ATI Radeon X800 XL 512MB

[gk1]

ATI Radeon X800 XL 512MB

We run ATI's newest card through its paces. Does doubling up on RAM pay off?

May 04, 2005 - This morning, ATI Technologies officially unveiled its 512MB graphics card, the aptly named Radeon X800 XL 512MB. This marks the first official card from this generation of products (we're talking ATI's X series and NVIDIA's 6800 series of cards)

 

to breika sto ign.com

512 mb ayta eine!!!!!

[Πέτρος Σ.]

Για το Pixel Shader 3 δεν ξέρουμε τίποτα;

Πότε θα βγούν εκείνες οι κάρτες;

[gk1]

ayto eine agnosto... emeina m@@@@@s otan to eida sto ign symera k exei poli megalo athro an deis!

[aviator737]

Παλι χοντρα θα μας τα παρουν!!!!

[gk1]

a kala eise!!!! giayto den tis ftiaxnoyn?

[gk1]

ATI Radeon X800 XL 512MB

We run ATI's newest card through its paces. Does doubling up on RAM pay off?

May 04, 2005 - This morning, ATI Technologies officially unveiled its 512MB graphics card, the aptly named Radeon X800 XL 512MB. This marks the first official card from this generation of products (we're talking ATI's X series and NVIDIA's 6800 series of cards).

 

By doubling the video RAM, games that use immense amounts of texture data, lots of rendering passes and run at ultra-high resolutions should benefit greatly. But does this apply to current games? Are we at the point where we need 512MB of RAM on a video card yet? Read on...

You may be wondering, why an X800 XL instead of an XT? Well, cost is obviously a factor here, as is likely availability. The X850 line of cards have been hard to come by, causing some retailers to jack up the price of the cards to excruciating levels just to make a few extra bucks. How nice.

 

While we're on the subject of price, the X800 XL 512MB will carry an MSRP of $449. This puts it in direct competition with NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 GT ($399) and ATI's own Radeon X850 XT ($499). It's also priced exactly the same as ATI's own All-in-Wonder X800 XT which has a whole slew of cable, radio and video input and output capabilities. Comparatively, the 256MB version of the X800 XL retails for $299.

 

Speaking of the standard X800 XL, the X800 XL 512MB features the same core and memory clock speeds of 400MHz for the core clock and 980MHz for the memory. The difference, aside from the amount of RAM, is that the X800 XL 512MB has dual DVI + VIVO.

 

A big difference between this card and the rest of its line is that ATI will not be producing its own first-party boards. Usually, ATI has its own in-house produced products as well as having a slew of third-party board partners. The Radeon X800 XL 512MB will only see release from ATI's board partners. These partners include:

 

# ABIT

# Connect3D

# Gigabyte

# HIS

# Info-Tek

# MSI

# Sapphire

# TUL

# VisionTek

 

What the Developers Are Saying

Straight from the press released issued this morning, here are a slew of quotes from prominent developers:

 

"ATI is allowing us to raise the visual quality bar and deliver a new level of realism never seen before in real-time video games," said Andrey Khonich, Senior R&D programmer, Crytek.

 

"The new 512 MB cards from ATI will allow us to increase the visual quality of our games and take graphics in forthcoming games to an unprecedented level," said Jorgen Tharaldsen, Product Director, Funcom.

 

"When we received the new 512 MB video card from ATI, we got final, absolute confirmation that the future of PC gaming was not only bright, it is undoubtedly going to lead the way to next-generation gaming experiences. ATI totally gets it and is leading the charge!" said Chris Taylor, CEO/Creative Director, Gas Powered Games.

 

"ATI gave us the head start we needed to develop for the new generation of 512 MB platforms. Developing on the absolute edge of what a PC can do, 512 MB hardware has really allowed us to increase both visual quality and speed. Gamers should be really excited by what a doubling of memory can do," said Bo Anderson, CEO, Grin.

 

"No matter what the shader model, having the space to store the best high definition textures local to the VPU is critical. This is particularly important in true next generation development, with complex materials requiring concurrent access to multiple high definition source maps. That, along with techniques using multiple render targets for deferred rendering components and demand for high definition, anti-aliased back buffers mean that the new 512MB development platform from ATI offers us important new degrees of freedom," said Ian Moran, Lead Programmer, Juice Games.

 

"The 512MB of memory on ATI's card makes our games run at high frame rates even on scenes with very high amounts of textures," says Tim Rance, Chief Technical Officer, Lionhead Studios. "Our games run more smoothly in these cases because everything can be stored in video memory with no thrashing of the texture cache."

 

"We developers always like getting more of everything to play with and 512 MB of memory allows us to push visuals much further. With such an immense amount of memory at our disposal, we can get closer to realizing Remedy's vision of cinematic gaming," said Markus Maki, Director of development, Remedy.

 

"The Radeon X800 XL 512MB has both immediate and long-term advantages," said Gary McTaggart, Graphics Architect, Valve. "Texture thrashing during a frame render is drastically reduced or eliminated. This is even more beneficial in the case of High Dynamic Range rendering (HDR), which we are in the process of releasing for the Source engine, where environment and light maps are eight times as large. Further down the road, memory hungry technologies like 3D textures, used in things like procedural noise for detail textures, some fog algorithms, and color correction, will benefit as well from the capabilities of this new card."

Well, sounds great. But how does the card match up in current real-world games? Let's move on to the benchmarks.

 

Benchmarks

 

Our testing system is as follows:

 

# Intel Pentium 4 3.73GHz EE w/ EM64T

# Intel 925XE motherboard

# 1GB Corsair DDR2 RAM

# 160GB Seagate 7200.7 Serial ATA HDD

# Sound Blaster Audigy 4 Pro

 

We've tested a slew of the most popular current games whose engines are being used in multiple third-party games. This gives us a pretty good idea of how the card will perform across a wide array of games!

As you can see, it looks like we're not quite in need of 512MB of RAM just yet. Sure, if we had 512MB on a X850 XT PE then we'd be more than happy, but it doesn't seem incredibly beneficial quite yet. For the most part, it scales about the same as the 256MB cards do.

 

We're curious about how these numbers would pan out with an UnrealEngine3 powered game or something similar, as next-gen games will be using excessive amounts of memory and 512MB will very likely pay off there. We're also curious as to how it might help with Valve's upcoming add-on level for Half-Life 2, The Lost Coast, as that's specifically intended for ultra high-end configurations

eipa na balw oloklira to athro.... alla ta diagramata den mporw na ta balw!