X1900 reviews

[JCLW]

http://www.beyond3d.com/reviews/ati/r580/

ATI's decisions for the R580 chip that powers the X1900 have been interesting, to say the least, even a little bold in some ways. Even though we've looked at the X1900 fairly thoroughly in this article we've possibly yet to see it pay off fully. As shown by the pure pixel shader tests, but not fully realised by the games, this really is an architecture that has more to come, but only if games are going to going to go in the way that ATI are predicting, and quickly. For now, though, its clear that Radeon X1900 XTX offers a performance increase over X1800 XT in all situations, but it also has the price premium to match.

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=4477&page=1

A new high-end GPU with everything going for it, perhaps bar the software to really show it off. Will it come in time, especially with D3D10/Vista games programming already under way at most major developers, is the question. Even if it doesn't fully realise its potential, it's a blindingly fast 3D graphics product with the best IQ possible.

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=310

Radeon X1900, or R580, is in many ways what the R520 should have been before all the die respins. R580 uses the same memory controller found on R520, with the 512-bit internal ring bus. Externally, the chip can address 256-bits at a time. Our Radeon X1900XT came with 512MB DDR3 running at 1.45GHz, but the X1900XTX version comes with a default memory clock of 1.55GHz. As anticipated, the R580 core features 16 pixel pipelines with 48 pixel shader processors. R580 is produced on a 90nm process. Unfortunately, all X1900 series cards are double width cards; the additional width is needed to properly cool the GPU.

http://www.ocworkbench.com/2006/ati/x1900xt/g1.htm

ATi X1900XT will start appearing in retail on the 24 Jan 2006. This short preview gives you a rough estimation of the performance against the 7800GTX Normal and SLI setup. From what we can see so far, the performance level is pretty well above the levels of a 7800GTX 256M card in both single and SLI mode.

http://www.hardwarezone.com/articles/view.php?id=1808&cid=3&pg=1

Debuting at the same price as the Radeon X1800 XT first did a couple of months back, the US$549 priced Radeon X1900 XT is in a class of its own with no real competitor. We speculate the Radeon X1800 XT to gradually wane away as stocks deplete in the following weeks and months while its price slides to yet below the US$500 mark as the Radeon X1900 XT becomes the definitive successor with performance gains of up to 30%. That's an incredible performance gain for a minor core update, but when it comes down to pure numbers, we had expected even better performance than what we encountered considering it has three times more shader processors. Obviously, the bottleneck is not only at the shader processor, but elsewhere along the line that hasn't changed from its predecessors. Additionally, the success of the ATI's new top dog really hedges upon how forward looking game engines get and the more shader programs used displace conventional render routines, the higher the performance of the Radeon X1900 series. We for one can't wait to try it with Unreal Tournament 2007 and hopefully it becomes ATI's forte thanks to its architectural design inclinations.

http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/865/first_looks_from_taiwan_ati_radeon_x1900xtx_512mb/index.html (thanks Jod)

If you’re on the market for a new graphics cards and upgrading from something like an older Radeon X800, you’ll be very pleased with the performance increases but if you’ve only just bought an X1800XT, you might want to wait a little while and see what nVidia will bring to the table in a couple of months with their G71 (GeForce 7900) GPU.

http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews/X1900XTXCF/x1900/index.htm (thanks lowfat)

As far as the overall experience, the X1900 cards are a joy to use. The gaming performance cannot be matched by any other product and the cards ran flawlessly throughout our testing which says as much for the hardware as it does the software. It was also great to see that the X1900 delivered on video playback performance with some excellent CPU usage savings being experienced. Really we only have one issue with the X1900 series and that's the level of noise ATI's cooler makes in comparison to the 7800GTX. The ATI card is by no means unpleasant to use, it is however noticeably louder, especially in Crossfire mode so some rethinking would be appreciated on ATI's part for the next generation. There is of course the option for you to install a 3rd party cooler such as Artic Coolings new X2 should you be bothered by the stock cooler.

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=OTUz

The bottom line is that ATI has produced an impressive refresh to the X1800 XT. We are very happy to say that ATI has informed us that production is not a problem with this X1900 GPU and that these video cards are everywhere now for people to purchase. Timely availability has really been ATI’s main problem recently. ATI had some very impressive technology in the recent past; it was just that no one could buy it in the right timeframe. It seems ATI has turned the tables and provided the hardest launch we have ever seen—video cards that were actually available and in people’s hands before the card was even announced! While not official, that’s as hard as it gets folks; let’s hope ATI can maintain these hard launches and provide products the day of launch.

