ATI Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition

On December 1, another ATI's top-end video card - Radeon X850XT Platinum Edition - was announced. To be more precise, a whole new family was announced. Remember that the previous X800XT was brought out merely 8 months ago, on May 4.

The year 2004 proved to be a crazy year. You even can't recall a year when so many events fitted within such a short time period. Among them a complete replacement of Intel platform, and a mess with AMD sockets, three versions of DX9.0. For the two years to come, the introduction of PCI-Express 16x will make it compulsory to release every new line of cards in two makes. If you wake me up in the middle of the night, I can't - for the life of me - recall in which make hardware in our test lab is or what is missing... So much has been produced that you can remember that all.

I know it for sure that there is 6800Ultra in the PCI-E make, the others are there. NVIDIA is explaining that simply - even assembly operators are short of these cards. 16 pipes were launched in April, PCI-E announced in June, but still the cards are on rigid rationing - by NVIDIA and ATI. That has always been, but three to four months were enough to find a way out of the trouble. The year 2004 will go down in history as the first year when the shortage for top-end video cards turned protracted. Manufacturing companies are tired of lamenting over the shortage in supplies of top-end cards. ATI partners are a bit more confident - according to the info from the manufacturer of both solutions, requests for ATI cards are satisfied at 80%, whereas NVIDIA is able satisfying no more than 50% of the top-end market demands.

What is it all about? Definitely, they got themselves boxed in and persist in moving towards the same direction. From the former "who is the king of the hill?" formula, competition between ATI and NVIDIA has transformed into "who makes more is the winner." The price in this case does not matter at all. Sellers set whatever price spun out of thin air - the cards anyway sell.

All the above applies just to the top-end market. In the mid-end, there is another war of no less interesting specifics going on.

But let's get back to the announcement of new cards from ATI. The new family is called X850XT (R480) whose name is self-explanatory as if saying what it is - the optimized X800XT (R423) chip.

The X850 series comprises three cards, at the same time the previous line X800 it has been extended by 2 cards. The total table of all new Hi-End cards by ATI of year 2004 looks as follows:

Video card	Core	Mem	Pixel Pipes	Retail Price
X850 XT Platinum Edition	540Mhz	1.18GHz	16	550$
X850 XT	520Mhz	1.08GHz	12	500$
X850 Pro	520Mhz	1.08GHz	12	400$
X800 XT Platinum Edition	520MHz	1.12GHz	16
X800 XT	500MHz	1GHz	16
X800 XL	400MHz	1GHz	16	300$
X800 Pro	475MHz	900MHz	12
X800	400MHz	700MHz	12	250$

Eight pieces. The five new cards are colored red. Let's add AGP and PCI-E versions to produce the view of current situation in computer graphics.

ATI Radeon X850XT Platinum Edition Layout

ATI Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition
Chip code name	R480
Process technology	0.13 micron (low-k)
Memory bus	256-bit (GDDR3)
Interface	PCI-Express x16
Memory	256Mb
Chip clock speed	540MHz
Memory speed	1180MHz DDR
Peak memory bandwidth	37.8 GB/s
Q-ty of Vertex Pipelines	6 600 mln polygon transformations per second 5.7 bln vertex shaders per second processed
Q-ty of pixel pipelines	16
Vertex shader version	2.0
Pixel shader version	2.0b/w 3Dc
Generation	DirectX 9.0+
Q-ty of monitor outputs	2

Due to the modern scalable architecture of graphic chips, it is possible to create any multiple configurations of pixel pipelines quantities on the chip, including 8- and 4-pipelined configurations. There aren't any other obstacles except the economic inexpediency.

The diversity of pipeline numbers, memory/core frequencies for cards released in 2004 can be represented in the following table:

