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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?"
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.
Is it me or are there just too few silent video cards out there?
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.
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"
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.
And too (two) few companies.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
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