bjorn3d had theirs up, & was taken down, but here is some cached text grabbed before it was taken down (im sure the rest will be avail in a few hours, but what the hell):
Introduction
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Winter is over, and as usual it is not only time for warm weather and green leaves on the trees, but it is also time for new cards from both NVIDIA and ATI. Earlier in April, we posted our first look at the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra, and today it is time for us to talk about ATI's new chipset, the x800.
In contrast to NVIDIA, ATI not only provided us with a reference board for benchmarking, but they also invited us over to Toronto for a week to give us plenty of time to learn more about the new cards.
The Radeon x800 XT Premium Edition and x800 Pro
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
With the new cards, ATI has moved away from the Radeon 9x00 naming. The new cards are now called Radeon x800 XT Premium Edition and Radeon x800 Pro.
The x800 XT Premium Edition is the card that goes head-to-head with the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra. Just like the 6800 Ultra, the x800 XT Premium Edition has 16 rendering pipelines, DDR3 memory and high frequencies on both the VPU and the memory. The x800 Pro is the little brother and 'only' has 12 rendering pipelines as well as a bit slower memory. Let's take a look at the specs:
Technical Information
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Unlike ATI's R300, used in the Radeon 9700 and considered a major leap in 3D architectures, the Radeon X800 series is very light on new features. In fact, only two items are not simply performance enhancements. First of all, we have Temporal Antialiasing, ATI's name for three new antialiasing modes.Don't worry, though; the X800 cards still have the option to use the highly-lauded antialiasing modes found on ATI's R300 series, as well.
Before we can get into the specifics of temporal antialiasing, we need to examine the premises behind it. Temporal antialiasing relies on the idea that the human eye can filter out random noise very well. The concept of using random noise as a means to antialias a scene has been around for a very long time; known as stochastic antialiasing, it generates a new and random sample pattern for every pixel. Stochastic antialiasing is also considered by some to be the best possible form of antialiasing because it relies on both smoothing lines and creating noise to reduce aliasing artifacts. However, stochastic antialiasing has one huge drawback. If at least eight samples are not used, stochastic antialiasing looks terrible. The noise is too apparent and becomes a flicker at the edge of polygons, and image quality can actually be decreased. Even eight samples is not a great choice, as it still flickers at times. Sixteen samples is the threshold for excellent stochastic quality.
But, we obviously haven't reached the point where sixteen samples is feasible for a gaming card. ATI has taken some of the concepts behind stochastic antialiasing and applied them to temporal antialiasing, an antialiasing method that requires no more samples than the R300 series. To accomplish this, temporal antialiasing relies on the R420's chipset ability to dynamically change sample patterns. It goes something like this:
A single frame is rendered normally. Every pixel is antialiased with the same sample pattern, and the frame is output to the monitor.
Once the frame has finished rendering, the sample pattern is changed. The new sample pattern is not randomly generated as in stochastic antialiasing; it is simply a second sample pattern created for temporal antialiasing.
The next frame is rendered using the new sample pattern and output to the monitor.
Once this frame is completed, the sample pattern is reverted to the original, and the process repeats itself.
What this means is that by alternating sample patterns, temporal antialiasing creates some noise that is then reduced by the eye for improved image quality. The best part? There is no performance cost. However, temporal antialiasing is not without drawbacks. First, vertical sync must be enabled for temporal antialiasing to work at all. The tearing associated with the lack of vertical sync would become much worse with temporal antialiasing since half of the frame would have one sample pattern while the other would use a totally different pattern. Second, temporal antialiasing flickers except at high framerates. Since vertical sync forces the framerate to be, at maximum, the refresh rate of your monitor, better monitors will have more success with temporal antialiasing. Third, temporal antialiasing can occasionally reduce quality versus the regular rotated-grid multisampling found on R300 because of flickering and shimmering. This is true of high contrast edges in particular.
Another interesting point is that temporal antialiasing works on the R300 series currently through the use of a registry key. R300 has the same capability for programmable sample patterns, and it works fine on those cards in Direct3D applications (it does not seem to work in OpenGL at this point in time). But, even more than temporal antialiasing itself, the most exciting part is that it indicates that ATI is moving in the direction of stochastic antialiasing and might even reach that goal with their next generation.
