Previewing ATi's Radeon X800 XT & X800 Pro

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Previewing ATi's Radeon X800 XT & X800 Pro

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday May 4, 2004 @03:51AM from the me-like-the-pixels dept.

Giant_Panda writes "A few short weeks ago, it looked like NVIDIA was back on track as they were able to overtake ATi and reclaim the 3D performance crown with their GeForce 6800 Ultra. Now, it seems like ATi has fired back with a killer card of their own. HotHardware just posted a preview of the new 12-Pipe ATi Radeon X800 Pro ($399) and 16-pipe ATi Radeon X800 XT ($499). The X800 XT seems to be faster then even the new GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme cards that were rumored to exist on a few sites this past weekend and the X800 Pro is a great performer as well. (Other sites have just posted previews: TechReport, Hexus, Lost Circuits)"

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Video Arms Race by networkBoy · 2004-05-04 03:52 · Score: 3, Insightful

At what point is there simply too much noise Vs. signal about how good one card is VS. the other. If you're a fan of nVidia you're going to buy their card no mater what and likewise for ATI no? -nB

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1. Re:Video Arms Race by NeoFunk · 2004-05-04 03:59 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Buying a card just because you "prefer" that particular brand is stupid. There's nothing wrong with brand loyalty, but true enthusiasts will always go with the best product.
  
  I was an Nvidia "fanboy" for quite a while, until their cards started to suck. My latest video card purchase was a Radeon 9800 pro, and I couldn't be happier.
2. Re:Video Arms Race by networkBoy · 2004-05-04 04:05 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Great for you!, What I was getting at is that IMHO most people, when faced with two video cards, closely related in specification will likely buy the same brand as they had before (unless experience == bad). I don't understand the need for this level of power consumption and processing horsepower in a video card for even the most demanding games. I can only think the nVidia or ATI cards would really shine in their respective demos and in scientific rendering applications (nMRI, 3-modeling, etc.) just my 2c -nB
  
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3. Re:Video Arms Race by Short+Circuit · 2004-05-04 04:52 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  For some of us Linux users, there's a second consideration: How difficult will it be to set up?
  
  Once I learned how to set up my Riva TNT2 with the NVidia drivers, I didn't have much of a problem doing it again whenever I upgraded my kernel.
  
  However, that didn't prepare me for the obstacles involved in setting up my recently-bought ATI Radeon 9000. I'm not saying it was harder, just different.
  
  I would have preferred to upgrade to a new NVidia card, but I didn't want to go back to a 2.4 kernel. (At the time, you needed to apply a third-party patch to the driver glue to get it to work with the 2.5/2.6.opre* kernels.)
  
  Now, I'm happy to say that my Radeon works fine, and I don't need to reinstall a driver every time I upgrade my kernel.
  
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4. Re:Video Arms Race by dnixon112 · 2004-05-04 05:34 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  I don't understand the need for this level of power consumption and processing horsepower in a video card for even the most demanding games.
  Just like every advanced commercial technology, not many people 'need' the power of the most high end products. But for those of us who buy at the more affordable price points, the release of these cards are just as significant. I'm sure soon enough you'll be able to pick up a 9800pro for dirt cheap, and for people like you that's probably great. In another year's time, when applications will have caught up with these next generation cards, we'll be seeing these products at those same bargain bin prices.
Question by pubjames · 2004-05-04 03:58 · Score: 4, Insightful

Is there any point in getting one of these cards for any reason other than playing the latest games?
Cost-performance ratio by jago25_98 · 2004-05-04 03:59 · Score: 4, Insightful

Someone please divide price by benchmark and plot this in a graph please!

Maybe I'll do it if no one else can be bothered.

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1. Re:Cost-performance ratio by Geek_3.3 · 2004-05-04 04:15 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  These new cards are gonna be LOOOOOOOW on the performance/price ratio, relatively speaking. That is why I usually don't like those types of graphs--they kind of give you a firm grasp of the obvious, that expensive cards have a crappy performance/price ratio compared to a more reasonable (i.e. Radeon 9600XT GeForce 5700). Not to spoil anything, but as history dictates, I would imagine that the new offerings from ATI/nVidia will be in a dead heat for last place on this particular ratio.
  
