Power Color Radeon X1800 XT Review --- TheThirdMedia Hardware

The Radeon X1800 XT Goes Retail

The game of one-upmanship continues unabated between the two giants in the discrete graphics card business, ATI and NVIDIA. Despite their iron grip on the market, both companies have not faltered in their desire to achieve victory, however short-lived, in the race towards ever larger and more powerful graphics cards. This has created an intense competition - not unlike the one between Intel and AMD - and things can quickly get quite dirty with mudslinging from both parties. With its latest Radeon X1000 series, ATI has shifted tack and moved to a 90-nanometre manufacturing process ahead of NVIDIA. It is hoping that the revamped architecture and the higher clock speeds made possible by the die shrink will help to restore parity if not pole position compared to NVIDIA's GeForce 7 series.

The performance of the new Radeons seems to promise more than it delivers and the reception is muted so far due to its limited availability, with ATI staggering the introduction of the various cards. Also, NVIDIA is not content to wait quietly for its rivals; it has reacted to the emerging threats by modifying its existing product lines to make them more competitive. Hence, we have seen the new-old SKUs like the GeForce 6800 GS and the GeForce 6600 DDR2; both are enhanced incarnations of older cards and are very attractively positioned. This means that some of the new Radeons will likely face pressure from NVIDIA's offerings, even before they becomes available in retail. The only bright spot that remains is that ATI has retaken the bragging rights of top dog with its flagship Radeon X1800 XT 512MB graphics card.

Unfortunately, by the time we managed to get our hands on a review unit of an actual retail Radeon X1800 XT card, the latter is no longer true. NVIDIA has enhanced its GeForce 7800 GTX card with another 256MB of memory, bringing it on par with ATI's champion. From the benchmark numbers we have seen from this 512MB version of the GeForce 7800 GTX, the extra memory together with increased clock speeds means that NVIDIA has recaptured the performance crown. However, it is also prohibitively more expensive than ATI's Radeon X1800 XT 512MB, which probably blunts the blow somewhat. Meanwhile, the retail Radeon X1800 XT cards are only starting to appear in stores now and PowerColor has sent us its version for assessment:

The compact but thick box packaging used by PowerColor manages to contain one of the larger graphics cards now, along with a decent bundle of software and accessories. It is a welcome change from the usual oversized boxes.

PowerColor Radeon X1800 XT 512MB Technical Specifications

GraphicsEngine	ATI Radeon X1800 GPU 321 milliontransistors on 90nm fabrication process Core Clock: 625MHz 16 pixel shaderprocessors 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 High quality 4:1 compression for normalmaps and two-channel data formats High quality 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 Includes support for blending andmulti-sample anti-aliasing 32-bit integer HDR(10:10:10:2) format supportedthroughout the pipeline Includes support for blending andmulti-sample anti-aliasing 2x/4x/6xAnti-Aliasing modes Multi-sample algorithm with gammacorrection, programmable sparse sample patterns, and centroid sampling New Adaptive Anti-Aliasing feature withPerformance and Quality modes Temporal Anti-Aliasing mode Lossless Color Compression (up to 6:1) atall resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions 2x/4x/8x/16xAnisotropic Filtering modes Up to 128-tap texture filtering Adaptive algorithm with Performance andQuality options High resolutiontexture support (up to 4k x 4k) Flexible display 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/GDDR4 memory interface 512MB DDR3 SDRAM Memory Clock = 1500MHz(1.25ns)
RAMDAC	Dual integrated dual-link DVI transmitters DVI 1.0 compliant /HDMI interoperable and HDCP ready Dual integrated 10 bit per channel 400 MHz DACs
I/O FaceplateConnectors	2 x DVI-I connectors 1 x mini-DIN connector
Drivers &Software	Driver support forWindows 98 / Me / 2000 / XP Pacific Fighters CyberLink DVD Solution
Other Information	CrossFire EditionsAvailable Four modes ofoperation: Alternate Frame Rendering (maximumperformance) Supertiling (optimal load-balancing) Scissor (compatibility) Super AA 8x/10x/12x/14x (maximum imagequality) Dynamic Voltage Control Native PCI Express x16 bus interface 350watts or greater PSU recommended



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