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- Date:
- Wednesday, December 01, 2004
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
ATI Radeon X850XT-PE Preview
The Radeon X850XT-PE, an extension of the current ATI technology, is unveiled. We take this enthusiast level video card and pair it up with the best of the best in six games to find out what kind of gaming experience you can expect.
Introduction:
We can start right off by saying that the Radeon X850XT-PE is a small step forward for ATI. Looking at ATI’s current product lineup before today, you will see that ATI had three distinct products broken up into two categories of bus interfaces for the enthusiast.
Under the AGP bus interface, pertaining to “new” technology, you will find two video cards, the Radeon X800Pro, which is a 12 pixel pipeline video card clocked at 475MHz VPU / 450MHz memory, and the Radeon X800XT-Platinum Edition, which is a 16 pixel pipeline video card clocked at 520MHz VPU / 575MHz memory. (Some will argue that the Radeon X800XT-PE is not even a retail product, as finding it on store shelves ranges from difficult to impossible. And many times when you do find it, the price will be well over MSRP, bringing the price of the card up into the US$700 range sometimes.)
Under the PCI-Express interface you will find the Radeon X800XT, which is a 16 pixel pipeline video card clocked at 500MHz VPU / 500MHz memory, and the Radeon X800XT-Platinum Edition, which has 16 pixel pipelines and is clocked at 520MHz VPU / 575MHz memory. So the only difference between the X800XT and X800XT-PE is a 20MHz VPU clock frequency and a 75MHz memory frequency.
The X600 and X300 series of cards have basically found their way to “budget” video card status. The X700 series, while looking extremely strong against NVIDIA’s GeForce 6600 mainstream series of GPU, has still yet to be released in an AGP interface package.
The ATI product lineup is changing today and will probably be a bit confusing to some as the current X800 product line starts to reach towards mainstream pricing. ATI is announcing five new products, three in the high-end and two performance products at lower prices. The high-end video cards appear under the name of the Radeon X850 Series and the two performance cards are now in the Radeon X800 series.
The PCI-E Radeon X850 Series:
We won’t bore you with all the marketing talk and will instead get right down to the facts about these new video cards. The R480 VPU (i.e. the Radeon X850 Series) is all about efficiency. ATI is using newly optimized silicon, new power features within the silicon, and a completely new thermal solution that may make you cringe at first with flashbacks of “leaf blower” and “dust buster” parody pictures.
The Radeon X850 series are all PCI-Express only and consist of the Radeon X850XT-PE, Radeon X850XT, and Radeon X850Pro. The core and memory frequencies have been beefed up on each one when compared to their Radeon X800 counterparts.
The Radeon X850XT-PE has exactly a 20MHz faster VPU frequency and a 15MHz faster memory frequency. This is the smallest increase in performance out of the three.
The Radeon X850XT has a 20MHz faster VPU frequency and a 40MHz faster memory frequency.
The Radeon X850Pro has a 45MHz faster VPU frequency and a 90MHz faster memory frequency. This is the largest increase in this comparsion.
Other than those clock speed differences, there are NO architectural differences. The X850XT and X850XT-PE have 16 pixel pipelines, and the X850Pro has 12 pixel pipelines. Each one supports Pixel Shader 2.0b and Vertex Shader 2.0, has 6 vertex engines, and supports 3Dc along with SMOOTHVISION HD, SMARTSHADER HD, and HyperZ HD.
The New Expanded PCI-E Radeon X800 Series:
The two new Radeon X800 series video cards are the Radeon X800XL and the Radeon X800. These two new video cards are PCI-Express and are using the new 110nm manufacturing process. The whole idea with these two cards is to produce something fast, and at a lower cost.
The Radeon X800XL has 16 fully functioning pixel pipelines operating at a 400MHz VPU frequency with 256MB of RAM at 1GHz. This card has a faster memory speed than a Radeon X800Pro AGP, but it has more pixel pipelines at a slower VPU clock. What this works out to is the X800Pro having a fillrate of 5.7 gigapixels per second, while the X800XL has a fillrate of 6.4 gigapixels per second. Therefore, the X800XL is faster in fillrate and memory bandwidth when compared to an X800Pro, and as you can see is priced accordingly at $349. What makes this unique is that this is a PCI-Express video card, where there was no PCI-Express video card to fill this spot before this product lineup.
The Radeon X800 is the most interesting out of the bunch. It is a 12 pixel pipeline video card clocked at 400MHz and has a 700MHz memory frequency. This video card is being priced at $249, which is a very comfy place considering the X700XT is priced at $199. So now for $50 more, you can go from a mainstream 8 pipeline card to a more performance oriented 12 pipeline card. Comparing this card to what is on the NVIDIA side would be like going from a GeForce 6600GT to a GeForce 6800, but interestingly enough, the Radeon X800 is comparatively priced to the GeForce 6600GT with 256MB of RAM.
There are no architectural differences between these two new X800 series video cards and the previous X800 series or new X850 series. Obviously, the new X800 cards are using an 110nm process, which means they will need less power and will be cheaper for ATI to produce. They all support the same level Pixel Shader 2.0b, Vertex Shader 2.0, 6 vertex engines, SMARTSHADER HD, 3Dc, SMOOTHVISION HD, and HyperZ HD.