ATI X800 XL Shootout --- TheThirdMedia Hardware

High End Value for the Dollar

When ATI upgraded their RADEON X800 series of graphics card last December with the introduction of the RADEON X850 series, most of the attention was focused on the high-end RADEON X850 XT. Due to the poor availability of the former champs, the RADEON X800 XT, many were wondering if the same problems that plagued ATI previously had been solved with the latest iteration. From what we have seen, the upgrade seems to have paid off. ATI now has a product with the necessary firepower to match NVIDIA's relatively uncluttered but limited product family for every price range. But it also meant that many first time buyers would be confused by the range of model numbers available as in addition to the older RADEON X800 cards (which should die a natural death in the retail market), we now have the RADEON X850 PRO and X800 XL. While we had no doubts that the RADEON X850 XT is a worthy successor to the graphics performance crown, we were more intrigued by the possibilities of their high mid-range competitor, the RADEON X800 XL, a 16-pipeline PCI Express card utilizing a 256-bit memory interface coupled with a 256MB GDDR3 frame buffer. What makes the RADEON X800 XL even more appetizing is its lower price bracket than the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT.

Our RADEON X800 XL contenders.

Our previous review of a RADEON X800 XL card showed that although the RADEON X800 XL was not the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT killer as we had hoped, it still did creditably, with some minor wins in some of the benchmarks. ATI may have intended the RADEON X850 PRO as the main rival for the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT but the better value for money RADEON X800 XL may end up as the more attractive bargain. Also, RADEON X800 XL cards seem to be more widely available in the retail market at the moment. Therefore, in order to help you discover which RADEON X800 XL card is for you, we compare and contrast seven RADEON X800 XL cards from Elsa, GeCube, Gigabyte, HIS, MSI, PowerColor and Sapphire in this roundup.

All the seven cards featured in this article may all be unique in their own ways but before we go through them individually, here is a table showing the kind of technical features that you can expect from a RADEON X800 XL card.

Typical RADEON X800 XL Technical Specifications

GraphicsEngine	ATIRADEON X800 XL VisualProcessing Unit (VPU) StockVPU clock = 400MHz 16parallel rendering pipelines 6parallel geometry engines 256-bitmemory interface SMARTSHADER?HD Full support forMicrosoft?DirectX?9.0 programmable vertex and pixelshadersin hardware 2.0Vertex Shaders Supportsvertex programs up to 65,280 instructions with flow control Single cycletrigonometric operations (SIN & COS) 2.0Extended Pixel Shaders Supports up to1,536 instructions and 16 textures perrendering pass 2nd GenerationF-buffer technology acceleratesmulti-pass pixel shader programs with unlimited instructions 32temporary and constant registers Facing registerfor two-sided lighting 128-bit, 64-bit& 32-bit per pixel floating pointcolor formats Multiple RenderTarget (MRT) support Completefeature set also supported in OpenGL?via extensions SMOOTHVISION?HD 2x/4x/6xfull scene anti-aliasing modes Sparsemulti-sample algorithm with gamma correction, programmable samplepatterns, and centroid sampling LosslessColor Compression (up to6: 1) at all resolutions, including widescreenHDTV resolutions TemporalAnti-Aliasing 2x/4x/8x/16xanisotropic filtering modes Up to 128-taptexture filtering (Adaptivealgorithm with bi-linear (performance) andtri-linear (quality) options) 3Dc? High quality 4:1Normal Map Compression Works with anytwo-channel data format HYPER Z?HD 3-level HierarchicalZ-Buffer with early Z test Lossless Z-Buffercompression (up to 48:1) Fast Z-Buffer Clear Z cache optimizedfor real-time shadow rendering Optimized forperformance at high display resolutions,including widescreen HDTV resolutions VIDEOSHADER?HD Seamless integrationof pixel shaders with video in realtime FULLSTREAM?video de-blocking technology for Real,DivX, and WMV9 formats VIDEOSOAP?noise removal filtering for capturedvideo All-format DTV/HDTVdecoding Adaptive Per-PixelDe-Interlacing and Frame RateConversion (temporal filtering) Dualintegrated display controllers Single and dual linkexternal TMDS transmitter support forhigh resolution and/or multi-monitor DVI configurations
GraphicsMemory	256MBDDR3 SDRAM DefaultMemory clock = 980MHz (490MHz DDR)
RAMDAC	Dualintegrated 10-bit perchannel 400MHz DACs Integrated165MHz TMDStransmitter (DVI 1.0 compliant and HDCP ready)
I/OFaceplate Connectors	1x DVI-Iconnector 1 x mini-DINconnector for TV-Output / VIVO (supportsTV-output resolution up to 1024x768) 15-pin D-subVGA connector (supports up to 2048x1536 @85Hz)
Drivers& Software	Driversupport for Windows 98SE/ Me / NT / 2000 / XP / XP-64 and Linux
OtherInformation	PCIe x16slot required



	TheThirdMedia Hardware → Video Guide → Video Article > ATI X800 XL Shootout