The second new feature found in the X800 series is, in my opinion, much less exciting than temporal antialiasing. It's called 3Dc, and it's a new compression scheme for normal maps. Normal mapping is a technique used to drastically reduce the number of polygons required for a realistic model--think of it as bump mapping on steroids. Doom 3, in particular, uses normal mapping everywhere to create such excellent graphics while keeping polygon count very low. 3Dc promises to increase the quality of normal maps while keeping the memory bandwidth required the same, since it was developed specifically for normal maps. The problem with 3Dc, though, is the same problem that faced Truform on the Radeon 8500: its success depends totally on developer support. Several games are using 3Dc, most notably Valve's Half-Life 2, but unless it offers a fantastic image quality increase in real games, it will probably fade quickly just like Truform did.
Image Quality At a Minimal Cost
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pixel and Texel fillrate of 8.4 Gigapixels/sec, 37 GB/sec of raw bandwidth and 16 pipeline architecture are the key features when it comes to X800 performance. Due to its sophisticated 0.13-micron Low-K dielectric process (525MHz), very efficient GDDR3 memory interface (1150MHz) and superior pixel shader architecture (16 pixel pipelines and 6 vertex units), RADEON X800 easily doubles the performance of its high-end predecessor ? RADEON 9800XT.
There is no doubt in our minds that the new RADEON X800 from ATI has just raised the image quality bar. By introducing Temporal Antialiasing, this technique brings in huge quality enhancements while keeping performance cost at zero. This is truly a step forward when it comes to programmable Antialiasing architecture. As with R3xx design, X800 offers full trilinear texture filtering by default along with up to 16x Anisotropic Filtering. When combined, the video output is phenomenal keeping the performance hit at minimal -- in some situations none-existent because of X800?s superior fillrate.
Conclusion
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
With the x800 Pro and XT Premium Edition ATI has brought up a pair of impressive products. If there is something one could complain about is that the cards really do not have any new exciting features and that they basically still are R300 on crack. I don't necessarily think that the lack of PS3.0 will affect this generation though and the performance increase itself is enough to have any serious gamer wanting it. Any price-concious gamers should take a closer look at the Radeon x800 Pro which should perform excellent while be a lot more affordable.
The x800 pro should be out as you read this at a suggested retail price of $399 and the x800 XT Premium Edition will be out on the 21st of May at a suggested retail price of $499.
Here are specs:
Radeon 9800XT Radeon X800 Pro Radeon X800 XT
Premium Edition
Manufacturing: 0.15-micron 0.13-micron low-k 0.13-micron low-k
No of transistors: ~115 mil. ~160 mil. ~160 mil.
VPU speed: 412 MHz 475 MHz 525 MHz
Pixel Pipelines/Pixel Fillrate:
8 / 3300 MP/s 12 / 5700 MP/s 16 / 8400 MP/s
TMU's/Texel Fillrate: 1 / 3300 MT/s 1 / 5700 MT/s 1 / 8400 MT/s
Memoryspeed: 730 MHz 900 MHz
1150 MHz
Memory/Bandwidth: 256-bit DDR1 / 23.4 GB/s 256-bit GDDR3 / 28,8 GB/s 256-bit GDDR3 / 36,8 GB/s
Pixel Shader: 2.0 2.0b 2.0b
Vertex Shader: 2.0 2.0 2.0
FSAA: 6x RGMS + Gammacorrect. 6x RGMS + Gammacorrect. + Temporal AA 6x RGMS + Gammacorrect. + Temporal AA
Anisotropic Filtering: 16x 16x 16x
Connections: 1x VGA, 1x DVI and 1x "S-Video" (HDTV) 1x VGA, 1x DVI and 1x "S-Video" (HDTV) 1x VGA, 1x DVI and 1x "S-Video" (HDTV)
Recommended PSU: 300w 300w 300w
Other: 1 slot 1 slot 1 slot
__________________
CPU: P4 3.2 Northwood
Board: Intel D875PBZ
RAM: 2GB DDR-400
Video: BBA 9800 Pro 128MB
Introduction
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Winter is over, and as usual it is not only time for warm weather and green leaves on the trees, but it is also time for new cards from both NVIDIA and ATI. Earlier in April, we posted our first look at the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra, and today it is time for us to talk about ATI's new chipset, the x800.
