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ATi Radeon X1K Graphics Launched, Benchmarked
MojoDog writes "ATi has officially launched
their all new Radeon X1000 family of 3D Graphics cards this morning and
a full showcase with benchmarks of the entire line-up can be found at
HotHardware. What may or may not be surprising to you, is the fact
that the new high-end flagship X1800 is still a 16 pixel pipe GPU but now
running at a blistering 625MHz.
Is it fast enough to catch NVIDIA's 24 pipe GeForce 7800 GTX?"
Why is Slashdot portscanning me?
How are the Linux drivers?
I thought ATI was going to seize the advantage from Nvidia with these cards but from what the article is telling me it appears to be a GF5900-style bust. I was thinking the X1600 would've been exactly what I needed but I may just get the 6800GT instead. Oh well.
I will worry more about the drivers, especially for linux. Also ATI had some problems with supply of the chips in the last few quarters.
Why do naming schemes suck, anymore??
X1000? I thought the "X" in "X800" was there because those video cards were the generation after "9800" and "9700"... Whats next, OSX11?
Intel, AMD, ATI, nVidia... Mazda... they're all driving me nuts with their product naming schemes, lately...
Here it is in printable version
"When a ball dreams, it dreams it's a frisbee"
"This past hear has been a tumultuous one for ATI"
This article isn't even on Slashdot. Are editors everywhere losing their touch?
Now to reach into my bottomless pit of money!
... I'm not that impressed. Technically the product looks to be superior but performance wise it's not doing well... it seems more like a "dud" generation like the early fx series leafbl... graphics cards nvidia put out. I think the next generation of nvidia and ati cards are going to be much more interesting than the present generation. Have to wait and see though.
Shadus
I will remortgage my house in anticipation
The problem is not the hardware it's the software. And our understanding of how to write decent software. ATI's drivers while 'fairly good' still suck horrible for some rudmentary taskst. For example ever seen how crappy a ATI mobil chip makes a video from your laptop to a TV set look?
Since this was "delayed" technology, I can see the logic of staying with the Radeon name, especially since they have put a lot of money into the recognition for the line. But in the short term, it just makes me say ho-hum to this new release. Now we'll just have to wait for NVIDIA's next shot across their bow.
In the mid-1950's, Zenith engineers created the first wireless TV remote control, eliminating the need to have a child.
Although the comment is modded offtopic, and although the picture does indeed have lots of red in it, it is not what I hoped it to be... How boring!
http://www.hothardware.com/printarticle.cfm?artic
Coral cache:
http://www.hothardware.com.nyud.net:8090/printart
Slow Down Cowboy!
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Fuck you for being useless, Slashdot!
Since they are not doing an AGP version (which they were initially going to do) of the 1800 I could care less. ATI has forced me back towards Nvidia
...and the site is already slashdotted...any mirrors?
Why do these words conjure images of Bic lighters held near ... never mind!
Well, it had to happen sooner or later. The X1800 engineering sample card pictured in the article is double high and has a giant blower on the top of it. I wonder how long it'll be before we get a card that comes with an external fan attachment that you have to hang off of the back of your case?
I read the internet for the articles.
My 2 cents: there are two key aspects: 1) Price; 2) Availability. 1 - If the price's too high, it would be very difficult to convince people to buy a high-end card with almost the same performance that a $100-less card (7800GTX). 2 - Remember that the X1800XT will be available only middle-November, which gives nVidia a lot of time to think how to counter-attack with something like a 7800Ultra.
http://www.hothardware.com.nyud.net:8090/viewartic le.cfm?articleid=734&cid=2
Somebody spent a lot of time researching and writing this article. My impression was that it wasn't done for free in someone's spare time. It makes me wonder where the resources came from. Maybe someone can clue me in but, when I see something like this (in a field that I am not familiar with and certainly don't know the players), I get a bit cynical. Did someone pay to have the article written? Is it truly done by an impartial outside observer?
Mirrordot.org: http://mirrordot.org/stories/7d9f801c0c2c973601863 3177c0d72fd/index.html
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=172
http://www.techreport.com/
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=ODIy
http://www.beyond3d.com/reviews/ati/r520/
Listed alphabetically so no preference to which site is good or not.
v /s /ati_radeon_x1800_x1600preview= 527
http://www.beyond3d.com/reviews/ati/r520/
http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews/r520reviewxvx
http://www.guru3d.com/article/Videocards/262/
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=ODIy
http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=3603
http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Review
http://www.noticias3d.com/articulo.asp?idarticulo
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=172
http://www.tbreak.com/reviews/article.php?id=407
http://www.techreport.com/onearticle.x/8864
One coral cache mirror fresh off the server.
c le.cfm?page=1&articleid=734&cid=2
http://www.hothardware.com.nyud.net:8090/viewarti
XML - A clever joke would be here if
"What may or may not be surprising to you, is the fact that the new high-end flagship X1800 is still a 16 pixel pipe GPU but now running at a blistering 625MHz. Is it fast enough to catch NVIDIA's 24 pipe GeForce 7800 GTX?"
