X1800 Reviews

78.03 was the last set of NV drivers that a) I was happy with since I'd done an exhaustive analysis of for the shimmering thing and b) and this is the important one, arrived more than a day before NDA expiry. I simply did not have time to rebench the GeForce hardware, which I'd done before Ibiza to get it out of the way, yesterday, which would have including checking them over properly to convince myself they weren't shite.

As for the IQ analysis, I'll do as good as job as I can. I think I'll cover the right bases but we'll see about John having to hide his blushes when he gets to the end If only sleep were optional and I had 973 hours in a working day.

 

I really don't think they have to improve performance by 20%, as the r520 failed to "slamdunk" in any of the reviews I've read. It's more a fairness preception question regarding the review.

 

He's got a lovely pair there.

 

wow total system power consumption under load for x1800 xt is just 256W! my current PSU is just 250W. so i probably won't need 600W to run crossfire rig?

and nvidia wants you to have 400W to run one of it's cards right? how much is needed for SLI rig?

 

Things I wish i could see now...

Benchmarks with:
Call of Duty2
Quake4
Oblivion

Unfortunately these games aren't out yet but would represent the kinds of games you are buying these cards for.

 

minor nitpick: tell the guys @pcper red == ATI, green == NVIDIA, I got a headache reading their graphs, needed more than twice the time to read each of them than if they would have used the usual colors.

 

You can run 6800 Ultra SLI, an FX-57 and 2GB of memory, on a good ATX2.0 400W supply. And even then I say 400W because climb the ladder of quoted output and your current draw on +12V goes up to make that figure with 400W where you want to be in terms of the caps from those rails.

Actual output power from the PSU will be no more than 300W, loaded. So a 350W PSU would do, 24/7, given the right rail ability.

I've done all my testing, Crossfire and otherwise, on a Tagan TG420-U02 in recent months. 420W as the name suggests. It's good enough for everything I've got to throw at it, easily.

 

Rys, you are to congradulated on what is, so far, the best comparison review of these cards......

 

So Rys, with the beta catalysts did you check to see if you could enable adaptive AA thru the control panel on an X800 series card? I'm really sort of curious about that.

 

can some one point me to some high res benches? like 1900x1200?

 

I did alright, but there's no comparison with the outgoing R480 which is what I'm annoyed at the most. Wavey's will perk up when he can get the next bits done and there's some other people who still don't even have hardware, that I'd quite like to read that should do well. You know who you are

 

Just gave that a shot on an X800 XL, can't see the checkbox. I'm not convinced it's been Q&A'd for R4-series GPUs yet, since the initial implementation was done for R5, which has some hardware acceleration for it as far as I know.

 

"JR didn't get a card!", singsong the Dig merrily.

Yet they gave one to [T] to not review, go figure. (YES I WROTE SOME E-MAILS TO ATI!)

 

A X1800XT review from the Inquirer ....

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=26720

 

That's what I had heard, they hadn't been able to quality test it for the R4xx generation yet.

Still, I got it so I'm happy.

 

I'd imagine that the Quake4 benchmarks would closely follow the Doom3 ones. The NV chips still have a big advantage with games using the rendering technique of the engine so I'd personally expect the performance ratios to be about the same as for Doom3 i.e. NV chips outperforming their ATI counterparts by a reasonable amount.

 

I think the X1800 XT is looking pretty good. Wins the majority of the benches by a comfortable margin. And with better IQ (considering the shimmering of the 7800 in Q mode) …

hardwarefr … 7800GTX ... X1800 XT ... 12x10-4AA/16AF …

HL2 … … … … 103.2 … … 120.1
Doom3 … … … .128.2 … … 109.1
Farcry … … … … 60.3 … … 76.4
SC : CT … … … .48.4 … … 62.7
Collin McR 05 ..…56.9 … …. 72.6
Act of War … … .. 69.6 … … 70.2
IL2 - PF … … … ..41.8 … ….31.3

 

NV's lead in Doom 3 and games based off it don't purely have to do with that engine, as in one of the X1800 XT reviews they benched 2 flight sims using OpenGL and those were quite a bit faster on the 7800 GTX as well so the only thing I can figure out is that ATI just doesn't care enough to write decent OpenGL drivers.

 

Unfortunately, it depends on what review you read ...

 

That's true, there does seem to be a rather sizeable difference between reviews... I wonder how many review sites are using true stock GTX's and how many are using factory OC'd GTX's. I also wonder how much the different speed CPU's used affect the benchmarks.