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ATI Radeon X1800 GTO Launched
SippinTea writes "ATI has also hastened to market with a launch of their own this week, with a new Performance Mid-Range Graphics Card. The Radeon X1800 GTO is a chopped-down version of the Radeon X1800 XL with 12 pixel pipelines and less expensive, lower speed GDDR3 DRAM on board. It compares well with the new GeForce 7600GT but can it compete with a GeForce 7900GT for only a few dollars more?"
Is it me or are there just too many video cards out there?
There's one significant difference between the nVidia launches this week and the ATI board launched the same day. The nVidia products were available on launch day from on-line stores but the ATI product won't be available for "a few weeks".
It looks like ATI wanted to steal nVidia's thunder by announcing their latest product the same day. The small issue of not actually being able to manufacture their product yet doesn't seem to be very important to them.
The vesa driver is sooooo unacceptable.
-- Bryan
I am offically an Old-Fart(tm).
/.'ers will make the same comments?"
I looked at this and I thought, "so what, how many fps do kids need in their games anyways?"
Then the exact next thought was: "Bah the drivers are still fubar in linux so why should I care."
3rd: "How many
So offically, pass me a hat. I quit.
Ahh games I do miss them so (the best FPS will always be StarSeige Tribes), and eye-candy; nah it'll probably slow down my compile times.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
If you put four of them together you can actually run the first full second of the trailer for the next version of Doom.
Robert Oschler - RobotsRule.com
Its a real shame Apple had to shackle its Pro notebook and consumer desktop with the uninspiring x1600. OS X relies on the graphics card for so much and they give it so little attention. I hope they follow the lead of other OEMs and make upgrades to their products as new stuff becomes available and not delay faster stuff so that Steve Jobs has something to talk about at Macworld or WWDC.
1. Spend hundreds of millions of dollars developing top of the line graphics card.
2. Sell it for $500
3. Spend a few more million dollars figuring out how to cripple top of the line graphics card.
4. Sell it for half the price.
5. Profit?
6. Consumers figure out how to re-enabled all the features that were crippled making there $250 graphics card perform almost equal to the $500 version.
Another graphics chip, in case the 20+ already out there aren't enough choice for you.
FTFA:
And then:
So first they say what many of us already knew - cards become obsolete in under 18 months - and immediately after say we should spend lots of money on them anyway. Now $250 might now be much to some, but not all of us can afford that, especially for what is effectively a mid-range card.
Don't you just hate it when people reply to your signature?
Am I the only one who suspects the reason we now have a ridiculously confusing range of video chips is less to do with product differentiation and manufacturing efficiency than the publicity that accompanies each new launch? ATI and nVidia seem to have themselves stuck in this game where if one were to announce a new product every month and the other every two months, the relative disadvantage in the reporting on the latter company will result in a significant loss of consumer recognition.
So they keep coming up with new variations that are trivially different from the existing products - a clock speed adjustment here, a few pipes disabled there - primarily to keep their name in the media. Even the "unannounced" chips are broadly reported, usually with something like "quietly released" in the headline.
Presumably you are the grand old age of 26 or something. I see this all the time on
Guys like me started out on punch cards, and worked with guys from the ENIAC-era...they used to do the "You young 'uns today...!" thing too, only they complained that we wouldn't know how to program with patch cords to save our lives.
Those guys are mostly dead now, so, guess what...I feel old.
ATI used to suck with linux drivers. If you wanted a fairly recent 3d card in linux, you had to go with nvidia.
Is that still the case? If so, then I can't see why I would be interested in ATI.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
huh?
I once set Q3Arena to deathmatch, one of the void maps, against bots. 300 of them. Frag limit bumped to something like 500 and it wasn't much. The game was completely crazy but incredibly fun. With some luck you lived 10 or 15 seconds, the trick was not to not be killed but to frag at least two before you get fragged. The saw glove appeared to be extremely good weapon because at a good location you could run through a row of 30 or so bots shooting each others' backs, and get 30 frags in a row.
