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Sapphire Radeon X1900 GT 256MB PCI-E Review |
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Written by Zombie
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Thursday, 18 May 2006 |
FiringSquad presents a review on the Sapphire Radeon X1900 GT 256MB PCIe graphics card. Last week ATI officially unveiled their Radeon X1900 GT GPU to the public. We used the word officially because the Radeon X1900 GT actually hit some retailers shelves before ATI's official announcement. With ATI successfully hard launching the Radeon X1900 XT/XTX, their Xpress 3200 chipset, and now the Radeon X1900 GT all this year, it appears ATI's taken the criticism towards availability to heart. These new products couldn't have come at a more critical time for ATI, as NVIDIA certainly isn't letting up either.
 Sapphire Radeon X1900 GT 256MB PCI-E Review
As its name implies, the Radeon X1900 GT is meant to take on NVIDIA's current GeForce 7900 GT GPU, which has become an extremely popular seller in the short time it has been out on the market. The GeForce 7900 GT has proven popular with enthusiasts due to its excellent price/performance ratio; unlike the GeForce 7800 GT, which had some of its pixel and vertex shaders reduced, the GeForce 7900 GT runs with the full feature set found in NVIDIA's flagship GeForce 7900 GTX, only it runs at slower clock speeds. Some enthusiasts have found the GeForce 7900 GT to be an excellent overclocker.
Right now it's difficult to determine a good score for Sapphire's Radeon X1900 GT card. On one hand, you've got the aspects that Sapphire typically excels at such as their game bundle and their pricing and availability. One glance at most retailers online and you'll quickly see that Sapphire's cards can be found practically everywhere and with pricing that's usually lower than most, if not all, of ATI's board partners. It's because of this that we wouldn't be surprised if Sapphire's Radeon X1900 GT card ended up being one of the most popular Radeon X1900 GT cards on the market.
Of course, with over twice the number of pixel shaders onboard, the X1900 GT may eventually turn the tables on the Radeon X1800 XT. It's conceivable that in shader-heavy titles the Radeon X1900 GT could end up delivering better performance than the Radeon X1800 XT card it replaces. But it's also possible that by the time this happens, ATI may have a faster $300 card out anyway, you'd be better off saving your money and getting the Radeon X1800 XT 256MB for about $250 as a stopgap solution until more shader-heavy applications appear. With DirectX 10 on the horizon this strategy makes even more sense.
It's also possible that we're not seeing what the Radeon X1900 GT is fully capable of. ATI managed to squeeze a lot of additional performance out of the Radeon X1800 XT between its launch in early October and the time it ultimately hit retail en masse. The new Catalyst driver updates certainly proved this in the past. The only thing hampering this reasoning is that the Radeon X1900 XT has been on the market for a few months now with more pixel shaders onboard than the GT, so any driver optimizations for the Radeon X1900 XT/XTX should theoretically also apply to the Radeon X1900 GT as well.
The bottom line is that if you're in the market for a new card in this price range, you'll want to keep a close eye out on street prices as well as the benchmark battle that will no doubt continue over the course of the next several months. Sapphire Radeon X1900 GT. should be priced competitively with the other card manufacturers, and of course knowing Sapphire's track record when it comes to distribution, cards should be pretty easy to find online from multiple retailers in a matter of weeks.
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