Home ATI’s Radeon X850 XT graphics cards
Reviews

ATI’s Radeon X850 XT graphics cards

Scott Wasson
Disclosure
Disclosure
In our content, we occasionally include affiliate links. Should you click on these links, we may earn a commission, though this incurs no additional cost to you. Your use of this website signifies your acceptance of our terms and conditions as well as our privacy policy.

ATI’S HIGH-END RADEON X800 CARDS have been reasonably successful by most measures. The technology is solid and, although a little older, more or less on par with NVIDIA’s GeForce 6 series GPUs. They seem to be selling well, with big PC makers like Dell sucking up nearly all the cards ATI can supply. The cards’ performance is decent, and ATI’s market share numbers are up.

However, not all has been roses. NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800 cards have been fierce competition, with the 16-pipe GeForce 6800 GT arguably offering a better value at $399 than the Radeon X800 Pro. Also, ATI’s top-end product, the Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition, has been exceptionally rare. Oh, sure, the streets aren’t exactly awash in GeForce 6800 Ultras, but the Platinum Edition has been brutally scarce.

ATI is aiming to correct these availability problems and bring a little more performance to the X800 series with a pair of new graphics chips, code-named R430 and R480. The first products based on these chips will be the Radeon X850 XT and X850 XT Platinum Edition, and we’ve had our grubby little hands on one of these cards long enough to benchmark it. In fact, we’ve benchmarked it against nearly every card we could find. Read on for a look at how ATI is remodeling the high end of its product line, and for a performance comparison of all of the latest the graphics cards from $199 and up—including dual GeForce 6800 Ultras in SLI.

ATI’s new arsenal
Both of ATI’s new graphics chips, the R430 and R480, are derived from the R420 graphics processor found on prior Radeon X800 cards. The R420, in turn, traces its roots to the R300 design used on the original Radeon 9700. The R430 and R480 aren’t revolutionary by any means, but ATI has brought some notable changes to each of them.

The R480 will be aimed at the very top of the performance ranks. Like the R420, the R480 is manufactured by TSMC on its low-k 130nm fab process, but the R480 and its supporting cast have been tweaked and tuned to reach higher clock speeds more easily and reliably. For the R480 chip itself, the big change is in power management. ATI has endowed the R480 with a dynamic clock gating capability, a la the Pentium M, that allows the chip to deactivate parts of itself when they’re not being used. ATI says the R480 should use as little as half the power and produce half the heat of the R420 in “2D” desktop use.

The R480’s supporting cast gets similar tweaks. ATI has chosen a different chip substrate component in order to ease the quest for higher memory clock speeds. The board design has been changed to improve power delivery to the graphics chip. And, most prominently, cards based on the R480 will have a Dustbuster-esque, dual-slot cooler strapped to the side, much like NVIDIA’s top-end cards. Check it out:


The Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition

Before you snort your coffee through your nose, rest assured that the Radeon X850 XT does not sound like a Dustbuster—or a GeForce 5800 Ultra, for that matter—in normal use. I have to admit, I was part bemused and part terrified when I first fired up a system with a Radeon X850 XT PE card in it. At boot time, that blower cranked up briefly to full speed, aurally evoking an Oreck XL. Once those few seconds passed, though, the blower never did get back up to that speed again, no matter what I did with the card. In intense 3D gaming and benchmarking sessions, even with relatively warm ambient temperatures, the X850 XT PE was generally quieter than a GeForce 6800 Ultra, which isn’t bad company to keep.

Still, the other shoe has dropped. ATI has gone to a dual-slot cooler in order to keep pace with NVIDIA’s uber-high-end cards. This change, like all the others to the R480, is intended to bring higher clock speeds with less fuss, so that supply of R480-based cards might actually be able to keep up with demand.

The second prong of ATI’s new high-end assault is the R430. Like the R420 and R480, the R430 has 16 pixel pipelines and six vertex shader engines. Instead of dynamic clock gating and a big-ass fan, though, the R430 gets a bit of a die shrink courtesy of TSMC’s 110nm fab process. This process, combined with lower clock speeds, should allow R430-based cards to thrive with a relatively minimalist single-slot cooler.