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=202&type=expert&pid=21

ATI's R580 architecture was built up to be the company's saving grace, and it turns out to have been correct. The X1900 XTX is the fastest GPU we have ever tested and is going to give NVIDIA some headaches until they can get their 90nm G70-based parts on the market with higher clocks and/or more pipes. The immediate availability of four X1900-based cards, the XTX, XT, CrossFire and All-in-Wonder, really shows that ATI has tweaked their 90nm technology and has things rolling in the right direction once again.

http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=871

With the X1900-series of cards ATI once again has taken back the top crown in the video card race. Usually a spring-refresh means minor enhancements and faster clockspeeds but going from 16 to 48 shader processing units is a big improvement which should ensure that these cards will be able to handle whatever the game-developers throw at the card for quite some time. Even a game like FEAR which is known to bring great machines to its knees runs well with these cards.

http://www.elitebastards.com/page.php?pageid=13474

So, after months of discussion and speculation since the launch of the Radeon X1800, R580 is now upon us. Nobody doubted that the Radeon X1900 would be faster than its older brother across the board, but the big question on everybody's mind was just how much the tripling of pixel shader units alone would lend to increasing performance in currently shipping titles. And, even putting to one side some of the huge gains seen in synthetic benchmarks, the final numbers are impressive. While the exact performance boost naturally varies from game to game, there isn't really any title that fails to benefit quite comprehensively from the X1900's 48 pixel shader units, and the impact of this architectural change on titles such as Age of Empires III and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory is really quite astounding, and one that we can only imagine will be repeated more and more frequently as 2006 sees the release of ever-more shader intensive games. The addition of Fetch4 to R580's arsenal only serves to complete the equation, arguably giving the Radeon X1900 the feature set that the X1800 should have had in the first place. Indeed, it will be interesting to see what inroads the use of Fetch4 will make in to game titles, where NVIDIA's PCF functionality is already rather well established in its field (Thanks largely to its inclusion in the original Xbox GPU).

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/293/1/

ATI has released a pair of cards that can be taken seriously by anyone that was considering the 7800GTX 512. The feather in ATI's cap is that finding the Nvidia card for anywhere near the X1900XT asking price would mean that you bought it used, if you could find someone willing to take such a huge loss on it. In fact you'd be lucky to find one at all. Today you can buy a brand new ATI card that offers features not found in Nvidia's line and performs at or near the same level in most situations, and much better in others.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/Videocards/315/

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.

http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=777&cid=2

Overall, we have to give kudos to ATI for starting off 2006 with a such a bang. The company's problems in 2005 were well documented, so we won't rehash them here. Instead, we'll congratulate ATI for launching the Radeon X1900 so quickly, and thank them for keeping the rivalry between them and NVIDIA alive. ATI fought hard, and seems to have wrestled the performance crown from NVIDIA this time around. NVIDIA surely isn't sitting idle though, and will certainly have an answer for the X1900 sometime soon, but for now ATI is riding high. It wasn't a blow-out by any means, but the X1900 is definitely a winner.

http://www.tbreak.com/reviews/article.php?cat=grfx&id=430&pagenumber=11

There’s no denying that the X1900XTX is a mighty fast card and with driver updates, will continue to get better- as and when games continue relying heavier on shaders. It came out above the 7800GTX-512 card in most of our tests which is nVidia’s highest offering at the moment- and pretty expensive and hard to find. The X1900XTX on the other hand, should be widely available starting today.

http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2006q1/radeon-x1900/index.x?pg=14

The Radeon X1900 cards are significantly better performers than the Radeon X1800s that they replace. I am a little bit perplexed, though, by ATI's choices here. They've tied up roughly 60 million transistors and 50 square millimeters of die space on the R580 primarily in order to add pixel shading power, but even in ShaderMark, we didn't see anything approaching three times the performance of the R520. Would this chip have performed any differently in any of our benchmarks with just 32 pixel shader units onboard? Seems like it is limited, in its present form, by other factors, such as pixel fill rate, memory bandwidth, or perhaps even register space. Who knows? Perhaps the R580 will age well compared to its competitors as developers require additional shader power and use flow control more freely. I wouldn't be shocked to see future applications take better advantage of this GPU's pixel shading prowess, but no application that we tested was able to exploit it fully. For current usage models, NVIDIA's G70 architecture appears to be more efficient, clock for clock and transistor for transistor. Here's hoping that ATI's forward-looking design does indeed have a payoff down the road.

http://firingsquad.com/hardware/ati_radeon_x1900_xt_preview/ (thanks Cowboy X)

The most promising aspect of ATI’s Radeon X1900 family though isn’t today’s performance, but the performance of tomorrow. While the X1900 XT and X1900 XTX delivered sweet performance in games like F.E.A.R., Half-Life 2 Lost Coast, and others, it’s the crop of games that haven’t been released yet which could show the most significant benefits. As game developers continue to incorporate more shaders into their games and begin to rely on more of shader model 3.0’s features like dynamic branching, the performance potential of the Radeon X1900’s R580 architecture will increase. In other words, like a fine wine, the Radeon X1900 could get even better with age. It’s this future that ATI’s obviously banking on.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1914692,00.asp

