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ATI's Radeon X1900GT On Test
An anonymous reader writes "ATI's Radeon X1800XT reached end of life last month and the company announced its replacement on May 5th: Radeon X1900GT. Bit-Tech has put a pair of retail Radeon X1900GT cards from Connect3D and Sapphire to the test in a range of real-world benchmarks to find out how it matches up to NVIIDA's 7900 GT."
What the video card industry needs is more competitors. Not low end stuff like what TI and Intel offer, but beefy video cards with lots of horsepower. The complaint is that there aren't any good, open drivers for Linux for these things, and a lot of that is simply because there are only two companies out there and they don't have to cater to anyone but the Windows gamers.
I'm sure the benchmarks are very impressive, after all, they were pretty impressive last time the tests were run. But now that we've got the "quantity" in these cards, it's high time we got some of that Open Source "quality" along with it.
Final Thoughts...
In some areas, the R580-based Radeon X1900GT is faster than the card it is replacing. However, in other, less shader-intense titles like Day of Defeat: Source, the R520-based Radeon X1800XT is the faster of the two. This can be attributed to the architectural differences between R520 and R580.
The natural competitor for the Radeon X1900GT is NVIDIA's GeForce 7900 GT, and across a range of games, it is very much a case of win some, lose some for both companies.
In texture-heavy games, the Radeon X1900GT can sometimes be slower than the GeForce 7800 GT, nevermind the faster GeForce 7900 GT. In newer, shader-intensive games like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Call of Duty 2, the Radeon X1900GT delivers a very good gaming experience in comparison to the GeForce 7900 GT. This is particularly the case in Oblivion, where the Radeon X1900GT is able to deliver a better gaming experience than XFX's superclocked 7900 GT XXX Edition. In addition, it will be possible to play Oblivion with both HDR and Anti Aliasing enabled if the upcoming Catalyst 6.5 driver includes the 'Chuck' patch. This is something that is currently not an option for NVIDIA owners.
Based on the current price forecasts from people in the know, the deal looks to be a pretty good one. If the Radeon X1900GT is priced at £199, it is undoubtedly a good deal. However, there are GeForce 7900 GT's already selling for that price. The decision will ultimately depend on what games you're currently playing, whether you're planning to overclock or not, and also based on the price points that ATI's partners will manage to hit.
The GeForce 7900 GT is a very good overclocker, while the Radeon X1900GT looks to be a bit of a mixed bag at the moment. If you're looking to overclock, we feel that the GeForce 7900 GT is the better deal if you find one at a good price. However, if you're planning to run your video card at stock speeds the final decision will depend on the games you're looking to play.
that the letters GT in the card name make it run faster. maybe if they add a x after it they could even topple Nvidia's cards once and for all..... or not.
nVidia's linux drivers are very solid. They aren't open - get over it - but a given nVidia card in a Linux box has the capability to do everything that a nVidia card in a windows box can do. The linux drivers and windows drivers share the same codebase, sans kernel hooks, etc. using their unified driver architecture.
Unfortunately the same cannot be same for ATI. ATI drivers are flaky and as a developer features are missing under Linux that exist in Windows.
...in about 5...4...3...2...1 seconds...NOW!
And it blows away every other one out there, so do I just wait for the next one or buy???
I never know what to do. I think I'll stick with my Voodoo 3.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
First your not going to get open source driver availability just by having more competitors. Your going to get that when the market is sufficiently appealing enough to warrant the attention of the makers of the video cards.
Nothing is wrong in accepting drivers from the companies even if they do not provide the source. If you don't like the terms then by all means go write them yourself or use ones written by others. What irks me the most is how so many now suddenly feel entitled to having code provided to them when it used to be they would have rather written the support themselves or from someone else in the community.
These companies cater to Windows gamers because they are the market. They pay the bills so they get supported.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
But can these cards pass a VESA test?
I'm pretty hard-core; I buy many PC games and play them often. I'm still milking a 9800 Pro. For almost everything, it works Good Enough.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Usually by the time I go to upgrade my video card, they've changed the bus to something faster (ISA, EISA, VESA, PCI, AGP (2x, 4x, 8x), PCI-X), and its just cheaper to get a new motherboard and processor, since processor slots change even faster than card slots. Which normally means that my card mix (ISA/PCI) won't fit, or they've change the HD controller (...,PATA, SATA) and I need a new hard drive.
Which means that each time I consider upgrading my video, it usually is just cheaper to mothball the machine and buy a new one. I think I replaced a video card once, back in the mid 90s. No, wait...I upgraded once back in 2003 so that I could go from a single monitor to a dual monitor setup. And even then, I had to step back about 3 generations from cutting edge so that the card would still work on my motherboard.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
My desktop now has 2xNvidia cards who work perfectly. I bought a ATI card back in the days and found that it was impossible to use the TV-out. That's "half the card" and a very important feature missing and I didn't even need to be a developer to figure out it meant that I had to forget about TV-out or buy another card. I'm never buying ATI again, part of the reason is that there are STILL no drivers, now 3 years later, supporting TV-out on the ATI card I bought.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
Next month... "ATI's Radeon X1900XT has reached end of it's life and the company announced its replacement on June 5th: Radeon 9700486772GTX47RZA21 Rev. A!"
Seriously, can we stop using big numbers to compensate for our tiny penises?
Both Nvidia (GeForce) and ATI (Radeon) are guilty of having hundreds of products with the same name that can only be differentiated by their absurdly esoteric combination of numbers, X's, T's, and words like Pro and Extreme (or Xtreme if they are feeling particularly retarded that day). I hate marketing as much as the next nerd, but get everyone drunk some night after work and come up with a new product name.
Then I won't have to spend a week researching video cards before I buy one. I could spend that week doing better things, like waiting for UPS to deliver my video card.
Self-referential Sigs are cool on /. these days...
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With video cards, unless you have a lot of disposable income, you are better off buying the mid-range cards that pack enough features to get the job done. The X1600Pro is a much better deal than the X1900XT. It will run Oblivion just fine in 1024x768 with most of the bells and whistles enabled. It's priced at around $125 for the AGP version.
To be quite frank, the ATi drivers are awful under Windows too. The ATi control center manages to take 25s to load on my 2GHz Core Duo laptop with 2GB of RAM and a 7200rpm hard disk. That's equivalent to an awfully grunty desktop. For all that, it doesn't even do very much, has a terrible UI, doesn't work correctly when Windows is set to use the correct screen DPI not pretend it's a 72dpi display (pathetic for a video card mfgr), and is a bit flakey to boot.
The ATi drivers are absolutely crap no matter what platform you're on.
Video card benchmarks are like the cock measuring contests of the Geek world.
I suppose if my entire life revolved around the PC, and games were my main form of entertainment (besides shooting the neighbors dog with a pellet gun for crapping on my lawn), then I guess 300-700 dollars for a video card would be great.
I got a Nvidia 6800OC from Woot for 59 bucks...plays all todays games great. Sure...not at 100000x6800000 resolution, or on the side of a skyscraper, but good enough to whip some 12 year old punks ass on your local WAN server. So what if I miss a couple of particles. My lazy eyes can't even dicipher them.
But if it's your bag, then go for it. Just be ready for the next card from Nvidia in the next 10 minutes.