  That, it it would seem that each card has their respective wins in different disciplines anyways... Radeon = better in newer games (Farcry, etc) and situations where you have a lot of options on, while nVidia tends to be better in older games, but not a slouch in any particular discipline either, so it would be harder to find out what index you would want to use for this particular graph.
Silly question by AndroidCat · 2004-05-04 04:00 · Score: 3, Insightful

I realize that this question makes no sense to the people who have to be so-leading-edge-it-hurts, but are there any applications around that will really push a graphics card that much and require one of these?
Make no mistake, I'll eventually buy one like these .. after it's well down the price curve, bugs fixed, drivers updated, in a couple years.

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Re:I really want to buy this card.... by starz · 2004-05-04 04:01 · Score: 3, Insightful

Don't count on it working well in the next kernel release, as nvidia's current kernel drivers are incompatible.
Re:Too much hype over having the "best" card? by NeoFunk · 2004-05-04 04:01 · Score: 3, Insightful

It NEVER hurts to have the best performance.

Sure, both nvidia and ATI's latest cards will play all current games at great framerates, but once you start to pile on things like high resolution, anti-aliasing, antisotropic filtering... you need all the performance you can get. Even these newest cards probably won't be able to play FarCry perfectly at 1600x1200 16xAA 16xAF with full details...

More performance is never superfluous.
Re:I really want to buy this card.... by Dragoon412 · 2004-05-04 04:04 · Score: 5, Insightful

What, exactly, would be the purpose of running this card on a *nix box? To play cutting edge games like America's Army and Quake 3?

I don't mean to troll, but every time there's a post about some new bleeding edge video card, there's always someone getting modded up to +5, insightful for saying he'd buy it if it weren't due to lack of driver support, and I'm left wondering what the hell for?
Wow ultra uber speed by stratjakt · 2004-05-04 04:06 · Score: 3, Insightful

with ultra shit support.

The fanboy following video cards is endlessly annoying. I own a Radeon 9800, and it was good value for the dollar all around, but quite frankly, the support sucks.

ATI relies on big benchmark numbers over real world results, I guess that's what 'uber pc geeks' want. nVidia seems to cater to gamers by working with developers to make sure games USE all those fancy new functionalities of the GPU. Ie; nVidia's "The Way it was Meant to be Played" program. ATI plays lip service to it with it's "Get in the Game" program, but they don't provide the same support (like sample codes for killer shader effects, etc)

So we end up with TRON 2.0 having really cool glowing effects on nVidia, but flat and tacky looking on ATI. We have soft shadows in Splinter Cell for nVidia, blocky PSX-era crap for ATI.

Hell, I could go on for months listing all the anomalies in actual real-life games I've encountered. Texture corruptions in Tomb Raider: AOD, outright crashes in Halo.

For all the hype around FSAA and anisotropic filtering - just about EVERY GAME I've enabled them for has crashed hard. Unreal 2, Halo, XIII.

Oh, and the worst, the absolute worst, is frame drops to 5fps and worse in CounterStrike when there's smoke onscreen. I mean COME ON, I had a RivaTNT2 that played the game properly. There's no excuse for that, save a piss poor opengl implementation.

So I tried Will Rock, the game whos screenshots were on my 9800's box, and is a member of the "get in the game" program. This ought to SMOKE on an ATI card, right? Almost, awful looking texture corruption in menus, stuttering in-game for no apparent reason (nothing on screen).

Missing proprietary nVidia features is fine, substitute your proprietary ATI features. Just make them stable and working.

I've used ATI forever, they used to be a cut above the other retail level cards. Now they've slipped hard.

This is a case where nVidia will slowly strangle the competition, because the competition sucks. I'd really like to see ATI turn around and focus on the gaming experience, not the mutual masturbation you see on rage3d.com (the unofficial "support" forum) - with a bunch of kids comparing benchmarks and overclocks, with two or three frustrated folks chronically posting for advice on with mishmash of driver files will actually work with Counter Strike.

Anyhow, hooray for leapfrogging nVidia in phony-baloney do-nothing benchmarks. Will this fabulous new technology actually work with games or is this just more MARKETING BULLSHIT for the likes of toms hardware and hardocp to spread?

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1. Re:Wow ultra uber speed by cK-Gunslinger · 2004-05-04 04:39 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  The fanboy following video cards is endlessly annoying. .. Followed by endless rants about how ATi sucks and nVidia rocks and will "slowly strangle the competition."
  
