ATI All-In-Wonder X1900 PCIe Review

An anonymous reader writes "ViperLair is currently running a closer look at ATI's newly released All-In-Wonder X1900 PCIe graphics card. The clock speeds and memory are pretty comparable to other cards available but the reviewer warns that 'clock speeds do not always tell the whole story.' The review tests performance in Doom 3, UT 2004, Far Cry, Half-Life 2, and the 3DMark06 benchmarking tool." This release comes relatively quickly after the X1800 series which was release just last October.

Comments

I'm giving up on my All in Wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

My next video card won't have any TV capture abilities. I got an MDP-130 HD capture card, and Comcast is now doing Analog Digital Simulcast (clear QAM) in my area, which means I can do straight digital captures of most major TV stations.

Re:I'm giving up on my All in Wonder

[Tlosk]

I would second the cheaper also. I've had a Tuner card that has seen me through three full systems and about seven video card upgrades and is still working great. In comparison the 2MB video card, 64MB memory, 56k modem, 4X CD Rom etc that shared space with it when it was new have long since hit the dustbin.

Primarily useless benchmarks...

[Suddenly_Dead]

The review didn't really test much that stressed the video card beyond Doom 3. A look at Half-Life 2 Lost Coast and/or some other HDR game(s) would have been far more useful than testing Unreal Tournament 2004, which the review admitted had more of a CPU bottleneck than anything else. They didn't do any overclock tests either, and the image quality tests are a little dubious.

Re:$500

[LurkerXXX]

People with more disposable income than you, or people who have gaming as a higher priority in their life compared to other things than it is in yours.

Re:$500

[d474]

"People with more disposable income than you, or people who have gaming as a higher priority in their life compared to other things than it is in yours."

IOW, guys without girlfriends.

Re:geforce

[d474]

"...buy the one that has the best FPS/$"

Aha! So you are a FPS/$ fan.

I'm still waiting ...

[AdamReyher]

While the performance of the card does take a nice step forward over the X1800, it's not really much to spend the extra $$ over. I'm still waiting for the "next generation" graphics card. Something that really takes a large step forward. Still, it really comes down to the application developers and how they design the programs. Most can't use the full capabilities of the card, so we're still left in the dark.

- Adam

Re:geforce

[Billly Gates]

There is a good reason.

Linux support and a companies reputation. ATI has made some lousy drivers and products in the past. However I find nvidia to be falling behind and both their linux and windows drivers are not stable. I had to downgrade to an older Windows HCL certified driver for my geforce 6600 for windows. Strange things kept happening. SuSE has a big warning on drivers too.

ATI now makes cards that are faster and have better effects and visuals than NVidia's while their drivers are improving. Even on Linux they are getting decent.

This is why people buy on loyality and I wished I purchased an ATI instead a few months ago.

think about that

[way2trivial]

if 700$ gets you 82 fps in a game, that's 8$ per frame
if 200$ gets you 40 fps that's 50 cents a frame
if a 10$ card gets you 30 fps,

are you really ONLY gonna buy based on $/fps?

enjoy your 10$ card.

Re:$500

[corychristison]

But you can watch TV AND Game!

Well... if you have a dual-screen setup. ;-)

Re:geforce

[WhiteWolf666]

Meh....

I only run Linux. I used to be a huge fan of ATI. I still have a Radeon 9800 Pro, and an Xpress 200 integrated chipset.

Both are a HUGE pain in Linux, compared to Nvidia. Huge. Gigantic.

Their drivers have improved, yes. But they still suck quite a bit. At least they usually compile/install correctly now, but performance is crappy.

Re:48 pixel pipelines

[be-fan]

They didn't jump from 16 to 48 pixel pipelines. The x1000 cards have a fairly non-traditional architecture. Instead of having a fixed set of pixel pipelines with fixed resources, they have a large shader array, running a number of rendering threads. ALUs are assigned to each thread as necessary. The X1900 increases the number of shader units from 16 to 48, but both the X1800 and X1900 have 16 texture units and 16 raster-op units. So both cards can do 16 texture lookups per clock, and commit 16 pixels to memory per clock. Where the extra ALUs in the X1900 come in handy are for complex shaders, where the X1900 can do far more calculations per pixels than the X1800.

Re:48 pixel pipelines

[BrookHarty]

Then the graph is off in the article.

All-In-Wonder Comparison
X1900 X1800 XL 2006 X800 XL X800 XTPCI Express
Yes Yes Yes Yes No
Core Clock
500 500 450 400 500
Memory Clock
480 500 400 490 500
Vertex Pipelines
8 8 2 6 6
Pixel Pipelines
48 16 4 16 16
Microtune Tuner
IC 2121 IC 2121 IC 2121 IC 2121 MT2050
Shader Model 3.0
Yes Yes Yes No No
Avivo, H.264 Acceleration
Yes Yes No No No