The problem? It was running at about 5 FPS.
Now I'd like to get a card that would enable this kind of gameplay at reasonable speed. Crowded cities, armies of troopers, hordes of demons. Power in numbers, not detail. Completely new gameplay style. Screw high degree of reality, allow me to perform a multi-kill of 40 with one shot.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
I wonder what's the point of releasing such cards. They usually cost about the same that previous-generation cards with very similar performance. The only reason for me to get a new crippled card would be to unblock some features but I can't come up with a way how is this profitable for the manufacturer.
Radeon X1800 XL with 12 pixel pipelines and less expensive, lower speed GDDR3 DRAM
The 7900GT has 24 pixel pipelines 65nm process and is cheaper. nuff said.
The human race is artificial intelligence created using object orientated programming.
Um... the 5200 series was actually a fairly decent card. I was playing UT2k4 on it at 800x600 with >30fps frame rates. For a card that cost me literally 92$ CDN that ain't bad.
Last I checked a Voodoo card from 1997 wouldn't get 30fps at 800x600x32bpp while playing UT2k4.
Nice troll though. It's kinda funny actually, most of the trolling on slashdot and on usenet come from anonymous sources. It's almost like you ARE a coward and think that disrupting a conversation is ok to do, so long as you can post anonymously and not face the consequences.
How does it feel to be a small little child thingy?
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
well this card is placed really nice in the 200-300 price bracket. if u take a look at the card at that price range 7600GT will be low range and 7900GT will be outta budget. i think its better than nvidia 7600GT(only if 7600GT had 256bit memory bus y nvidia y). the moment nvidia launched 7600 and 7900 products ATi decreased the prices. i don't think we are gonna see the X1800 GTO soon in the market. as all ATi lauches are mostly paper launches. but i think its a good move from ATi they have created a new segment in that price bracket. and actually ATi had a big hole in that bracket specially in SM3.0 compatible cards.
i work for money, if u want loyalty, Go get a Dog.
Well can u see any point in realeasing new version of OS. or new fasted CPU. Do u think companies investing millions of dollors in research are mad .... dude get a point and comment on anything .... and new generation cards are not have same performance and features. ever tried playing FEAR or doom3 on 9800P ...
i work for money, if u want loyalty, Go get a Dog.
Tech Forum Watch has a good round up of the recent launches including the GTO, Quad SLI & Notebook SLI.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
They are about offering more about bang than the other guy for your buck. The midrange $150-$200 range is where you get the most for your money, and each time one competitor offers a better value, the other can't afford to sit back for too long. The midrange GPU segment is one incredibly efficient market and the that is why there are these frequent releases. Each company is fighting to stay ahead.
One reason for this is that most midrange buyers are enthusiasts, and judging by the # of comments for a product on newegg, one can see that as soon as a better value is offered by a new chip, sales quickly shift towards it. The Nvidia 6800 GS was selling like hotcakes for just the tiny stopgap period it was put out, just to best the ATI x800GTO until the 7600 GT showed up.
I'm shopping for a card for a friend now, and have noticed that the midrange is good, but for high resolution play at 1600x1200 or 1920x1200, the midrange is barely cutting it now, so it becomes important to get the most bang for your buck, especially if you have an LCD with native high res and want to maintain quality. The new 7600 GT is about 15% faster than the 6800 GS, even w/ a 128 bit memory bus, and definitely hits a sweet spot at $190. It should run most popular titles comfortably at 1920x1200 and has next generation shader 3.0, unlike ATI's offerings below $200.
Unfortunately for ATI, they haven't offered the best midrange value since their 9xxx line. ATI took Nvidia's crown a while back but Nvidia has had it back for some time now.
all ATi X1xxx series hardware is 90nm too .... they shifted to 90nm before nvidia.
i work for money, if u want loyalty, Go get a Dog.
