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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?"
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.
... 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
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.
...who incidentally isn't producing AGP versions of their cards either. The way it stands, ATI has the fastest (and highest number of) AGP cards to offer.
I think ATI still believes that Linux is not a long-term viable gaming platform and therefore they are not coming out with linux drivers... Which is why I still run Nvidia cards on my linux boxes. They have the same unified driver base for linux as they do for windows and it just simply works. And since linux is what I use 95% of my time, I'm not buying ATI anytime soon.
-=JML=-
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?