ATI's X1000 Series: Extended Performance Testing
by Derek Wilson on October 7, 2005 10:15 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
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.
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.
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tfranzese - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link
These points were brought up about the first article too. It's a big improvement, I agree, but it's still not to the level that this site was founded on.DerekWilson - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link
We already commented on the FEAR Demo -- we won't test a game that doesn't show shipping performance characteristics. We are working on getting our hands on a prerelease copy of the shipping game for testing.We have had black and white 2 in house since it became available at best buy (as today is the official US launch, we got it a couple days early). We just haven't had enough time to finalize tests for it.
We will look into the recently released call of duty 2 demo among others. I agree that we could have done things better, and hopefully our coming follow up will hit all the points people want covered.
If you have any other suggestions, please let us know -- we will try our best to include them.
PrinceGaz - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link
As for other suggestions, how about some games other than FPS or FPS-view (EQ2) style games? A driving game like NFS:U2 or colin McRae Rally 2005 would be an excellent addition. Then you should have some sort of flight/space-sim, like maybe X2. And a roleplaying game that isn't viewed from a first-person perspective. By including games that have a totally different style of graphics, you'll get a better idea of how well the card performs. X2 for instance would require totally different graphics performance than Half-Life 2.I know some of the games I've mentioned don't have a benchmarking mode, but use FRAPS to get the average framerate. And the minimum framerate. In fact the minimum framerate is more important than the average so you should include it as a matter of course in *all* tests, even to the point of dropping the average framerate if you don't have space. No one is too bothered if the average framerate while playing is 45 or 50fps while playing a game, but the difference between minimum framerates of 20 and 25fps would definitely be noticeable. I'm sure others will agree.
This (and many other) site seems to think FPS games are all people play, but a lot of us play games from all genres, so including them would be useful.
coldpower27 - Saturday, October 8, 2005 - link
I support the use of X2: The Threat as a benchmark, I also support the use of shipping games to compare numbers, so Anandtech should benchmark Black & White 2 as it is now available, plus Call of Duty 2 & Fear when they become available.bob661 - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link
Even though I found the original article very informative (I guess I can read well), this one was much better. The bar graphs don't show how the performance goes down as you raise the resolution and turn on the eye candy.zmanww - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link
what no Overclocking?come on I want to see that this baby can really do.
Peldor - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link
I don't think the usual overclocking utilities are working for the X1x00 cards yet.DerekWilson - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link
this is true -- we wanted to test slower versions and couldn't because of this.also reference board overclocking isn't always the best indication of retail board performance.
Lonyo - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link
Would be nice to see some analysis of ATi's SM3 implimentation, with SM2 vs SM3 benchmarks in the games which do support SM2 and SM3 paths.tfranzese - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link
From the article:I think the analysis and the conclusions up to this point have been far short sighted. Seems that the games that are using SM3.0 are taking considerable advantage of the new architecture. The Tech Report, Hexus and others were able to show that much.