ATI's New Leader in Graphics Performance: The Radeon X1900 Series
by Derek Wilson & Josh Venning on January 24, 2006 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
The Performance Breakdown
Here we're going to take a quick look at overall performance of the X1900 XTX compared to the X1800 XT and to the 7800 GTX 512. This will give us a good idea at the outset of what we are going to see in terms of performance from the new part from ATI. Obviously having individual numbers for multiple resolutions over multiple settings is more conducive to proper analysis of the performance characteristics of the hardware, but for those who just want the bottom line here it is. This is a look at 2048x1536 with 4xAA performance in order to see a snapshot of performance under high stress.
The resounding victory of the X1900 XTX over the 7800 GTX 512 in almost every performance test clearly shows how powerful a part we are playing with. Clearly NVIDIA has been dethroned and will have a difficult time regaining its performance lead. But the more these two companies can leap-frog eachother, the happier we get.
The only real loss the X1900 suffers to the 7800 GTX 512 is in Black and White 2. We've complained about the poor performance of BW2 under ATI hardware for months now, and apparently ATI have located a bug in the application causing the performance issue. They have a patch, which we are currently evaluating, that improves performance. ATI are saying that Lionhead will be including this fix in an upcoming game patch, and we are excited to see something finally being done about this issue.
Of course, with the BW2 test in question, that puts the ATI Radeon X1900 XTX firmly and without question in place as the worlds fastest consumer level graphics product.
Here we're going to take a quick look at overall performance of the X1900 XTX compared to the X1800 XT and to the 7800 GTX 512. This will give us a good idea at the outset of what we are going to see in terms of performance from the new part from ATI. Obviously having individual numbers for multiple resolutions over multiple settings is more conducive to proper analysis of the performance characteristics of the hardware, but for those who just want the bottom line here it is. This is a look at 2048x1536 with 4xAA performance in order to see a snapshot of performance under high stress.
Hold your mouse over the links below to see the quick performance breakdown of the Radeon X1900 XTX at that resolution:
The resounding victory of the X1900 XTX over the 7800 GTX 512 in almost every performance test clearly shows how powerful a part we are playing with. Clearly NVIDIA has been dethroned and will have a difficult time regaining its performance lead. But the more these two companies can leap-frog eachother, the happier we get.
The only real loss the X1900 suffers to the 7800 GTX 512 is in Black and White 2. We've complained about the poor performance of BW2 under ATI hardware for months now, and apparently ATI have located a bug in the application causing the performance issue. They have a patch, which we are currently evaluating, that improves performance. ATI are saying that Lionhead will be including this fix in an upcoming game patch, and we are excited to see something finally being done about this issue.
Of course, with the BW2 test in question, that puts the ATI Radeon X1900 XTX firmly and without question in place as the worlds fastest consumer level graphics product.
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Harkonnen - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
Almost $900 CDN for the XTX and it only has a 1 year warranty?Main reason I would never buy an expensive ATi card is that right there.
smitty3268 - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
The people who buy a card this expensive the first day it comes out won't keep it for a whole year, so the warranty doesn't matter. In 6 months another card will be out that makes this one look slow and they'll be spending even more money.DerekWilson - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
Due to popular demand, we have added more percent increase performance comparison graphs to the performance breakdown that shows the performance relatoinships at lower resolutions.Let us know if there is anything else you'd like to see. Thanks!
Live - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
The performance breakdown looks very good now! I would go so far as to say that this should be standard in future reviews.piroroadkill - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
Using a lossy image format (JPEG) for image quality comparison screenshots seems kind of... pointless.But I guess you have to worry about bandwidth.
Josh Venning - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
Thanks for the input all. Just to let you know we are dealing with some problems regarding our power numbers, but they should be up shortly. Thanks for being patient.Josh Venning - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
One more thing.. We also caught a mistype on the graphs that we are in the process of correcting. The two crossfire systems we tested are the X1900 XTX Crossfire and the X1800 XT Crossfire. (we miss-labeled the latter "X1900 XT Crossfire") Sorry for any confusion this may have caused.smitty3268 - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
Ah... That makes much more sense now. I was wondering why the XTX crossfire was doing so much better than the XT crossfire when the specs were so similar.SpaceRanger - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
Problems with the publishing of them, or problems in the sense that it requires a direct link into a nuclear reactor to power properly??
DerekWilson - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
our local nuclear plant ran us an extention cord just for this event :-)