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ATI Radeon X1900 XTX 512MB PCI-E Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Monday, 08 May 2006 |
SimHQ reports about their review on the ATI Radeon X1900 XTX 512MB PCIe video card. The graphics market has traditionally seen product refreshes occur at a fairly static pace. A new architecture upon which a generation of parts will be based is introduced, generally for the spring or fall OEM cycle, with a new part that is derivative of the existing architecture hitting the market just in time for the following refresh. This schedule, however, is an ideal market approach that can't always be adhered to or met perfectly, and in ATI's case was completely blown out of the water last year with the oft-mentioned delay of their first Shader Model 3.0 graphics chip, the R520.
 ATI Radeon X1900 XTX 512MB PCI-E Review
The Radeon X1900 XTX is selling online for well over $500 as of late April, placing the part squarely in the high-end bracket. ATI has paired these 650MHz cores with high-speed RAM, Samsung's 1.1ns GDDR3 modules, creating the fastest, arguably most feature-rich, graphics card currently available on the market. Yet, ATI has also paired these chips with a cooling solution that can be, to our ears, quite intrusive at times; we would gladly give the XTX a slightly higher score were it not for the noise levels produced by the board. Unfortunatly a better cooling solution would be something to consider.
Looking back at the testing we conducted, it's fairly clear where the improvements made to the Radeon X1900's will see the most visible gains. As future titles make heavier use of pixel shaders the tripled number of shader cores in the Radeon 1900's should pay solid performance dividends. The XTX certainly outperformed the Radeon X1800 XT across our benchmark suite at all resolutions and settings, and particularly so in newer titles such as Chaos Theory that make higher utilization of pixel shaders. As games become more shader incentive, the Radeon X1900 will benefit greatly from this trend.
While it's up to the individual to decide whether the Radeon X1900's merit the price difference over the Radeon X1800's, the former's improvements should reap benefits if ATI in their design choices has accurately predicted the direction developers will take over the coming months. Yet even if ATI's developer relations are unable to procure such graphical advancements from developers this year, the Radeon 1900's still enable high resolution, graphically-rich visuals in existing titles while offering the hardware potential to continue doing likewise with future games.
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