Video card	Core	Pixel Pipes	Pixel/Texel Fillrate	Bit rate of memory	Frequency of memory	Bandwidth (Gb/sec)
ATI
Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition	540Mhz	16	8.64Gpixels/Sec	256 bits	1.18GHz	37,8
Radeon X850 XT	520Mhz	16	8.32Gpixels/Sec	256 bits	1.08GHz	34,6
Radeon X850 Pro	520Mhz	12	6.24Gpixels/Sec	256 bits	1.08GHz	34,6
Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition	520MHz	16	8.32Gpixels/Sec	256 bits	1.12GHz	35,8
Radeon X800 XT	500MHz	16	8Gpixels/Sec	256 bits	1GHz	32
Radeon X800 XL	400MHz	16	6.4Gpixels/Sec	256 bits	1GHz	32
Radeon X800 Pro	475MHz	12	5.7Gpixels/Sec	256 bits	900MHz	28,8
Radeon X800	400MHz	16	4.8Gpixels/Sec	256 bits	700MHz	22,4
NVIDIA
GeForce 6800 Ultra	400MHz	16	6.4Gpixels/Sec	256 bits	1.1GHz	35,2
GeForce 6800 GT	350MHz	16	5.9Gpixels/Sec	256 bits	1.0GHz	32
GeForce 6800	325MHz	12	3.9Gpixels/Sec	256 bits	700MHz	22,4

We can say that ATI is more confident a player in the top-end sector of video cards in its desire to fill the sector uniformly. But NVIDIA's job at that is being done by the partners, so there are much more than three - just mention ASUS V9999 Gamer Edition which is an interim solution between GeForce 6800 and GeForce 6800 GT.

Here is the reference ATI Radeon X850XT Platinum Edition and ATI Radeon X800XT.

ATI Radeon X850XT Platinum Edition and ATI Radeon X800XT

The first what catches the eye is the dual-tiered design of the cooling. Manufacturers of ATI produce used high-performance massive coolers by Arctic Cooler, but in the reference make it is the first dual-slot card from ATI. NVIDIA worshippers can of course smile, and ATI fans object, which ATI did precisely two years later (the first two-storeyed NVIDIA card is NV30, announced still late in 2002). Both prove right.

Remember the three differences of X850 from X800:

• Chip optimization;
• Now power management features;
• More efficient heat-sink system.

Not all is that sad. The driver our X850XT Platinum Edition was equipped with has integrated overclocking tools. Formerly, only some brave partners of ATI and Alex Unwinder dared, but the company itself vowed it did't know that word at all. Overclocking was possible for the X850 series only.

The attempt to use a new driver on X800 failed.

With the new driver, they succeeded to attain the following maximum values of core and memory with full stability preserved:

Video card	Overclocking	Default
ATI Radeon X850XT Platinum Edition	582/1.20	540/1,18

As we see, the core frequency was overclocked by 10%, whereas that for the memory almost stayed intact. This is understandable, because the same memory as on ATI Radeon X800XT PE - 1.6 ns GDDR3 of maximum frequency 600 MHz (which gives resultant 1.2 GHz) was used. That is, the memory runs at its technological limit, and use of 1.4 ns (maximum frequency 700 MHz) makes little sense in terms of economy - it is in shortage even for the defense industry, industrial instrumentation and medicine where price is of the lowest priority.

Remember that unlike the previous X800 series, the X800XT PE and X800XT could be told apart only by the visual sign - in the former case, 1.6 ns memory with the cooling bar on the reverse side was used, whereas in X800XT there is 2.0 ns memory without any cooling of memory on the reverse side:

ASUS X800XT and ATI X800XT ref

That's right - today's Radeon X850XT Platinum Edition also has a metal bar for cooling:

The chip differs from the previous X800XT in only the increased operating frequency - 540 MHz. It was manufactured at the TSMC factory following the 0.13 mk process technology with copper connections and low-k dielectric like in R420/R423 (AGP and PCI-E versions of X800). For the chip, ATI implemented the power-saving feature intended for mobile solutions where unused blocks are fully disabled in the 2D mode.

Additional power - already familiar 6-pin connector. All the video cards of the PCI-E format which require extra power supply are equipped with a connector just like that. The video card will be invariably equipped with an adapter which will not be needed by owners of new-generation power-supply unit.

The inputs/outputs are not traditional - two digital, and a TV-OUT, no analogous, so the user will have to use an adapter. Support for VIVO - ATI Rage Theater.