Most people are worried about price, availability and not what counts with ATI cards nowadays: Power. I bought an X850 AGP and the power requirements are absolutely ridiculous. Surely, my Antec 550w can handle it, but it's completely unnecessary, as shown by nVidia. I don't like the idea of having to put aside an extra $10 a month to power my graphics behemoth, although I do love the performance.
Just another graphic card getting hot enough to make toasts with you PC... It becomes boring...
My old Matrox Mystique doesn't heat my entire room, why should these new cards do it ? That's no real progress to me.
I look forward to see some faster progress concerning the power draining of new graphic cards...
my fucking hairy asscrack
And you thought two gpus's were hot? Well not anymore with this new motherboard hotty (with pics) supporting not 2 or 3, but 4 (OMFG!) gpus via 2* SLI. Of course all this technowhoring glory comes at a cost, with 4 GPUS likely to force most average gamers into submissive bondage for a month or ten, not to mention what it will take to prevent such a toasty little box from going critical!
==Nuclear Power Now!==
If you're like most people and running a single 1280 by 1024 monitor resolution tops, the best thing about these cards is they make the top end of the previous generation cheaper. I can only see one of these cards (nvidia or ati) being a must buy if you are running 1600 by 1200 or multiple monitors. Especially as many games are frame locked at certain rates. My 9800XT still plays any game I throw at it just fine regardless of what the hardware sites say. Between the two manufacturers, it's a matter of preference regarding the image quality. Me, I think ati is a little sharper, but that is subjective.
Some of us are still humming along on our AGP 4x/8x AMD64 mobo's with plenty of RAM to spare. Where are the new graphics cards for us?!?! nVidia and ATI are in some damn war over their latest, greatest PCI Express cards while they pay little attention to providing cards built for AGP card slots. This, quite frankly, sucks. I'm not a freak about buying every new graphics card that comes out, but it's getting to the point where it's about time to upgrade (so I can enjoy more features of HL2's DoD:Source HDL tweaks) and you simply can't buy an nVidia 7800 card for an AGP slot. If I'm going to spend twice as much on a video card than any processor I've purchased in the last 5 years, it better be the best I can get right now so that it lasts me for a long time to come, but alas, no such card is made for my mobo! Where's the love, graphics card companies?
Is there some current game that demands that much performance?
Once you're gaming at 100fps 1600x1200 with all the bells and whistles, why do you need a new card (or pair of cards)?
Is there some game in the pipes that will actually use all the fancy features that these cards have?
My Nvidia 6800 GT is plenty for BF2. Won't be upgrading for at least another year or more.
it has 16 "pipes", while nvidia has 24 "pipes"...
I assume this means instruction pipelines? which would suggest ATI can do 16 instructions in parallel while nvidia can do 24...
music - http://www.subatomicglue.com
... when buying a top-end graphics card for playing all those new DirectX 9-powered games, aren't they?
Sorry. Old technology. Not good enough to increase past limits inherent in the design. That, and they can't sell you new stuff if you don't have to upgrade.
The new PCI SLI will outperform AGP as soon as they get their act together. I don't expect to see high-end products for AGP anymore.
it's not fast enough to serve up web pages for their performance stats (/.'d)
It's been noted on many sites that these cards are not available for sale yet. ATI has been getting hammered lately over their decision to "paper launch" crossfire, while telling review sites that they would be in stores. Don't expect to see these cards for at least a month.
0
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=255
http://www.kubuntu.org/
Here's a list of most reviews of the Radeon X1K family.
WTF? What kind of cheapskate bastards ship a new model card with dual monitor support, but without dual DVI? (Save 50 cents on an extra DVI connector, and the DVI to VGA dongle?)
They had a chance to knock the 6600GT out of the lowest priced widely available dual DVI card slot, and they blinked? Morons.
Apparently, the X1800 parts will be PCI-E only. Only the X1600 parts and X1300 parts will be offered with the 8X AGP bridge.
Now, most serious gamers may say "who cares". Well, for those serious gamers (like myself) who built their machine 2 years ago -- we do. PCI-E wasn't really a viable option then, so we went with AGP.
