry. I guess your difficulties in overclocking suggest higher stock core clocks would be difficult although people have been offering 700MHz core clock models. A 80nm shrink would have helped, but c'est la vie.

In the HL2 videos you see that little hitch that Source games are infamous for. I just wish review sites would have the BALLS to complain about the little stutters and hitching instead of kissing Valves ass everytime they make a game.

why do you guys bechmark in QUality :*( it just stupid since most people know Quality setting on Nvidia has shocking IQ.

Did you have to remove Warhammer Dawn of War from the benchmarking lineup? I was curious as to whether ATI would ever fix its lacklustre performance on it. I would of thought its more popular than the other two RTS you benchmark (not that I'm suggesting removing either of them)

Thanks for providing a few videos comparing the IQ between ATI and Nvidia's default driver settings. Xbitlabs is probably the first American hardware reviewer site to cover that issue. Hopefully that will be the beginning of the exploitation of Nvidia's lackluster default brilinear IQ settings. There was hardly any pressure on Nvidia to fix that problem, until now (hopefully).

With attention brought to this issue, let us begin comparing them against each other with High Quality settings. We could also test them against each other in default settings to see what the difference is.

Hope it's not too much for me to ask of you, but may you kindly update the review with Geforce cards benchmarked in High Quality settings, as a side-to-side comparison with default Quality settings? It will make for a very interesting review--and perhaps one of the most popular GPU reviews before the G80 is released. At least, it is guaranteed to be the most popular X1950XTX review.

Gamers who pay $400 for high-end Nvidia cards certainly do not want to play in the horrible default Quality setting that is actually low-quality in mipmap shimmering/noise.

"the game runs on a modified, yet still obsolete engine from Quake 3" (on Call of Duty 2, p11)

Wasn't the first Call of Duty based on Quake 3 and the second a new engine?

Test

After doing some research with the current 90 series drivers by Nivida, it seems that you do not have to use High Quality image settngs after all. All you have to do is disable Anisostropic Sample Optimization, which still causes shimmering. Leaving Trilinear Optimization on does not seem to cause any shimmering in the newer drivers. Just make sure that Anisostroipic Mip Filter Optimization is also off.

ATI drivers do not use optimization with Anisostropic Filtering after all, at least it does not cause shimmering.

That way, there is as close to perfect match as possible between Nvidia and ATI cards in image quality when testing or benchmarking.

Further testing is needed for confirmation with other cards, since I have only tested it with 6800 Ultra and the 7900 series.

The article's spec sheet was wrong.

1. The 'adaptive antialiasing' on ATI cards nclude support of mixing multsampling with supersampling on transparent texture.

2. Vertex texture fetch is can be done Radeon's vertex shader, except texture formats are not exposed. Vertex texturing can still be done, but using pixel shader.[1]

3. Tessellation on all cards in the list are supported by loading differ vertex shader programs[2]. Such function can be offloaded to pixel shader as well.

4. NVIDIA cards have supported rotated grid supersampling since GeForce 6[3].

[1] http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2005/10/17/sapphire_radeon _x1800xl/3.html

[2] ftp://download.nvidia.com/developer/Papers/2004/Vertex_Textu res/Vertex_Textures.pdf

[3] http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_12394.html

please re-upload these vids!
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/ati-x1950xtx_8 .html