ATI Radeon X1900 XTX review - Page 23

The Verdict

Well, I hope you'll agree with me that the X1900 is an intriguing card for sure. I'm not even talking about it's functionality and performance alone yet moreover the architectural choices that have been made versus the design choices. It's amazing to look at the progressive development of graphics cores in the high end-segment. Technology is moving so fast these days.

In Bill's defence, memory was extremely expensive those days, $300 for 64KB yes KB!

In the past developing graphics processors has been very parallel, you could almost calculate and project (with certain error though) what the next-gen product will be. The internal pipelines where always a good indication of what to expect of the next gen profduct, that and developments plus choices in memory have been the decisive factor of the new product.

Bluntly spoken pretty much three things always determined the performance expectation of the next generation product: internal pipes, memory and fabrication process versus clock speeds.

I for one am pretty confident that NVIDIA with the next gen product will add more pixel pipelines for example. Yet ATI did something interesting they did not upgrade the number of pipelines yet they went for something we see on the consumer market a lot, they have been looking at  "Question and Demand". ATI believes that the next-gen games will make use Pixel Shaders massively and decided to only focus on that aspect alone, it's a dangerous compromise obviously to save costs as they do not have to increase that entire pixel pipeline yet they did increase a certain part of that pipeline where demand will be high in complex recent and future games. It's saves them on the final transistor count and thus can keep the product a little more cost effective. From a journalist point of view it is fantastic to see differences in architecture and choices.

The idea as it is right now is really clever as I intend to believe that Shaders are so friggin important these days for games. But will it be enough? Suffice to say that complex shaded games now and in the future will definitely form a fantastic symbiosis with the Radeon X1900 XTX. Any game we tested was performing ridiculously fast it was breathtaking to see.

Some advice, keep a couple of things in mind though:

• You need to play games at the highest resolutions.
• You need to have a need for playing with image quality settings enabled
• You need to bare in mind that you need a screamingly fast PC in terms of your processor as a high-end graphics card needs to be bound to a high-end processor. I'm Talking Athlon 3600+ and upwards and Pentium 4 3.6 GHz as a bare minimum.

Do you not plan to fulfill all three of these requirements? For example are you intent/constrained to play games at 1280x1024 with 4xAA and 8xAF? Then please do not bother to buy this card. Stick with a Radeon X1800 XL, GeForce 7800 GT or anything in that range as the high-end graphics cards really require such a demanding environment to show off their fullest potential.

With that being said, the X1900 XTX is remarkably fast and with that large number of pixel shader units prepared for some nice games now and in the near future. The performance and image quality this graphics card is showing of in pretty much any game and is just breathtaking. It's powerful, stylish, offers brute horsepowerand yet manages to do that with the best possible image quality settings at the highest resolutions. Yeah, this card could almost be too much fun to play all these great complex games with. But as always it comes with a very hefty price tag though, 649 USD. And just like the 7800 GTX 512MB this is my only negative on this product.

High end graphics cards have price wise moved into a price range where it's not accessible anymore for the guys that would really like to buy them. See there's a certain threshold that is constantly being moved upwards, and in all honestly here personally I would never buy a graphics card over 400 bucks.

Sure, these puppies will be sold for Europe... but think in numbers of no more than ten thousand and that will probably it because honestly who can afford a card of this magnitude or even is willing to spend so much money to play a couple of games?

But no matter what game you like to play or need to do, this card can handle it. It is a beast for sure. Playing games at 1920x1200 with IQ settings enabled was not at all an issue. Stability of the card is perfect as we have had no issues whatsoever. Yeah very nice for sure.

It's also good to know that our test system is a little CPU limited. Yes 2GB of memory and an Athlon FX-57 is still not enough. Remember the 3DMark06 test results? It scored almost 5200 poinst at the default test. Well, AMD just submitted an AMD 64 FX-60 processor and I couldn't help doing another quick spin. The card is now pushing close to a score of 6000. Talk about being CPU bound, you really need a massive processor to be able to get the most out of this card.

But as always look a little further than just gaming. It's a media encoder and accelerator as well. This means your CPU does not have to decode a HD movie, nope your graphics card will do that for you and with the new AVIVO functionality you can bet it's at very high quality. The card is H.264 at 1080P ready! Fantastic stuff if you decide to hook up the card to a HD screen for example, that's magic on your screen man.

Crossfire then, if you are planning then don't go for the XTX! ATI will not release an X1900 XTX Crossfire edition. They will release the X1900 XT Crossfire edition, so save yourself some money as you want to have the master and slave card matched. We expect the Crossfire kit to come in for a review in the next week, so we'll bring you a full article on that release as well.

Yeah the X1900 XTX is a fine product and although it's roughly only up to five maybe ten percent faster than a GeForce 7800 GTX 512 MB in most scenarios you need to bare one thing in mind, when more complex or simply more shaders will be used in upcoming games, this card will have the advantage for sure. And that is definitely going to happen my friends.

The 1900 series of cards is available at launch time. That's right, this is a "real" launch.

Ouch my fingers hurt, are these really ...blisters?

Be sure to drop by in our forums and let us know what you think of this product.

Hilbert.

PS - look at these prices below .. hmm ?