x1900xt review

anthrax

Senior member
Feb 8, 2000
695
3
81
Looks like someone might have jumped th gun a little bit on NDA's but looks like the people at hardware zone have posted a 12 page x1900xt review with comparision to 7800GTX 512.., x1800xt , 7800GTX 256.

Here is the link.

http://www.hardwarezone.com/articles/view.php?cid=3&id=1808

In short, Acording to that partiuclar review.
Nothing spetacular with the x1900xt.

However, review does have the following problems that might have affected accuracy with.
-Choice of dated CPU (A64+ 3500)
-Narrow selection of games. (Where is BF2, Far Cry, HL2 , HL2 Lost coast, FEAR) ?
 

Diasper

Senior member
Mar 7, 2005
709
0
0
Poor review. Poor selection of games (nvidia - pixel fillrate favoured games - where's directx 9.0c games?), using underpowered cpu, and it's using hacked 5.13 drivers...!

Wait for a proper website to publish a review before you make any decisions - and also it'll be interesting to chart how future drivers change performance ATI have a habit of pulling out significantly more performance with drivers.

On a separate note, where I'd like to see graphics card developments is testing using dual-core with dual-core optimised drivers as opposed to just single core. However, in this both parties need their drivers to mature - I've heard many Nvidia people complaining about serious bugs, while ATI has only just started on them.
 

ViRGE

Elite Member, Moderator Emeritus
Oct 9, 1999
31,516
167
106
Originally posted by: Trey22
How is it supposed to compete w/ only 16 pipelines?
The idea is that games are(or will be) more pixel shader limited than texture-rendering limited, so by tripling the number of shading units on the X1900, ATI could theoretically improve their performance in all cases where the rendering pipelines are waiting on the shaders. That said, I'm not sure I'd say ATI had a choice in the matter; ATI was already on the 90nm process(and the R520 is already fairly large), so ATI can't make the R580 much bigger. I'm not sure how much space pipelines take, but I'm guessing it's a lot.
 

ViRGE

Elite Member, Moderator Emeritus
Oct 9, 1999
31,516
167
106
Originally posted by: Diasper
Poor review. Poor selection of games
I'm wondering how much time the reviewer had with the card. I doubt he's a poor reviewer in general, otherwise ATI wouldn't have sent him a card, but when you see real short reviews like this, it's usually a sign that the reviewer has had the card for only a little bit.