When Nvidia introduced the GeForce 7800 GTX 512, it represented such a significant boost in clock speeds over the 256MB version that it was hard to see how ATI would come up with something noticeably better, without sticking itself in the same supply situation as Nvidia has (7800 GTX cards now sell for $750, and are nearly impossible to find in stock). By trimming down the raster operation units and tripling the pixel shader units, as well as pairing the graphics chip up with some high-speed RAM, ATI has managed to increase performance by a huge margin over the X1800 XT, while only requiring about 20% more transistors per chip.

 

[lowfat]

I can't wait till this things show up in Canada.

 

[Jod]

Looks like this single card runs F.E.A.R. as good as 2 x GTX256...

Must have more reviews...

 

[JCLW]

Pricy, and not in stock. http://www.canadacomputers.com/index.php?do=ShowProduct&cmd=pd&pid=009269. But then again it's still under NDA as I type this.

http://www.pccanada.com/ is usually one of the first in Canada with stock on anything new.

 

[Cowboy X]

For the US based members :

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814102671

 

[lowfat]

Pricy, and not in stock. http://www.canadacomputers.com/index.php?do=ShowProduct&cmd=pd&pid=009269. But then again it's still under NDA as I type this.

wow that is expensive. $599US @ newegg is like ~$700CAD. No way will i pay $800+

 

[PhoenixOfChaos]

wow that is expensive. $599US @ newegg is like ~$700CAD. No way will i pay $800+

I believe the price will drop. Right as it was released it was 500$ befored the automated gouger went into effect. This might allow ATi to decimate nVidia for the time being- as long as they can keep the price down and the cards avalible.

 

[JCLW]

wow that is expensive. $599US @ newegg is like ~$700CAD. No way will i pay $800+

Don't forget duty and brokerage fees.

 

[lowfat]

Don't forget duty and brokerage fees.

Ya that is if I bought it from newegg, but I was thinking that it should be somewhere in the $700 range if i bought it from a Canadian store.

 

[Jod]

http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/865/first_looks_from_taiwan_ati_radeon_x1900xtx_512mb/index.html

 

[>HyperlogiK<]

I hope this results in something like an X1800 GTO2, there must be more than a few X1800XT cores they'll have trouble selling now.

 

[HousERaT]

I guess this hard launch makes this the best card money can buy since you can't find the 7800GTX 512 anywhere.

 

[RedDragonXXX]

Not worth it from what I seen so far. I'm going to hold off for G71's.

 

[lowfat]

Driverheaven review - http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews/X1900XTXCF/x1900/index.htm

All the graphs say 7800GT however in the system specs it shows them as GTX's.

 

[Cowboy X]

Firingsquad :

http://firingsquad.com/hardware/ati_radeon_x1900_xt_preview/

 

[Rattle]

I guess this hard launch makes this the best card money can buy since you can't find the 7800GTX 512 anywhere.

Its faster than that card and a hell of alot cheaper too

 

[JCLW]

I can't wait till this things show up in Canada.

I think the prices will end up being OK. No stock yet, but: http://search.ncix.com/search.php?quicksearch=x1900

XT ~CDN$650 (625/725)
CF ~CDN$700 (625/725)
AIW ~CDN$550 (500/480)
XTX ~CDN$800 (650/775)

Those XTXs are kind of silly, but the other prices seem OK.

For Comparison:
GT 256 ~CDN$450 (450/500)
GTX 256 ~CDN$600 (450/600)
GTX 512 ~CDN$1000 (550/850)

 

[RedDragonXXX]

Its faster than that card and a hell of alot cheaper too

Considering that it's ATI's next gen card (R580) I expect much better results then that and I'm frankly disappointed. I keep wanting to switch to ATI for once, but they have yet to come out with something that will impress me.

It's at a good price point but I'd rather save that money and buy 7900Ultra once it comes out.

 

[Cowboy X]

Not really , the R520 was to compete with the 256 GTX which it more than handily beats , but it was very late to market . The R580 is the refresh which should compete with the GTX refresh which is the 512 MB souped up GTX and it more than handily beats it , not counting the fact that the 512 GTX is basically a reviewers edition card and can hardly be found ( while costing more than the XTX ) .

So RedDragonXXX , I will have to disagree since the real next gen part is the R600 , the R580 is just a refresh .

 

[RedDragonXXX]

That's what they said about R580's when R520's were out.

512MB GTX's were out only to compete with X1800XT's since they had 512MB of onboard RAM.