I'm a photographer, and most of my work is photo editing with Adobe Photoshop and RAW picture conversion with Canon's Zoombrowser. I read in a FAQ from Adobe that they mentioned upgrading your video card to improve performance in Photoshop, and was wondering what types of aspects in a video card I should be looking at for this work? I don't need any of the video game type enhancements in a card, so should I just look at the speed and amount of DRAM on the board? Is the X1800 GTO going to be a good choice, or should I go with something higher up on the product line? Or does the video card really make little difference for programs like these? thanks, Chris
Actually a Voodoo 3 would barely be installable to start with, the last official Voodoo3 drivers are for Windows 98, to use a Voodoo3 on a W2K/WXP box you have to use sub-par unofficial drivers (I know it, because I used to run a W2k box with a Voodoo3)
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Fanless graphic cards are becoming more and more common on the retail market, while they virtually didn't exist a year ago...
Funny, my THREE PROCESSOR 12MB Creative 3D Blaster Voodoo2 was purely passive cooling - no fans, not even a heatsink. When did that come out... 1995?? Same with my Voodoo3 2000 PCI. ATi Rage/Rage Pro/RageIIC (digging them up as I dig thru my old hardware box here.) Same thing. Those are pretty old, as well. Matrox G400 - no fan or heatsink, either.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
So when can I mod the 6600GT to turn it into a 6800? Oh well, there goes that whole "downrated" argument.
I've got a HP zv6000( aka Compaq R4000 ) and ATI's driver only works if I turn OFF onboard SidePort memory and use 128MB of shared/system memory instead. Their response is that they don't support laptops.... The only reason why I even considered purchasing a non-Nvidia system was because I saw the Radeon Express 200M on their website stating Linux support.
So bringing out a new graphics card is pretty meaningless without GNU/Linux support in my eyes.
"ATI's patterns indicate that the Linux driver will deliver substantially fewer features and less performance than its Windows counterpart."
So does the Linux Nvidia driver support Purevideo(C)? I think you'll find that the Linux drivers overall support less features than their comparable Windows version.
Wouldn't you expect that a "GTO" edition of a card is better than the plain-jane version?
Recently I upgrade my card. If it wasn't for Tom's Video Card charts and some more reviews to round that out, it would have been impossible to tell which cards were better than which - let alone which is the best value.
I really think the numbering and naming schemes do the companies a disservice.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
That's funny seeing as how you can get higher framerates with my GF4 Ti4200 which can be had for $20 CAD on ebay. If not less. In fact I my geforce 2 TI outperformed the Fx5200.
Nowadays, you can get 5200s for next to nothing. I've seen $0-$30 after rebate from eVGA, the top nVidia board maker. Pretty good, and totally worth it even if you have to throw it out in a year.
what card and CPU were you using at the time? if they were from a long time ago, well, the new cards might offer ten times the frame rates of your old card, if you have a fast CPU to feed them. or was it a fast system already?
i disable sigs
I'd never buy stuff off ebay. I'd rather pay more and support a store I like [e.g. which is reputable] then mail order a card off the net from someone I don't know. Even if you get the card it may not be in the best shape [e.g. perma-heated, static shocked, etc].
That and when you make nearly six figures spending an extra 60$ or whatever on a video card isn't a big deal [specially in light of my first point].
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
And not only that, but the VooDoo3 wouldn't do 800x600x32bpp at any framerate. It was 16bpp only iirc.
:-(
I got a 6800GT on ebay for £120, and another one a month or so later for same price, but the adaptor on my scsi disk is getting in the way so can't use two yet till I get a bigger case. UT2k4 is very enjoyable at 1600x1200 with just the one card, and am spending way to much time playing it. Am really looking forward to the new one see here, but I'm pretty certain even with both cards its going to be slow as hell
The 5200, while clearly greater then vodooo graphic cards from 1997 were quite weak in comparison to their real competition of the time being the ati 9500 series.
Hmmm... Pie...