Technology
The product today was developed by ATi under the codename R420 and is of course lined up against the mighty nVIDIA 6800 series, they manage to compete very well for sure. The x800 XT graphics core is build on a 0.13-micron fabrication process with no less than 160 Million transistors. As you know there are two x800 products available in retail, the Pro version has 12 pixel pipelines as opposed to its bigger XT brother with 16. Make no mistake, both products have the exact same core yet the Pro version has 4 pixel pipelines disabled, which cuts down performance. The VPU furthermore has two pixel shader units per pipeline, the pipes are organized into four groups of four, six vertex shader units, four-way crossbar memory controller and at default should be a 550 MHz DDR-3 memory frequency.
I've placed an overview of the competing products in this chart:
| |
nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra |
ATI Radeon X800 XT |
ATI Radeon X800 Pro |
ATI Radeon 9800 XT |
| Transistor Count |
220 million |
160 million |
160 million |
110 million |
| Manufacturing Process |
0.13-micron |
0.13-micron, low-k dielectric |
0.13-micron, low-k dielectric |
0.15-micron |
| Core Clock Speed |
400MHz |
520MHz |
475MHz |
413MHz |
| Pixel Pipes |
16 |
16 |
12 |
8 |
| Texturing Units |
16 |
16 |
12 |
8 |
| Vertex Pipelines |
6 |
6 |
6 |
4 |
| Memory Interface |
256-bit |
256-bit |
256-bit |
256-bit |
| Memory Clock Speed |
1.1GHz DDR-3 |
1.1GHz DDR-3 |
900MHz DDR-3 |
730MHz DDR-2 |
| Peak Memory Bandwidth |
35.2GB/sec |
35.8GB/sec |
28.8GB/sec |
23.4GB/sec |
As opposed to the GeForce 6 series ATI did not choose to support Shader Model 3 but is compatible up-to model 2.0b, this actually saves them quite a few transistors. The lack of Shader model 3 has widely been debated, personally I would have loved to see it included on the x800 series, current games however hardly support it just yet (with the exception of Far Cry with the v1.2 patch) and whether or not it'll make a visual difference still can be questioned. Differences will be mostly seen in performance increases. There will be a few titles out supporting Shader Model 3 among them Lord of the Rings; Battle for Middle-Earth, Stalker, Vampire: Bloodlines, Splinter Cell X, Driver 3, Grafan, Painkiller and more...
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ATi Radeon x800 Pro & XT |
| |
![[Guru3D.com]](/imageview.php?image=3397) |
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Bundled Items
In the box, we can make note of the fact that where others go cheap and include hardly any software, HiS is paying attention to its product, we see a lot of software bundled as this is a seriously impressive package. Let's have a look:
- VideoStudio 7 SE
- Games Demo CD's
- Cyberlink PowerDVD 5
- PictureEZ Digital photo software (only for the limited edition)
- Arx Fatalis Game
- Counter Strike Condition Zero Full 2 Cd's
![[Guru3D.com]](/imageview.php?image=3378)
![[Guru3D.com]](/imageview.php?image=3360)
So everything you need to get started is present. Next to the card itself we'll see a plethora of cables in the form of nice long Molex power supply cable, a bracket for the fan exhaust, S-Video VIVO cable, DVI to CRT/VGA adapter so that you are able to hook up 2 CRT VGA monitors to your card. Lastly what seems to be a HDTV cable.
HIS deserves a pat on the back for a really nice bundle.
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