Test setup:

Test bench	PCI-E
CPU	P4 3.6Mhz 800FSB LGA
Mb	Intel D925XCV (i925X)
Memory	PC2-4300 (533MHz DDR2) 2x256Mb in the dual-channel-mode Memory latency timings - 4:4:4
HDD	Barracuda 7200.7 80Gb
DVD-ROM	SONY DW-D22A
OS	WinXP + SP2 + DirectX 9.0c
Drivers	ForceWare 66.81 Catalyst 4.11

Benchmarking:

Half Life 2

There are merely three games most interesting to the readers and reviewers in terms of benchmarking results - Far Cry, DOOM3, and Half-Life2. For the first two, the alignment of forces is already known, and the results for HL2 were also predictable. To run benchmarks, we recorded our own demo using the canal map. Every day, the game is complemented with new patches, even Russian localization appeared, a deathmatch, new maps, etc.. One day finished with the traffic counter set to 1 GB which extremely annoyed me. In the end, we had to disconnect the network cable from the test PC, fix the game with build 2215 and re-run all the benchmarks on a unified assembly. Once benchmarks were over, another new patch was downloaded :)

But manufacturers are mostly interested in the complete alignment of forces in MadOnion's tests. Let's satisfy their interest:

Conclusion:

Well, ATI Radeon X850XT Platinum Edition is the new king of the hill, which was expectable since the previous X800XT itself looked well enough, and today's novelty has added even more score points. NVIDIA may object to that, saying they have the SLI technology the results for which give a sure lead. NVIDIA's argument is simple - the consumer who is able to pay 700$ for a novelty (let's ignore the "recommended prices" to be realists) can easily pay even 900$ enough to buy two 6800GTs. At that, NVIDIA is a bit boggling - for a start, the user will have to wait till two PCI-Express 12 sockets have been released, pay extra 200$ for the novelty and get a very powerful PSU (or two of 500W each). But formally NVIDIA is right. The system will prove more powerful.

There is a thin seam of consumers codenamed "crazy millionaires" who are very popular with sales people. To their deep regret, until the recent times, when asked the question "what is the most expensive that can be assembled?" they had nothing to answer :-( The most you would have to fit in was at about 2500$ with maximum efforts no all assembly operators would be able coping with.

With the release of i925XE Express (of the system bus speed 1066 MHz) and the only processor that supports the bus, Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.46 GHz, things changed to the better.

So, calculating it:

1. Processor Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.46 GHz - 1000$
2. Motherboard Intel D925XECV2 - 250$
3. Memory Kingmax DDR2-533 2GB DDR2 - 400$
4. RAID made up of 4 300GB SATA II disks - 800$
5. ASUS Radeon X800XT Platinum Edition PCI-Ex - 800$
6. External audio - 200$
7. Omni-format DVD writer -merely 100$
8. 520W PSU - 150$
9. Luxurious PC housing - 300$

Today's maximum price bar for the CPU unit is 4000$, and the price for a cooler like Zalman 7700Cu will be dissolved in the configuration - to be more precise, the assembly operator dancing with joy would simply give it to you as a gift. Now you get something really worth showing to VIPs - a thing of the Versace suit class to make you look part of the high society.

This information is just for owners of small oil wells. But if you agree to find for a couple of months more, then the price favorite will be the "AthlonFX + nForce4 SLI + two 6800GTs" configuration. According to information from assembly operators, the starting price starts with 4000$, and the maximum - about 5000$. It's better to order now. To Alienware, a many miles long queue is already there.

But what to do to advanced gamers? They can resort to ATI Radeon X850XT Platinum Edition.

The year 2004 has raised the graphic subsystem performance bar by over than two times. The situation was rescued by Far Cry, Doom 3, and Half-Life 2. Without release of such games, modern top-end cards would have been left undemanded. They are too cool. What is the forthcoming year bringing to us?

Transition to the next process technology in the manufacture of chips has been planned for 2006, and until it is adapted, the increase in the number of pipelines in graphic cores is out of the question. We expect a scheduled polishing of existing cores for the whole year 2005 with projected transition to the GDDR4, as well as emergence of cards with 512 MB onboard.

The announcement of DirectX 10 is expected in Longhorn (2006), which is going to be introduced in stages. Following MS' system of nomination, the current DX9 will be referred to as Windows Graphics Foundation (WGF) 1.0 and provide the basic graphics level, with the advanced driver model DX10 - WGF 2.0 will be available in Longhorn SP1 (after 6-18 months after the original release of Longhorn). That time is scheduled for a complete migration to the PCI-E bus for graphic cards.

Longhorn's graphic interfaces - AERO Express, AERO Glass, and Diamond will push down modern high-end cards to the level of childish pranks, and the industry will acquire more chances for further races. Hopefully, the process is endless.