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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?
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...
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?
Today's winner of the Roland Piquopalliehsasdflkj Honorary Blogger Self-Promotion award is: Mojo-Dog. Special kudos go to slashdot editors, who continue to accept slashvertising as real "submssions".
In honor of this award, we are now providing a special slashdot effect to Mojo-Dog's server. Guess sometimes that self-promotion backfires, doesn't it?
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.
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?
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.
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http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=255
http://www.kubuntu.org/
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.
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?