![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Wednesday, October 01, 2003
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
Radeon 9800 XT Review
We examine the performance, image quality, and gaming experience delivered by ATI’s new Radeon 9800XT video card and explain their Half-Life 2 bundling plans.
ATI has come a very long way from where they use to be. Their past is a colorful one. We saw some great hardware that lacked implementation in the drivers to reach its full potential. That all changed when the Radeon 8500 reached it full potential over its life cycle. ATI did a complete 180 with their driver team and introduced the Catalyst Driver program that concentrates on providing a steady and frequent schedule of quality WHQL drivers with each release fixing bugs and typically providing performance increases. ATI has gone from an underdog to a leader in the graphics industry and the enthusiast’s choice when it comes to high-end gaming performance and image quality.
It was about a year since ATI released the R300 core. Here we are a year later and the R3xx line of cards is still number one in performance and image quality. Today’s new card is simply an evolution of what is already out there. It looks like we will have to wait till the first half of next year before we see ATI’s next-gen part.
ATI is all about expanding the visual experience. They started with the Radeon 9700 Pro a year ago and are still pushing forward with this goal. One thing that ATI has been doing lately and succeeding very well in is expanding to add-in Board Partners. They have some very solid names under their belt now.
ATI Radeon 9800XT:
The Radeon 9800XT is their next new high-end card. They have taken this core and expanded it and made it even more overclockable allowing for higher default clock speeds and still providing the same shader architecture. The last point is very important to note: “Most widely used DirectX9 Platform”. The R300 has been out a year now, in fact it was even out before DirectX9 was even released. That being the case, this card has been the development platform of choice for developers simply because it was the first and has been here the longest. That means any game that has been developed in the last year probably started with development on the 9700 Pro.
Clock Specifications
Above are the specs of the 9800XT codenamed R360. It comes clocked at a core speed of 412 MHz, this is compared to the 380 MHz on the 9800Pro. The memory is clocked at 730 MHz, which is compared to 680 MHz on the 9800Pro. The memory interface is still 256-bit which means it has a total memory bandwidth of 23.3GB/sec. Also you will find that 256MB of RAM is the standard amount of RAM shipping with this card. Also keep in mind add-in board partners can opt for 128MB on their boards if they choose to offer that, but you will no doubt find the 256MB versions available first.
New Cooling & PCB
In order to get this .15 micron core to the speeds it is running at stable and allow for better overclocking a new cooling solution needed to be put in place. The heatsink is now made of copper. However, they were able to keep the whole unit to a single-slot solution still and provide a quiet fan. They have also introduced thermal monitoring. On the R360 this is built into the packaging of the VPU. This also allows the fan speed to be varied during operation depending on how hot the actual chip packaging is.
ATI engineers have spent a lot of time with the Radeon 9800XT PCB layout. In this, they have made many improvements in trace lengths and component layout. According to ATI, these advancements have made more of an impact to the scaling of the core speed in the retail card than process improvements in manufacturing the core itself although both certainly come into play.
Shader Operations
These slides are sure to turn a few heads. This really gets to the meat of what the 9800XT is all about. The Radeon 9800XT’s shader engines are compared here to the NVIDIA GeForceFX 5900 Ultra’s shader engines. Here we see that for all intents and purposes the 5900 Ultra is a 4 pixel pipeline GPU that is compared to the true 8 pixel pipeline architecture of the 9800XT.
The 9800XT is able to achieve a maximum of five operations per pipe, so multiply this times the eight pipes and we get 40 operations per clock. According to ATI the 5900 Ultra is able to achieve three operations per pipe multiplied by four pixel pipelines and we get 12 operations per clock. The 9800XT is also able to achieve 40 FP operations per clock versus 8 FP operations per clock on the 5900 Ultra. Bringing it all together this means a theoretical max pixel fill rate of 16.5 GOps/sec on the 9800XT and 5.4 GOps/sec on the 5900 Ultra. Now it is important to note this is the theoretical max pixel fill-rate on both cards and typically this theoretical maximum is not reached in today’s games. However, you do get an idea how the shader engines compare and why the 9800XT is much faster in shader intensive applications.
Availability
This board is shipping in October and will retail for $499. ATI representatives have commented off-the-record that this card will be available for purchase on store shelves in the month of October.