Today I ended up ordering an AGP X850XT Platinum Edition. Why? Because the brand new X1600XT just doesn't cut the mustard in comparison. Sometimes its lagging behind by 20-30 fps. Although the X1600 XT part is likely to be lower priced, for those of us who want to give our rigs that "mid-life upgrade", the X850 XT PE is the best-shot since it's likely to be the highest performance part we'll ever be able to choose from.
18 months from now I'm hoping I'll be able to retire that machine for a Mactel and stick in whatever crazy card I can, but until then, 20-25fps at 1600x900, minimum detail doesn't cut it when I'm trying to tank Molten Destroyers for my guild. (this is a GeForce 6600GT, which incidentally, plays Half-Life 2, UT2004, and Doom 3 amazingly well at 1600x900, high detail)
Too bad the X1800 parts won't be offered in AGP -- I'd probably get one.
I have a 19" Sony X-Black TFT, which is quite responsive, reasonably large display and has really vibrant colour reproduction, I prefer it to my 19" CRT as I can use it for long periods without feeling fatigued. This means I never play above 1280x1024 (and at 60 FPS, as I like to play in vsync with the display to prevent tearing, which on a TFT is enough FPS for anyone).
I am primarily concerned about image quality, which means Anti Aliasing (4x or higher), Anisotropic filtering (x8 or x16) and smoothing on edges of transparent textures. My AMD64 3500+ w/ dual DDR400 and 7800 GT 256 MB are not quite able to deliver high end quality at 1280x1024 in games like Battle Field 2, Half Life or Doom (close, and certainly 'good enough', but not with high end quality details - I still have to put up with slow frame rates or have blurry textures and jagged edges all over the place, which break the immersion in an 'uncanny valley' sort of way due to the otherwise very high quality environment).
TBH my CPU is the bottleneck at the moment (I'll probably get a dual core AMD64 4200+ which will resolve that, the 4800+ is just a bit _too_ expensive to justify), once I have sorted out the CPU bottleneck I'll have to add the other card to my free PCI-Express slot and only then, with both cards in SLI mode, will I get MUCH better image fidelity (and drastically reduce blurred textures, missing lines and remove all jaggies).
The quality, rather than FPS or resolution is all I care about, even on there own the best cards in the market can't quite cut it (like the 7800 TGX) with really high quality textures and smoothing on games that use the HL2 or Doom engines (even games using the Unreal engine like WoW or Lineage are pushing it with the quality options turned up in the driver control panel). There is a massive noticeable difference between the quality of say a game with 12 x FSAA and 16x Anisotropic Filtering than a game without (or even at lower settings), blurry textures and sharp edges are what I find the most distracting though.
I don't know how much this consciously applies to most people though, I suspect few people other than a few select gamers even really play with the advance settings in their driver control panels an understand just how much better they could make their games look if they knew the options existed (typically the in game settings in most titles are very limited and don't enable the really nice features that make all the difference to high end quality, they are more there to just allow people to change settings in a broad way - usually so they can easily downgrade the detail to play on older systems).
There are a few titles that will use some of the features (like Shader 3.0), but it's fair to question them. However it's a bit of a chicken and egg scenario there of course. I know I'm going to need an SLI setup to run something like Quake Wars Enemy Territory at something approaching this level of detail.
The apparent lack of X1000 series cards is probably more to blame on the fact that the NHL starts again tonight (and the fact that most of Canada will be taking a sick day tomorrow). Coincidence? I don't think so...Duke sucks!
I tried to think of a good sig, and this wasn't it.
It took 8 months from my last PC purchase for them to support PCIE on Linux (If I'd gone for a slightly less "high end" model with nvidia it would have worked from day 1) and their latest quirk is that if you install their latest X.org firegl driver on Debian by using alien --to-tgz, then detarring the tar file at the root level, it'll change permissions on every directory it writes in to to 0700. You may then find that your regular user account can't, say, run ls. Fortunately fixing that isn't too hard once you figrued out what caused it. I'd file a bug with them but you have to register on their web site and "Debian isn't supported." It'll be a cold day in hell before I put another piece of ATI hardware in one of my systems.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
What are we doing with them? Scientific Visualization.
So if this is the GPU for the xbox 360 then will that be a similar dud compared to the PS3 I wonder?
No mention of a fanless version for those of us with water cooling.
Is that too much to ask of card manufacturers?