  Please. There are NO differences between the companies as far as "caring about gamers" is concerned. Both exist to make a profit. Period. Several people I know are big independent ATI developers. ATI provides them with code samples, driver updates, etc.. gratis. Anything you say that generalizes one or the other of the companies makes you a "fanboy." Its no different than Ford vs Chevy. Each has some advantages and some disadvantages. And the both have some rabid fan-base that will make it thier sole priority to bash the other. *yawn*
  
  Also, I don't get the whole "hooray for leapfrogging nVidia in phony-baloney do-nothing benchmarks" when every single review I read included all the current DX9 games with commentary on stability and visual quality, as well as performance. I don't even think Anandtech showd a 3DMark03 score. If so, I didn't pay attention to it. I agree, games are all that matter. Fortunately, that's what was tested.
Are Nvidia and ATI the only choice for Linux? by Psiren · 2004-05-04 04:09 · Score: 4, Insightful

I plumped for an NVidia card for my new machine, but did consider the ATI ones. In the end I went for NVidia because the drivers seemed better supported. My question is, did I miss anyone? Are there any other cards that can run modern(ish) 3D games under Linux?
Re:I really want to buy this card.... by Dot.Com.CEO · 2004-05-04 04:10 · Score: 4, Insightful

This is a valid question, to which there is a valid answer. There are a lot of people out there (myself included) who use Linux as their main desktop, only booting to Windows to play the occasional game. Now, if I can play a game in Linux (native like UT2004 or under winex) I do, and when I do, I want to have comparable features to Windows. So, whereas I did not buy my 9800 Pro so that KDE refreshes windows faster, the fact that I could use it to play the couple of games that exist in Linux is a bonus.
Anyhow, the original poster is wrong and therefore this discussion is irrelevant.

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Re:I really want to buy this card.... by Glock27 · 2004-05-04 04:25 · Score: 4, Insightful

I don't mean to troll, but every time there's a post about some new bleeding edge video card, there's always someone getting modded up to +5, insightful for saying he'd buy it if it weren't due to lack of driver support, and I'm left wondering what the hell for?
Seeing as how none of the other replies mentioned it, one reason is to do cutting-edge OpenGL development under Linux. There is significant interest in doing Linux game development using cross-platform toolkits of various types. One example is Garage Game's Torque engine. Write to that, and get Windows, Mac and Linux support with very little (if any) tweaking. IMO, Linux is the best and most cost-effective platform for game development.
This is why, once again, my next video card purchase will most likely be from NVIDIA. I'll get ATI if I manage a G5... ;-) (I wonder how soon the G5s will get these cards?)

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Re:Too much hype over having the "best" card? by falcon5768 · 2004-05-04 04:31 · Score: 3, Insightful

better yet lets take it one step further, at what point is driver support not factored into it... see Both me (a mac guy) and two PC guys where talking before we left work and we where saying how no matter how good ATI supposedly is, we would rather wait for NVIDIA's cards to come out because the drivers are more polished and unlike ATI's tech support, NVIDIA's doesnt suck and try to blame your computer as the problem but actually looks to see if it is indeed the computer or the card.
Honestly I thought it was just the mac side cause tech support for most companies loath us mac guys because they refuse to have one mac tech on call. But hearing it from two PC guys who homebuild their systems I felt a little better.

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Re:I really want to buy this card.... by Dot.Com.CEO · 2004-05-04 04:36 · Score: 3, Insightful

I STRONGLY suggest you read around about the problems people are having with Nvidia's 64 bit drivers before investing your money. True, ATI have NO 64 bit drivers but perhaps that should tell you that perhaps it is too early for you to get a 64-bit system. They are unstable and run at half the speed. Now, if that is "good enough" for you, fair enough, but I'd much rather wait for a couple to six months so that things settle down on the 64 bit arena.

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Difference this time by bonch · 2004-05-04 05:12 · Score: 4, Insightful

The difference I see this time (and which I wrote about in a related post here) is that the new nVidia card is a power hog and requires you to buy a new power supply if you don't meet the requirements for its two-slot design. The X800 takes up just one slot while generally matching the quality.

I guess I just see that two-slot, power-sucking design as a huge hassle. I can't imagine how noisy it must be, though I haven't heard it really mentioned in review. But I think the non-fanboys will take a look at the two cards, see that one takes up one and the other takes up two, and go with the one...