X1800 Reviews

Boy wonder has his up now

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2552

 

Dave, did you manage to overclock yours ? You said earlier you thought they had been conservative. I see few overclocking results yet.

Cheers

 

I took a board home with me from Ibiza on the 2nd. Started testing on the morning of the 3rd. So about 24 hours of testing analysis time on the 3rd, and 24hrs for writeup yesterday. I've slept about 4 hours since I woke up on Monday morning (I shouldn't moan, it's my job, but the NDA race fucks me up more than it doesn't).

So if there's one thing that really galls, it's that US sites had a full week and a bit longer with boards than we did.

Not their fault at all, but we all deserve the time they had with the hardware. Guys like Scott did an awesome job in the time they had, kudos at least to him (I don't read much else now).

I had about 4 hours testing time in Ibiza on top of that, using my own system that I took out there. Sucks.

 

Curiously, on the GPGPU side of things, R520 is currently far more capable.

 

As an aside to that, I've done some GPGPU stuff with the board this morning while I waited for NDA to expire. I can't seem to push more than 12G instructions through the pixel hardware using no texture access, in float3 and float4 setups, full precision. Only about 60% of peak efficiency so far. Still tweaking my shaders though and maybe it's a good idea to do some texturing at the same time since the hardware/driver might expect that as a general case just now.

 

On a similar note, i will stick to my X800XT AGP (with my A64 3200+) . I own this system for a bit over a year now and i really see no reason at all to upgrade to a new vid card. In fact, the season that's about to end gave me almost no reasons to justify the X800XT purchase. The next upgrade will be probably be a complete package and won't materialize for a long time. I am seiosuly thinking at getting the 360 though...

 

Is it just me or do some of the sites seem to drop cards in certain tests and shift what features they are testing? That is annoying to me because every test jumps around and it makes you wonder, "So, what does it show with other settings?"

I have not got to read them all, but 2 of the 3 so far have done this. So far digging Extremetech's choice of having every card in every test, and displaying the performance of each card at all the settings. You get a good feel of how, depending on settings like AA/AF are used, where the cards come out.

I like that it allows the reader to draw their own conclusions based on what they are seeing based on what is important to them. Some people are AA hogs, others just want pure framerate, some want a balance, etc...

Now if they tossed in "minimum framerate" in their I would be stoked!

 

Same here, got a S754 A64@2200Mhz and a 6800GT. I am waiting till the next generation to build a new machine. I play WoW a little and DOD:Source. Both games run crystal smooth on my 2001FP so there isnt a reason to upgrade.

Plus for the money there just isnt enough bang imo. Here is to hoping the next generation is a great series to jump into.

 

DH had even less time with the card... so yeah this side of the pond things were not as favourable as the US.

 

I think the big problem is that we don't have that many true next-gen games to see the R5x0 stretch it's architectural legs, with the possible exception of Far Cry. I think in six months time we'll see games like F.E.A.R., Alan Wake, UE3 engined games, etc all running a lot faster and prettier on R5x0 than on G7x.

When those games arrive that start seriously pushing shader and vetex processing, we'll see the gaps widen.

 

Obviously, once dynamic branching catches on, there will be no comparison in terms of performance. But, by the time that happens, I fully expect new NV cards that don't have a huge branching penalty, etc.

But then again, the 5900 Ultra was faster in a decent number of applications than the 9800 Pro (if I recall correctly). Which is considered to be the better card now, and how much of that is due to better image quality and usable SM2.0?

 

I'd be real surprised if it mattered though even if true.
The R300 smashed the NV30 in DX9 shader performance. But really does anybody care or want to use either in upcoming heavy shader games like STALKER, FEAR, or the Unreal 3 engine?

I mean with a R300 or NV30, the R300 may be twice as fast as the NV30 at 4FPS vs 2FPS in the Unreal 3 engine..

I think it is quite clear however this generation is being held back by CPU performance.

 

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/592-1/ati-radeon-x1800-xt-xl.html
In french

 

Darn it i hit the snooze button to many times. Late to the party. Sigh.

So where are the Oblivion time demos? Someone did run them right?

epic

 

And there will be new ATI cards too. My point was that if you buy either a G70 or a R520 in the next few weeks, I think the R520 will have a much longer life and better performance 6-18 months down the line with the newer, upcoming games than the G70 will.

Features like dynamic branching appear to be fast and usable on the R520, whereas we know that they are not on the G70. Which card are you going to want to be running in six months when dynamic branching is getting used? Or do you just want to have to go out and buy another high end graphics card next spring?

 

When have you known people who buy high-end cards to be reasonable in terms of which card will perform better in the future?

 

Errr... I am.

 

I liked the [H] review untill it got to the benchmarks. They then completely and utterly ruined it. I don't see the point in not benchmarking a card because it isn't on the market yet, unless they have some sort of beef with ATi or affection for Nvidia. Not being able to buy the card on release day is annoying, yes. Refuseing to bench mark it because you can't buy it yet is a bit OTT, especially when it's a common occurance.

Also I generally don't go out and buy a couple of hundred £s of hardware the day it's released/reviewed anyway.

EDIT: I consider futer performance as well, especially as most current games run well on any hardware.