I broke my last ATI card trying to prize their glued-on fan from the GPU, and don't want to do the same with my next purchase.
boakes.org
Yeh. I have a similar problem with bad shadows and reflections, and "infinitely thin" transparent surfaces that don't implement refraction. Mostly, I can ignore them, but sometimes they're really glaring and while a developer can write special-case code to deal with individual problems (raycasting shadows, for example) it's not automatic and they inevitably forget about some of the places where there should be shadows, reflections, caustics, or other optical effects that just fall out automatically in raytracing.
Now... I was doing raytracing on an Amiga 1000 (7.14 Mhz 68000) in the late '80s, and while a full scene took insanely long you could render a patch for testing in a few seconds and farm patches out to other computers without worrying about edge effects. That's because pure raytracing is an "embarassingly parallelizable algorithm": for static scenes, you get linear speedup in raytracing for every CPU you add. The problem is getting dynamically updated scenes out to the individual raytracers fast enough...
I'm waiting for someone to come up with a massively parallel raytracer in a video card. If they can solve the memory fan-out problem so that they can give each 16x16 (or smaller) pixel patch its own dedicated raytracer with access to the whole scene's collection of bounding boxes... so they only need to go off-chip *after* they've discovered a potential intersect on a secondary ray... it should be possible to get optically correct photorealistic rendering in real time.
Just purchased last week. Or my Geforce 6200 AGP card in my other machine.
You have to think about minimum fps. During a big firefight, you want all the power you can get. No card can get a minimum fps equal to refresh rate in any modern title.
That article looks like it took a lot of work. How long do you think? (ie. two people working for a week, or something like that)
Are the reviewers usually paid? Do you think the click-through ads cover the costs?
http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=3603&pa ge=8/ ATI IS FASTER!
e id=734&cid=2/ ATI is slower :(
http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.cfm?articl
Whats a pity is that ATI again lagging behind on the performance part in the OpenGL based games/applications. You would think they learned their lesson with the Radeon 9x00 series and the X[3/6/7/8]00 series. How poorly those products perform with 'the next-gen' OpenGL based games, ID's Doom3 engine, and current line of OpenGL games. You would think ATI's Next-gen product would be doing alot better than their previous product line or atleast to be competitive with NV's 'next-gen' harware (i start to hate the word "next-gen", it's marketing lube than actually something meaningfull).
That ATI hardware perform well on DX9 based games is really nice (one of the reason i got myself a Radeon card 2 years ago, when NV's FX serie was just horror on DX9). But fortunately the gaming market doesn't only consist out of DX-based games.
From what i gathered on various resources (http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/article/1 818/ and http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2552 ) on benchmarking the X1000 series. They are still performing inadequately compared to ATI's current line of products and that of Nvidia's 6x00 serie.
The only thing that can save ATI now is offering very competitive pricing for their new product line at the expense of current product line, which is unlikely looking at their recommended pricing.
I'm a gamer myself. What most gamers wants is not the bleeding edge hardware (well they like to day dream having it, but thats something else than what their wallet allows them to have). But good performance with good image quality at a good price in any range; either entry level or midrange or high-end.
Talking about high-end. It's also a pity that the new X1000 serie seem to less efficient running at high level of FSAA and Anisotropic filters. Those techniques can makes a game, tho how bored the gameplay may be, even interresting (such as Doom3 and other arcade type run and shooter games).
For now, i'm happy to stick to my cheap-ass 120 euro 6800LE card for atleast 2 years to come. Which easily can beat ATI's new midrange product, the X1600XT, with ease and it cost me way less.
New isn't always betterUntil the drivers for Linux perform near their Windows counterparts, ATI is completely out of the question. You are throwing your money away if you plan on doing 3D in Linux and buy an ATI card. Sure, they will work, but performance-wise you won't be getting anywhere near what you would get in Windows. NVidia is the only choice unless one of these cards gets such outstanding performance over a same priced Nvidia to make up for the crappy drivers. And of course this isn't the case.
I don't care! The only way to make me care would be substitute ATI with Nvidia, substitute Radeon whatever with 7800GTX, and sub price dropped to $150(something I can afford)for release. As you might guess I am an Nvidia fan boy.
Linux Friendly since, like awhile.
Sure you can plug in four cards - but they won't all help with the 3D heavy lifting.
From the article:
"What is missing, of course, is SLI support. What would NVIDIA lose if it were to agree to Gigabyte's solution and release drivers that support SLI across four GPUs? Well, I guess there is not much to lose by being "first to market" here, especially since only very few people have the tremendous budget needed to go for a super expensive motherboard - we expect a minimum price of $250 - and as many as two dual GPU graphics cards at almost $1,000 each. We certainly do expect the efficiency of a quad GPU setup to be behind what current dual GPU SLI configurations scale. But would anybody willing to go the hardcore way really care? "
Sometimes my arms bend back.
