The Official X1900 Reviews Thread

Ah yes.. to limit the available bandwidth..

 

Thier benchmarks always tend to favor ATI over nV, if you look at the last few. They must be using quite strange timedemos, methinks.

 

Cannot be much else but heat and power requirements, I guess. Or maybe they just wanted to make oc'ers happy?

 

how did they get a black cooler, thats sexy

good to know Nvidia PR is out there to slander

Except it OC's like crap due to a strict voltage

 

All of the DH tests use playthroughs of the most intensive sections we could find (that were recreatable).

RE BF2's graph. Its being fixed asap.

 

Brent's conclusions are flawed throughout.

He also does it with Serious Sam II where the XTX is able to do HDR , AA and HQ AF all within a few fps of the GTX 512 which only manages angle dependent AF and can't do AA . Yet he asserts that the GTX is faster .

What a rediculous statement ! Considering that HDR , HQ AF and AA with HDR takes up alot of GPU power but the XTX does it very close to the GTX , there is no way that the GTX can be the "faster" card in that game . Why doesn't he then turn off HDR and see what happens and hack it down to angledependant AF and see who is faster apples to apples . What is the use of testing the way they do , in order to supposedly give the card with the best playable settings rather than apple to apple tests ............. then sabotage the card that meets their criteria by sayintg that the less capable card is "faster " .

 

AT anandtech FEAR also takes a heavy beating, the xtx is 60% faster at 1600x1200 and almost double the speed above that (with AA/AF offcourse)

And CF seems to do a better job in Q4 than SLI ?

 

True, but Driverheavens review of the X1800 also massively over egged the scores for that as well.

And of course Driverheavens review of the X800XL 512MB which found really good scores for the 512MB version of the card when no other sites did. Maybe because they chose a rather obscure set of games to test it on

http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews/x800_512/

Conclusion for the X800XL 512MB "We raised a concern in the introduction of this article as to whether it was worth adding the extra 256mb to the X800XL, on the whole I’d have to say that it was indeed worth it. Whilst many older games will not benefit from the additional 256mb of memory many newer games will."

REALLY ?

and

"When all of this is added together you get what is in our opinion the best gaming card currently available on the market. In terms of performance and value and future proofing there is nothing better than the ATI/Sapphire Radeon X800 XL 512mb…it’s so good that I’ll be using one in my own home gaming system for the foreseeable future."

I'd have rather had an X850XT PE to be honest

In the X1900 review we have this great conclusion

" never before have we seen such an impressive refresh in such a short time"

which is the best way of putting spin on the r520 being incredibly late that I have ever heard.

Did someone mention [H] ?

 

I wonder, will we see a "Super-duper PE bios" released at the same time as G71 which allows higher memory/core clocks?

Anyone think that this kind of PR-led event could be a feasible possibility?

 

I would not be surprised , especially with the memory clocks .

 

Well you gotta admit though that, when the X1800XT was launched, many were saying that it was unfair to compare it to the GTX256 because it "benefited from the extra 256MB RAM". So its either the one or the other

 

Another review : http://firingsquad.com/hardware/ati_radeon_x1900_xt_preview/

 

GPUBench scores are up

We've posted the X1900XTX GPUBench GL scores.

http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/gpubench/results/X1900XTX-5534/

The only test that didn't get updated for that run was the updated instruction issue test which fixes optimization of the SUB instruction. The new version has it equal to ADD, which it should be.

 

True !

I'm not against Driverheaven, nor if nvnews or rage3d do a review and see good things they'd like to proclaim.

Paranoia in this thread should be for both camps though, so I thought I'd even up and become paranoid

 

dont count on it, would cause problems with the CrossFire cards in that the speed you open up becomes useless in dual card mode, not to mention it simply makes no sense. We'd be seeing a 300MHz effective drop at least. Besides its not like its hard for Nvidia or anyone who owns a card to give the memory sufficiant juice and find out its performance with ~55GB/s bandwidth.

One can hope, but strategically there is nothing there for ATI to gain by leaving the memory at such a low clock except for heat and voltage. Which begs the question as to why they purchased such a high speed GDDR3, as well as most expensive, that they cant or wont exploit completely.

what ever though, i'v beaten this to death enough

 

Also since there are no comparisons on the graphs is there anything of interest to note?

 

Not exactly. Maybe they can't/won't ship GTX 512s anyway.

 

<shrug> It's the "same old, same old" at [H] . They only see everything through their green-coloured glasses. No matter what they say, they always spin the tone to favour their overlords at [N].

 

We've got ours online too, but it was a little late.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2006/01/24/x1900xtx_crossfire/1.html

finally HQAF is usable and practically a given.