R430-based Radeon X800 cards will get a much smaller cooler

As you might have guessed, the R430’s mission in life will be a little more modest, performance-wise, than the R480’s. Here’s a brief overview of how ATI will be using these new chips in actual products.

  Chip Core clock (MHz) Pixel pipelines Memory clock (MHz) Memory onboard Display outputs MSRP
Radeon X800 R430 400 12 700 128MB VGA+DVI+TVo $249
Radeon X800 XL R430 400 16 1000 256MB VGA+DVI+TVo $349
Radeon X850 Pro R480 520 12 1120 256MB VGA+DVI+TVo $399
Radeon X850 XT R480 520 16 1120 256MB DVI+DVI+ViVo $499
Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition R480 540 16 1180 256MB DVI+DVI+ViVo $549
  • The Radeon X800 is based on the R430 chip, but it will only have 12 pipelines enabled. ATI had once planned to sell a version of the Radeon X700 XT with 256MB of memory onboard for $249, but they now say that won’t happen. Instead, we’ll get a higher-performance chip and less memory at the $249 price point, just below the current pricing of the GeForce 6800 128MB cards.
  • Also based on the R430, the Radeon X800 XL could be a heckuva value for the money when it arrives, but I don’t think ATI will make the Christmas shopping season with R430-derived products. If they do, it’ll be very close. They’re telling us that we should get press samples in about two weeks. If the cards start shipping in volume by then, it just might be possible to pick one up at an online reseller in time for Christmas. Maybe. But I really doubt it.

    Both of the Radeon X800 cards will use a single-slot cooler and require no external power plug (at least on PCI Express versions).

  • The Radeon X850 Pro is a single-slot card with 12 pipelines. This one is apparently a place for ATI to direct its not-quite-right R480 chips with one of the pipeline “quads” disabled. The clock speeds on this chip are still tentative, and ATI says it won’t arrive until late December at the earliest, or possibly in 2005. This card won’t likely be a popular choice, because it has a higher list price than the Radeon X800 XL but should perform about the same.
  • The R480-based Radeon X850 XT is slated for arrival in mid-December. X850 XT boards will not be produced by ATI, only by its board manufacturing partners. This product essentially replicates the specs and performance of the ever-so-scarce Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition, with a few exceptions. Yes, it carries with it a dual-slot cooler, but it comes with dual DVI outputs for driving a pair of LCD monitors without the analog conversions muddling things up. (Not all X850 XT cards will necessarily have dual DVI ports, but at least some should.) We’ve hassled ATI in the past about the lack of a second DVI output on a $500 graphics card, and we’re pleased to see that they’ve responded.
  • ATI’s new king-of-the-hill product is the Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition. The ATI-branded version of this puppy is supposed to be available at online resellers today, right as the product launches. Retail availability of the X850 XT PE will lag behind “e-tail,” as it likely will for all of these products. For $50 more than the X850 XT, the Platinum Edition offers a teeny bit more performance and a little bit of prestige.
  • Ye olde Radeon X800 Pro will persist as an R420-based product at $299, mostly for PC makers who have qualified the product and don’t want to change horses in mid-stream. The Radeon X800 XT and X800 XT Platinum Edition will be put out to pasture. ATI says the Radeon X700 series will continue to move down in price over time.

All of the cards being announced today are PCI Express models. The word is that AGP equivalents are coming shortly, but ATI hasn’t announced anything yet and hasn’t given a firm timetable for their release. We asked about whether the new AGP cards will use a PCI Express-to-AGP bridge chip, like NVIDIA’s GeForce 6600 GT AGP, but ATI wouldn’t confirm that.

 

Our testing methods
As ever, we did our best to deliver clean benchmark numbers. Tests were run at least twice, and the results were averaged. All graphics driver image quality settings were left at their defaults, with the exception that vertical refresh sync (vsync) was always disabled and geometry instancing was enabled on ATI cards.

Note that some of our graphics cards are fakes. Specifically, the Radeon X850 XT is actually a Radeon X850 XT PE card that’s been underclocked, and the pair of GeForce 6800 GT cards in SLI is actually an underclocked pair of 6800 Ultras.