What matters even more to me than the speed of the drivers is the compatibility. I waited, and waited, for GLSL support in Linux from ATI. I finally get it and... the GLSL support is crummy. And I don't mean slow, I mean buggy. Some correct programs don't compile (at least then I know what the problem is). Others simply didn't run correctly (in Windows or on an nVidia card, no problem). Why bother to enable features in your driver that don't work?
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
Guys, H264 is already shipped and there are example videos at Apple. We, mac users were first to try it and people even running 2.3 ghz, dual g5 monsters lived what you lived trying to view vcd class mpeg on Pentium 75 :)
That h264 will dominate since both competing blu ray and Hd DVD decided on that format. Add the satellite feeds, digital terrestrial TV too and you will really want something that does most of the work on gpu.
After seeing amazing quality and excellent compression, I am even looking for a chip based solution to encode realtime (amateur,PVR stuff)
What made me think is, the HDTV resolution videos with h264 did not playback very well. They playback fine if you close everything running as old days.
Looking to upgrade my nv5200 ultra whatever coming with my desktop g5 soon, I checked the "avivo" features. 10bit video per channel and 12bit per channel encoding are professional level stuff. ATI page about avivo (flash anim) promises native h264 support too.
As H264 is the new standard for almost everything, you should check if it really does what it promises. For 3d performance, if it does 30 fps in complex scenes in latest game built with ID software or Unreal (engines) I am fine with it.
Remember latest OS X and upcoming windows will do lots of stuff on gpu itself so you better check the 2d performance, support,acceleration too.
This thing uses twice as much power as a 7800gtx/6800ultra.
m l
1 0
e id=734
How bad is that? It can be quantified: A 6800gt, lower clocked & only 12 pipelines, sucks down 38 watts at idle: http://www.silentpcreview.com/article265-page4.ht
38 watts doing nothing!
Accounting for more pipelines & higher core & memory clocks, the 6800ultra sucks down around 50 watts at idle. The 7800gtx & x850xt burn roughly the same: http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2496&p=
And here: http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.cfm?articl
we see the x1800xt burns 50 watts more than the x850. Ergo, this sucker burns around 100 Watts just sitting there.
Going by the anand results, the 7800gt uses 27 Watts less than an ultra, which would means it uses less than the 6800gt, 50-27=23 watts at idle. We have a winner!
The only thing I can see wrong is that they miscalculated the fill rate for the Geforces. Specifically the 7800's. Not sure about the others. Guess they wanted to make the ATI unit look better. GG bias. There's also 7800 GTX's being marketed retail with higher clock rates, highest I've seen is 490 MHz.
Who cares about FPS without knowing what the actual (theoretical) millions/billions of instructions per second it can handle? That's the main deciding factor in computers/processors. It is not the megahertz/gigahertz that matters. If in one clock cycle a processor can computer over 100 MIPS, then at 625 it'd be doing 62,500 MIPS. No graphics card does that yet.
/.
Are we all still ignorant to the "More MHz is better" syndrome? Please don't tell me people are still encumbered by this FUD, *ESPECIALLY* on
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Go get an original USB 1.1 TV Wonder. Out of the SIX machines in my house that work right now, only *ONE* (All computers are running the same OS, XP Pro SP2) will work with the damned device. I've had three ATi cards for graphics, and let me tell you, the driver support SUCKS. You might as well use the OMEGA DRIVERS. I couldn't even play Soldier of Fortune 2 at a decent framerate on a 1.7 mhz P4 with 256 megs of PC2100 DDR using an ATi 9800 card at more than 25 FPS with a brand-new XP install and using ATi's base-install drivers from their website. If you want more references, I can point you out to plenty of people who've switched out their ATi cards for nVidia. About... 95% of my buddy lists over AIM *and miss* /MSN/ICQ/Yahell! *HATE* ATi because their drivers have cost them more in data loss than the actual price of the graphics card. And to me, personal testimony and witnessing some of those cases with live webcam broadcasts from their computer just make me say *FUCK ATi.*
Sorry if this post is deemed troll, but I can at least point out... *counts buddy list members across all boards and divides by 0.95* 1300+ people that say ATi blows. Sorry, make that 1301+ including me.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Very simple. OpenGL is hardware-based, hence faster. D3D requires the OS to interpret the instructions, translate thru the OS's API, *THEN* send the info to the card. OpenGl doesn't do this, henceforth, it's faster. Why do you think Doom3 did OpenGL instead of Direct3D??? OpenGL is directly to hardware, without stupid OS interrupts/translation needing to happen.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.