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ATI Radeon X1900 XTX 512MB PCI-E Review |
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Written by Zombie
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Monday, 12 June 2006 |
TheTechLounge comes with a review on the ATI Radeon X1900 XTX 512MB PCIe graphics card. Back in January, I wrote a preview of ATI's top-of-the-line Radeon X1900 XTX. At the time, our main focus was to see how much of a performance increase there was from the Radeon X1800 XT it replaced. It wasn't until just recently that we were able to fully assess the Radeon X1900 XTX as a high-end video card in comparison with the competition, because we did not have a GeForce 7900 GTX. Last month we finally broke down and purchased a BFG GeForce 7900 GTX OC, because it had become evident that we simply would not get our hands on a sponsored sample, and we were determined to test the card against the competition.
 ATI Radeon X1900 XTX 512MB PCI-E Review
So, what makes the Radeon X1900 XTX different from the Radeon X1800 XT? The biggest difference with the Radeon X1900 is that it has more pipelines as well as slight increase in core and memory clock speeds. How many pipelines were added, you might ask? A few. More precisely, three times as many. The Radeon X1800 XT had a core clock speed of 625MHz, 512MB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 1.50GHz and a total of 16 pixel pipelines. The Radeon X1900 XTX has a core clock of 650MHz, memory clocked at 1.55GHz and 48 pixel pipelines. While it's a little faster, the main difference is the pixel pipeline count.
NVIDIA and ATI's current generation of cards are neck-and-neck, as is rarely the case. Usually either one card will clearly outperform the competition or the price gap will be wide enough for there to be an easily identifiable winner. What we see this generation are great offerings from both sides which essentially tie in the majority of our benchmarks. In a couple of our games that use OpenGL, we see NVIDIA come out ahead, and then in the X3 Reunion demo we see ATI doing a little better, but those games are the minority where you'll notice a difference in performance.
First, we have pricing. The GeForce 7900 GTX is going to be about $500 across the board. At some places, you will see BFG's offering bundled with a game, whereas some places don't bundle a game. The Radeon X1900 XTX can be found for as low as $470, minus a $30 rebate, and bundled with King Kong, the game. So, assuming you are comparing the best values on each side, you're looking at a GeForce 7900 GTX for $500 bundled with Sin Episodes versus a Radeon X1900 XTX for $440 bundled with King Kong. So based on price alone, it looks like the Radeon X1900 XTX is the smarter buy.
Features come into play as well. One advantage ATI has over NVIDIA right now is the ability to apply Anti-Aliasing and HDR lighting simultaneously. With that said, the majority of games still don't utilize HDR, and some games can't run AA on ATI or NVIDIA hardware. That just plain sucks, but it's not ATI's fault, it's a decision the game designers made when deciding what features they wanted to implement and how they are implimented. I personally lean towards ATI on the feature front, because I'd rather have a fully featured card for the games that support it.
At the end of the day, I find it very hard to recommend ATI's Radeon X1900 XTX. Given the price to performance ratio, buying one of these ultra high-end cards just isn't logical. Even those of you who don't care about money and just want the fastest thing around. After going back and forth, I finally decided that the best decision you could possibly make if you want a high-end video card is to save yourself a lot of money and get a GeForce 7900 GT, and you will be very happy with your purchase.
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