Our test systems were configured like so:

Processor Athlon 64 4000+ 2.4GHz Athlon 64 4000+ 2.4GHz Athlon 64 4000+ 2.4GHz
System bus 1GHz HyperTransport 1GHz HyperTransport 1GHz HyperTransport
Motherboard Asus A8V Deluxe Asus A8N-SLI NVIDIA reference
BIOS revision 1008 beta 1 ? 4.70
North bridge K8T800 Pro nForce4 Ultra nForce4 Ultra
South bridge VT8237
Chipset drivers Hyperion 4.55 ForceWare 6.31 beta ForceWare 6.31 beta
Memory size 1GB (2 DIMMs) 1GB (2 DIMMs) 1GB (2 DIMMs)
Memory type OCZ PC3200 EL DDR SDRAM at 400MHz OCZ PC3200 EL DDR SDRAM at 400MHz OCZ PC3200 EL DDR SDRAM at 400MHz
CAS latency (CL) 2 2 2
RAS to CAS delay (tRCD) 2 2 2
RAS precharge (tRP) 2 2 2
Cycle time (tRAS) 5 5 5
Hard drive Maxtor MaXLine III 250GB SATA 150
Audio Integrated VT8237/ALC850 with 3.66 drivers Integrated Integrated
Graphics 1 GeForce 6800 128MB AGP 
with ForceWare 66.93 drivers
GeForce 6800 GT 256MB PCI-E
with ForceWare 66.93 drivers
GeForce 6600 GT 128MB PCI-E
with ForceWare 66.93 drivers
Graphics 2 Radeon X800 Pro 256MB AGP
with 8-08-rc2-019256e drivers
Dual GeForce 6800 GT 256MB PCI-E
with ForceWare 66.93 drivers
Radeon X700 XT 128MB PCI-E
with 8-08-rc2-019256e drivers
Graphics 3 Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition 256MB AGP
with 8-08-rc2-019256e drivers
GeForce 6800 Ultra 256MB PCI-E
with ForceWare 66.93 drivers
 Radeon X800 XT 256MB PCI-E
with 8-08-rc2-019256e drivers
Graphics 4   Dual GeForce 6800 Ultra 256MB PCI-E
with ForceWare 66.93 drivers
 
Graphics 5   Radeon X850 XT 256MB PCI-E
with 8-08-rc2-019256e drivers
 
Graphics 6   Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition 256MB PCI-E
with 8-08-rc2-019256e drivers
 
OS Microsoft Windows XP Professional
OS updates Service Pack 2, DirectX 9.0c

Thanks to OCZ for providing us with memory for our testing. If you’re looking to tweak out your system to the max and maybe overclock it a little, OCZ’s RAM is definitely worth considering.

Also, all of our test systems were powered by OCZ PowerStream power supply units. The PowerStream was one of our Editor’s Choice winners in our latest PSU round-up.

The test systems’ Windows desktops were set at 1152×864 in 32-bit color at an 85Hz screen refresh rate.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

The tests and methods we employed are generally publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.

 

Pixel filling power
All of the clock speed and pixel pipeline numbers that ATI is juggling to achieve its ideal product mix also determine overall performance. Here’s a look at the highlights of how the new cards compare to the most common competition.

  Core clock (MHz) Pixel pipelines  Peak fill rate (Mpixels/s) Texture units per pixel pipeline Peak fill rate (Mtexels/s) Memory clock (MHz) Memory bus width (bits) Peak memory bandwidth (GB/s)
GeForce 6200 300 4 1200 1 1200 TBD 128 TBD
Radeon X300 325 4 1300 1 1300 400 128 6.4
Radeon X600 Pro 400 4 1600 1 1600 600 128 9.6
GeForce FX 5700 Ultra 475 4 1900 1 1900 900 128 14.4
Radeon 9600 XT 500 4 2000 1 2000 600 128 9.6
Radeon X600 XT 500 4 2000 1 2000 740 128 11.8
GeForce 6600 300 8* 2400 1 2400 TBD 128 TBD
Radeon 9800 Pro 380 8 3040 1 3040 680 256 21.8
Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB 380 8 3040 1 3040 700 256 22.4
GeForce FX 5900 XT 400 4 1600 2 3200 700 256 22.4
Radeon X700 400 8 3200 1 3200 600 128 9.6
Radeon 9800 XT 412 8 3296 1 3296 730 256 23.4
Radeon X700 Pro 420 8 3360 1 3360 864 128 13.8
Radeon X700 XT 475 8 3800 1 3800 1050 128 16.8
GeForce 6800  325 12 3900 1 3900 700 256 22.4
GeForce 6600 GT AGP 500 8* 2000 1 4000 900 128 14.4
GeForce 6600 GT 500 8* 2000 1 4000 1000 128 16.0
Radeon X800 400 12 4800 1 4800 700 256 22.4
GeForce 6800 GT 350 16 5600 1 5600 1000 256 32.0
Radeon X800 Pro 475 12 5700 1 5700 900 256 28.8
Radeon X800 XL 400 16 6400 1 6400 1000 256 32.0
GeForce 6800 Ultra 425 16 6800 1 6800 1100 256 35.2
Radeon X800 XT 500 16 8000 1 8000 1000 256 32.0
Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition 520 16 8320 1 8320 1120 256 35.8
Radeon X850 XT 520 16 8320 1 8320 1120 256 35.8
Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition 540 16 8640 1 8640 1180 256 37.8