In contrast to NVIDIA, ATI not only provided us with a reference board for benchmarking, but they also invited us over to Toronto for a week to give us plenty of time to learn more about the new cards.
The Radeon x800 XT Premium Edition and x800 Pro
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
With the new cards, ATI has moved away from the Radeon 9x00 naming. The new cards are now called Radeon x800 XT Premium Edition and Radeon x800 Pro.
The x800 XT Premium Edition is the card that goes head-to-head with the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra. Just like the 6800 Ultra, the x800 XT Premium Edition has 16 rendering pipelines, DDR3 memory and high frequencies on both the VPU and the memory. The x800 Pro is the little brother and 'only' has 12 rendering pipelines as well as a bit slower memory. Let's take a look at the specs:
Technical Information
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Unlike ATI's R300, used in the Radeon 9700 and considered a major leap in 3D architectures, the Radeon X800 series is very light on new features. In fact, only two items are not simply performance enhancements. First of all, we have Temporal Antialiasing, ATI's name for three new antialiasing modes.Don't worry, though; the X800 cards still have the option to use the highly-lauded antialiasing modes found on ATI's R300 series, as well.
Before we can get into the specifics of temporal antialiasing, we need to examine the premises behind it. Temporal antialiasing relies on the idea that the human eye can filter out random noise very well. The concept of using random noise as a means to antialias a scene has been around for a very long time; known as stochastic antialiasing, it generates a new and random sample pattern for every pixel. Stochastic antialiasing is also considered by some to be the best possible form of antialiasing because it relies on both smoothing lines and creating noise to reduce aliasing artifacts. However, stochastic antialiasing has one huge drawback. If at least eight samples are not used, stochastic antialiasing looks terrible. The noise is too apparent and becomes a flicker at the edge of polygons, and image quality can actually be decreased. Even eight samples is not a great choice, as it still flickers at times. Sixteen samples is the threshold for excellent stochastic quality.
But, we obviously haven't reached the point where sixteen samples is feasible for a gaming card. ATI has taken some of the concepts behind stochastic antialiasing and applied them to temporal antialiasing, an antialiasing method that requires no more samples than the R300 series. To accomplish this, temporal antialiasing relies on the R420's chipset ability to dynamically change sample patterns. It goes something like this:
A single frame is rendered normally. Every pixel is antialiased with the same sample pattern, and the frame is output to the monitor.
Once the frame has finished rendering, the sample pattern is changed. The new sample pattern is not randomly generated as in stochastic antialiasing; it is simply a second sample pattern created for temporal antialiasing.
The next frame is rendered using the new sample pattern and output to the monitor.
Once this frame is completed, the sample pattern is reverted to the original, and the process repeats itself.
What this means is that by alternating sample patterns, temporal antialiasing creates some noise that is then reduced by the eye for improved image quality. The best part? There is no performance cost. However, temporal antialiasing is not without drawbacks. First, vertical sync must be enabled for temporal antialiasing to work at all. The tearing associated with the lack of vertical sync would become much worse with temporal antialiasing since half of the frame would have one sample pattern while the other would use a totally different pattern. Second, temporal antialiasing flickers except at high framerates. Since vertical sync forces the framerate to be, at maximum, the refresh rate of your monitor, better monitors will have more success with temporal antialiasing. Third, temporal antialiasing can occasionally reduce quality versus the regular rotated-grid multisampling found on R300 because of flickering and shimmering. This is true of high contrast edges in particular.
Another interesting point is that temporal antialiasing works on the R300 series currently through the use of a registry key. R300 has the same capability for programmable sample patterns, and it works fine on those cards in Direct3D applications (it does not seem to work in OpenGL at this point in time). But, even more than temporal antialiasing itself, the most exciting part is that it indicates that ATI is moving in the direction of stochastic antialiasing and might even reach that goal with their next generation.
