ATI's X1000 Series: Extended Performance Testing

Final Words

The additional tests that we've run help to solidify our assessment of ATI's situation with the X1000 line. Our tests show that the high end ATI cards handle enabling antialiasing better than NVIDIA cards overall. The X1600 XT fairly consistently performs much worse than the 6800 GT and a little better than the 6600 GT. The X1300 Pro doesn't perform nearly as well as the 6600 GT in our tests (though it costs nearly the same), doesn't perform at playable framerates over 1024x768 in high quality modes, and enabling antialiasing is simply not an option.

The X1800 XT will be good competition for the 7800 GTX, besting it in many cases when antialiasing is enabled at higher resolutions. The X1800 XL competes fairly well with the 7800 GT, but the NVIDIA card generally comes out on top in the tests that we ran. OpenGL games are still a hurdle for all the ATI cards to overcome, but it seems as if the X1600 XT is more highly capable of mitigating the impact of a non-Microsoft API on performance.

The true bottom line of the goodness of these cards with respect to their NVIDIA counterparts is price. The MSRP data that we have (which is all we have to go on so far) is absolutely a deal breaker. At every step along the way, the NVIDIA parts that perform at or near the level of the ATI X1000 series cards look like they will have a $50 to $100 price advantage. As the NVIDIA parts have had the market to themselves for a while, their prices have managed to settle. ATI won't be able to benefit from the high prices that we usually see at a product launch because their parts just aren't worth the price premium.

But that's not all the coverage that we have planned for the new ATI parts. Stay tuned for some more in-depth Shader Model 3.0, image quality, and market analysis soon.