|
GeCube Radeon X1900 GT 256MB PCI-E Review |
|
Written by Mavke
|
|
Tuesday, 30 May 2006 |
Hardware Zone comes up with a review on the GeCube Radeon X1900 GT 256MB PCIe graphics card. Even if it's in the rumors department, ATI surely needs such a boost, because in real life, it's gradually losing market share in the ever-important discrete graphics segment. Though its integrated components have been growing steadily at the expense of Intel, ATI has lost ground in the past months for both discrete and mobile graphics to NVIDIA. Part of that reason as most of you should know by now is NVIDIA's GeForce 7 series, especially the mid and upper range reinforcements like the GeForce 7600 series and GeForce 7900 GT. These graphics cards have also translated well to the mobile department with good results.
 GeCube Radeon X1900 GT 256MB PCI-E Review
As for ATI, the company has recently been on the defensive, throwing new products to match the competition. The Radeon X1800 GTO was such an example for the middle segment and in quick succession, ATI has lined up another similar offering for the high-end, the Radeon X1900 GT 256MB. Just like the Radeon X1800 GTO uses a stripped down R520 core, so it goes for the flagship R580 core found on the Radeon X1900 series. The caveat is that its record high 48 pixel shaders have been cut down to 36 while the texture and raster operation units are both similarly reduced to 12 from the 16 originally.
Essentially, ATI disabled an operating quad from the core, thus the uniform reduction of a quarter of the processing units across the chip. The clock speeds have also been adjusted downwards, with the core of the Radeon X1900 GT running at 575MHz compared to the 625MHz on the XT. The onboard frame buffer has been halved to 256MB and clocked at a slower 1200MHz and not 1450MHz DDR. Fortunately, the rest of the Radeon X1900 architecture remains untouched, from the 512-bit internal ring bus to the eight vertex shaders. This Radeon X1900 GT is to compete with the GeForce 7900 GT.
It may have been only natural for ATI to continue its recent GTO line of graphics by introducing a new version. As the GTO line has become associated with good performance and value, a crippled R580 core would have been the logical candidate. However, as you know by now, ATI seemingly had a late change of heart and went with the GT moniker. While a graphics card by any name would still perform as best as its specifications allow, the deliberate marketing move to use the suffix of its close competitor from NVIDIA, the GeForce 7900 GT, hopes to put the two cards on par in the minds of the consumers.
So does the actual product live up to its billing? If ATI had wanted to match the GeForce 7900 GT, the Radeon X1900 GT was certainly the right candidate. Both the cards were very closely matched for most of the benchmarks that we tested, the usual advantage for NVIDIA in OpenGL based games not withstanding. However, they might have probably been slightly disappointed that the Radeon X1900 GT failed to register any significant victories. If you have been hoping that ATI would strike back with a vengeance with this card, you would be very wrong.
The Radeon X1900 GT is very much a hobbled Radeon X1900 XT and the results have shown that the gap between the XT and the GT is quite substantial. This means that the exclusive high-end remains so and the more affordable high-end is restricted to the GeForce 7900 GT and the Radeon X1900 GT from the newer generation of cards. For those looking in this segment, ATI has presented a more than decent choice with the Radeon X1900 GT, especially if you are the type who panders to eye candy like high dynamic range rendering with a degree of antialiasing.
Though one can get a bit more gains by overclocking, getting close to the levels of an XT is well nigh impossible. The end result is a competitive but not astonishing Radeon X1900 GT. As for the GeCube's version of the Radeon X1900 GT, it has the reference model look stamped all over it so the only worthwhile contribution from the vendor is probably its bundle of software and accessories. The good point is that GeCube has to our knowledge never priced its graphics cards out of the market and we can probably expect more of the same for its Radeon X1900 GT.
With the retail price set at $299 in a bid to match the GeForce 7900 GT which retains the advantage of price decrements due to its earlier launch, the Radeon X1900 GT adds more choice for the consumer at a competitive price and fulfills most of what ATI intended with this latest variant.
Related Articles
Connect3D Radeon X1900 GT 256MB PCI-E Review
Sapphire Toxic X1900 XTX 512MB PCI-E Review
Sapphire Radeon X1900 GT 256MB PCI-E Review
|
NiBiTor v4.5a