The second new feature found in the X800 series is, in my opinion, much less exciting than temporal antialiasing. It's called 3Dc, and it's a new compression scheme for normal maps. Normal mapping is a technique used to drastically reduce the number of polygons required for a realistic model--think of it as bump mapping on steroids. Doom 3, in particular, uses normal mapping everywhere to create such excellent graphics while keeping polygon count very low. 3Dc promises to increase the quality of normal maps while keeping the memory bandwidth required the same, since it was developed specifically for normal maps. The problem with 3Dc, though, is the same problem that faced Truform on the Radeon 8500: its success depends totally on developer support. Several games are using 3Dc, most notably Valve's Half-Life 2, but unless it offers a fantastic image quality increase in real games, it will probably fade quickly just like Truform did.
Image Quality At a Minimal Cost
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pixel and Texel fillrate of 8.4 Gigapixels/sec, 37 GB/sec of raw bandwidth and 16 pipeline architecture are the key features when it comes to X800 performance. Due to its sophisticated 0.13-micron Low-K dielectric process (525MHz), very efficient GDDR3 memory interface (1150MHz) and superior pixel shader architecture (16 pixel pipelines and 6 vertex units), RADEON X800 easily doubles the performance of its high-end predecessor ? RADEON 9800XT.
There is no doubt in our minds that the new RADEON X800 from ATI has just raised the image quality bar. By introducing Temporal Antialiasing, this technique brings in huge quality enhancements while keeping performance cost at zero. This is truly a step forward when it comes to programmable Antialiasing architecture. As with R3xx design, X800 offers full trilinear texture filtering by default along with up to 16x Anisotropic Filtering. When combined, the video output is phenomenal keeping the performance hit at minimal -- in some situations none-existent because of X800?s superior fillrate.
Conclusion
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
With the x800 Pro and XT Premium Edition ATI has brought up a pair of impressive products. If there is something one could complain about is that the cards really do not have any new exciting features and that they basically still are R300 on crack. I don't necessarily think that the lack of PS3.0 will affect this generation though and the performance increase itself is enough to have any serious gamer wanting it. Any price-concious gamers should take a closer look at the Radeon x800 Pro which should perform excellent while be a lot more affordable.
The x800 pro should be out as you read this at a suggested retail price of $399 and the x800 XT Premium Edition will be out on the 21st of May at a suggested retail price of $499.
Here are specs:
Radeon 9800XT Radeon X800 Pro Radeon X800 XT
Premium Edition
Manufacturing: 0.15-micron 0.13-micron low-k 0.13-micron low-k
No of transistors: ~115 mil. ~160 mil. ~160 mil.
VPU speed: 412 MHz 475 MHz 525 MHz
Pixel Pipelines/Pixel Fillrate:
8 / 3300 MP/s 12 / 5700 MP/s 16 / 8400 MP/s
TMU's/Texel Fillrate: 1 / 3300 MT/s 1 / 5700 MT/s 1 / 8400 MT/s
Memoryspeed: 730 MHz 900 MHz
1150 MHz
Memory/Bandwidth: 256-bit DDR1 / 23.4 GB/s 256-bit GDDR3 / 28,8 GB/s 256-bit GDDR3 / 36,8 GB/s
Pixel Shader: 2.0 2.0b 2.0b
Vertex Shader: 2.0 2.0 2.0
FSAA: 6x RGMS + Gammacorrect. 6x RGMS + Gammacorrect. + Temporal AA 6x RGMS + Gammacorrect. + Temporal AA
Anisotropic Filtering: 16x 16x 16x
Connections: 1x VGA, 1x DVI and 1x "S-Video" (HDTV) 1x VGA, 1x DVI and 1x "S-Video" (HDTV) 1x VGA, 1x DVI and 1x "S-Video" (HDTV)
Recommended PSU: 300w 300w 300w
Other: 1 slot 1 slot 1 slot
__________________
CPU: P4 3.2 Northwood
Board: Intel D875PBZ
RAM: 2GB DDR-400
Video: BBA 9800 Pro 128MB
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