Now that the ATi R520 cards – the X1xxx series – has been officially announced and released there are tests and reviews of them popping up all over the place. The picture emerging is quite a clear one, with performance matching the Nvidia counterparts in all respects except for high levels of antialiasing at extremely high screen resolutions, where the ATi cards pull away a bit.
That’s certainly not the ‘killer’ performance that a lot of people were hoping for. Add to that the fact that ATi’s cards are going to be more expensive than their NVidia competitors, and perhaps we can see some trouble ahead for the Canadian firm which has enjoyed the preference of gamers and enthusiasts for the past year or two.
A bit of history
ATi, of course, gained ‘supremacy’ in the eyes of gamers and 3D hardware enthusiasts when their Radeon 9xxx series of display cards outperformed the flawed Nvidia 5xxx series cards quite considerably. Nvidia regained some lost ground with the 6xxx series cards, when the ATi Radeon X800XT and then the X850XT cards were ‘winners’ in comparison with the Nvidia 6800 Ultra, but all the other cards in the series lagged behind their Nvidia counterparts. The Nvidia 6800GT and 6600GT were the choices and recommendations of preference for people who could afford to pay realistic marketplace prices for a display card for that particular generation of technology.
Nvidia has now had its current generation performance cards, the 7800GT and 7800GTX available for long enough to see prices ‘settle’. ATi seems to have come rather late with its new offerings, and definitely won’t be able to reap the benefits of the ‘honeymoon’ introductory period where prices are relatively high. If their new card prices don’t quickly drop to match the street prices for the 7800GT and 7800GTX then sales will certainly suffer. And the performance of the mid-price and low end X1600 and X1300 cards are explanation enough why Nvidia hasn’t even bothered to replace their previous generation low end and mid price cards yet.
The performance
The testing done at Anandtech is representative enough of the wealth of similar material emerging at present, so let’s summarise their findings:
X1300 Pro
Comparable price to 6600GT but much lower performance.
X1600XT
Comparable in price to 6800GT, but performs at a level only a bit better than the 6600GT.
X1800XL
Doesn’t quite match the performance of the 7800GT
X1800XT
Matches the performance of the 7800GTX and pulls ahead for high settings of screen resolution and antialiasing.
(Both those last two cards are higher priced than their Nvidia counterparts of course.
Add to that the fact that people who have been waiting will not be seeing AGP versions of the X18xx cards. Only the X16xx and X13xx cards will be made available in AGP format, so there’s no sales boost for ATi there! Those reviewers and commentors looking for an ‘edge’ to praise ATi about seem to be promoting the idea that the new ATi cards ‘overclock’ better than Nvidia’s offerings, but I’m quite skeptical about such claims. I’d rather see the performance out of the box than in some supposed overclocking activity, and I’m skeptical that the review sample cards are necessarily indicative of what the product will be like in retail release. I’ve seen far too many write-ups of hardware which are supposed to be ‘great’ overclockers, only to later see that many, many people buying them don’t achieve the results espoused. It stands to reason that the samples sent out for review are going to be hand picked.
Crossfire, the SLI ‘killer’
SLI is a ‘dud’ we heard the ATi legions crow. It’s restricted to identical cards, it doesn’t work with all game titles, and Crossfire is going to ‘kill it’.
Then we found that Crossfire was delayed, Crossfire was going to require a special ‘master’ card to be used. The new R520 cards were still going to need that special ‘master’ card, Crossfire was formally ‘launched’ only a couple of days prior to the release of the X1xxx cards, upsetting lots of people who’ve been waiting patiently with X8xx cards……..
Then we started to hear that some ‘launch partners’ hadn’t even seen any silicon from ATi yet, despite the Crossfire ‘launch’! We also now hear that Nvidia have overcome the need for identical cards with their upcoming 81.84 device drivers, and anyone who cares to investigate the supposed ‘restrictions’ of SLI can soon find that only a registry tweak and a bit of trial and error is needed to add older game titles to the SLI configuration profiles for the Nvidia drivers. (Not to mention the fact that dual-card performance isn’t even needed for those older titles.)
It appears to this pundit that ATi is still a long, long way from being a realistic ‘competitor’ in the dual-card stakes!
So does ATi look ‘down for the count’?
With expectations not met on two fronts at the forefront of high performance 3D technology ot’d be easy to assume that ATi looks ‘down for the count’, and they’ve taken a dousing at the hands of reviewers and analysts lately, as mentioned here at the Inquirer. The high end of the 3D display ballpark doesn’t really provide the bulk of sales though. The entry level and mid price cards provide that, and we’ve seen that ATi is still not really competitive there. Doesn’t look good, does it?
But within the past couple of weeks ATi has ‘quietly’ made a move which cements its position as a major player in the graphics stakes, to a much greater extent than a couple of good performing high end display cards ever could have. Integrated graphics are seldom discussed when the ‘graphics wars’ becomes the topic of conversation, but it’s in this ‘lowly’ field that ATi have made its best move yet. Quite simply they’ve readied their Vista-ready Xpress 200 integrated chipset well in advance of Nvidia’s competitor (GeForce 6150?) and are producing chipsets at a rapid rate. Intel recently announced it was dropping out of the low-end chipset market, and with the release of Windows Vista looming closer the Intel 915 chipsets are simply not suitable. ATi’s timing might not have been very good with its performance products, but the timing of their readiness with the much more important integrated chipset couldn’t be bettered. There’s a ‘killing’ to be made with Intel pulling out of the competition, and ATi is right there ready to claim the kill.