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MSI RX1950PRO-T2D256E Review
[Abstract]
IntroductionA new year has dawned and who knows what tech marvels lies in wait to delight us. We do know some of what you can expect though, by extrapolating existing products and looking at ro...
[Content] PCDigitalMobileGame
Introduction
A new year has dawned and who knows what tech marvels lies in wait to delight us. We do know some of what you can expect though, by extrapolating existing products and looking at roadmaps for the coming months. For consumer graphics, NVIDIA can realistically hope for two months at most before ATI's next generation R600 is released and start vying with it for the graphics performance crown (with the soonest expected timeframe to be around Windows Vista's launch). NVIDIA's head start will also mean that the mid-range variations of the GeForce 8 series will be selling in stores before the ATI equivalent.
The greater competition and choice in discrete graphics by then will hopefully lead to more users buying them, though we think that the key adoption factor will be Windows Vista and DirectX 10 games. Eagerly awaited titles like Unreal Tournament 2007 will be another catalyst for system upgrades but we could also see more PC gamers defecting to the console for various reasons. What's unlikely to change is the never-ending flames between hardcore supporters of ATI and NVIDIA over which is the top dog.
The other constant in this changing environment is the cost of these new gadgets. You can bet that they won't be cheap when launched. Hence, for those with a modest budget, looking at current graphics offerings is a more practical approach. For those intending to upgrade to a decent high-end graphics card, ATI's recent Radeon X1950 PRO is an offer hard to miss. After reviewing a number of custom designs from various manufacturers, today we turn our sights on a standard clocked Radeon X1950 PRO from MSI, though it does use a non-reference heatsink and fan. Here's the technical lowdown on the MSI RX1950PRO-T2D256E:
MSI's Radeon X1950 PRO. |
MSI RX1950PRO-T2D256E Technical Specifications
| GraphicsEngine | - ATI Radeon X1950 GPU
- 330 milliontransistors on 80nm fabrication process
- Core Clock: 575MHz
- 36 pixel shaderprocessors
- 12 pixel pipelines
- 8 vertex shaderprocessors
- Ring Bus MemoryController
- 512-bit internalring bus for memory reads
- Programmableintelligent arbitration logic
- Fully associativetexture, color, and Z/stencil cachedesigns
- HierarchicalZ-buffer with Early Z test
- Lossless ZCompression (up to 48:1)
- Fast Z-Buffer Clear
- Z/stencil cacheoptimized for real-time shadow rendering
- Optimized forperformance at high display resolutions,including widescreen HDTV resolutions
- Ultra-Threaded ShaderEngine
- Support forMicrosoft® DirectX® 9.0 Shader Model3.0 programmable vertex and pixel shaders in hardware
- Full speed 128-bitfloating point processing for allshader operations
- Up to 512simultaneous pixel threads
- Dedicated branchexecution units for high performancedynamic branching and flow control
- Dedicated textureaddress units for improved efficiency
- 3Dc+ texturecompression
- Highquality 4:1 compression for normalmaps and two-channel data formats
- Highquality 2:1 compression for luminancemaps and single-channel data formats
- Multiple RenderTarget (MRT) support
- Render to vertexbuffer support
- Complete featureset also supported in OpenGL® 2.0
- Advanced Image QualityFeatures
- 64-bit floatingpoint HDR rendering supported throughoutthe pipeline
- Includessupport for blending andmulti-sample anti-aliasing
- 32-bit integer HDR(10:10:10:2) format supportedthroughout the pipeline
- Includessupport for blending andmulti-sample anti-aliasing
- 2x/4x/6xAnti-Aliasing modes
- Multi-samplealgorithm with gammacorrection, programmable sparse sample patterns, and centroid sampling
- NewAdaptive Anti-Aliasing feature withPerformance and Quality modes
- TemporalAnti-Aliasing mode
- LosslessColor Compression (up to 6:1) atall resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions
- 2x/4x/8x/16xAnisotropic Filtering modes
- Upto 128-tap texture filtering
- Adaptivealgorithm with Performance andQuality options
- High resolutiontexture support (up to 4k x 4k)
- Flexibledisplay support
- Programmablepiecewise linear gamma correction, colorcorrection, and color space conversion (10 bits per color)
- Complete,independent color controls and video overlaysfor each display
- High quality pre-and post-scaling engines, withunderscan support for all outputs
- Content-adaptivede-flicker filtering for interlaceddisplays
- Xilleon™TV encoder for high quality analog output
- YPrPb componentoutput for direct drive of HDTV displays
- Spatial/temporaldithering enables 10-bit color qualityon 8-bit and 6-bit displays
- Fast, glitch-freemode switching
- VGA mode support onall outputs
- Drive two displayssimultaneously with independentresolutions and refresh rates
| | GraphicsMemory | - 256-bit 8-channelGDDR3 memory interface
- 256MB DDR3 SDRAM
- Memory Clock = 1380MHzDDR
| | RAMDAC | - Dualintegrated dual-link DVI transmitters
- DVI 1.0 compliant /HDMI interoperable and HDCP ready
- Dualintegrated 10 bit per channel 400 MHz DACs
| | I/O FaceplateConnectors | - 2 x DVI-I connectors(HDCP Support)
- 1 x mini-DIN connector
| | Drivers &Software | - Driver support forWindows 98 / Me / 2000 / XP
- MSI Multimedia(Drivers & Utilities)
- MSI Star DVD Family
- TOCA Race Driver 3
| | Other Information | - DynamicVoltage Control
- Atleast 450W PSU recommended
- NativePCI Express x16 bus interface
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