ATI maintains its lead in clock speeds and theoretical peak performance over NVIDIA at the very high end, at least in terms of single cards. The X850 XT Platinum Edition gains a little bit of speed over the previous Platinum Edition card, but NVIDIA has also picked up 25MHz on the core speed of its GeForce 6800 Ultra. Not all 6800 Ultra cards run at 425MHz—most run at 400MHz—but Asus and BFG Tech are selling 425MHz cards, and the cards we tested for this review had a 425MHz core clock speed.

Here’s how those theoretical numbers work out in a synthetic fill rate test.

Few of these cards achieve anything like their peak theoretical fill rates when applying only one texture per pixel, but they do much better with multitexturing. Note that the Radeon X850 XT is just a tad slower than the X800 Platinum Edition, despite the fact that they share the same core and memory clock speeds. The R480 chip may be a little bit slower clock for clock, or it may have more relaxed memory timings. Whatever the case, it’s only a minor difference.

 

Doom 3 – Delta Labs
We’ll kick off our gaming benchmarks with Doom 3. Our first Doom 3 test uses a gameplay demo we recorded inside the Delta Labs complex, and it represents the sorts of graphics loads you’ll find in most of the game’s single-player levels. We’ve tested with Doom 3’s High Quality mode, which turns on 8X anisotropic filtering by default.

Doom 3 has not been ATI’s home turf, but the top ATI cards perform reasonably well this time around. The GeForce 6800 Ultra maintains a slight edge overall, and the $399 GeForce 6800 GT shadows the performance of the more expensive X850 cards. Still, the difference in performance between the X850 XT PE and the GeForce 6800 Ultra is only five frames per second at 1600×1200 with 4X antialiasing.

 

Doom 3 – Heat Haze
This next demo was recorded in order to test a specific effect in Doom 3: that cool-looking “heat haze” effect that you see whenever a demon hurls a fireball at you. We figured this effect would be fairly shader intensive, so we wanted to test it separately from the rest of the game.

The shader-driven “heat haze” effect makes the gap even narrower between the X850 XT PE and the 6800 Ultra, to the point where the two perform more or less equivalently with 4X antialiasing.

 

Half-Life 2 – Route Kanal
Our first Half-Life 2 demo is a longish section of the Route Kanal sequence early in the game. It combines a number of effects, including reflective water and the flashlight, with a lot of running around in simple, dark corridors and a few outside areas.

Half-Life 2 doesn’t present any kind of serious performance challenge to the more expensive cards. Any of the cards that cost over $300 can run this demo at over 60 frames per second at 1600×1200 with edge antialiasing and texture filtering cranked up. Still, the X850 cards easily distance themselves from the GeForce 6800 Ultra, and they even manage to give the dual-Ultra SLI rig a run for its money.

 

Half-Life 2 – Airboat Battle
In this demo, Gordon is doing battle with a helicopter while running around in an airboat. There’s lots of water here, plus plenty of pyrotechnics.

Both Radeon X850 cards are rolling here, absolutely schooling the NVIDIA cards, until they hit some kind of a wall at 1600×1200 with 4X antialiasing and 8X aniso filtering. I suspect it’s some kind of a memory management problem in the driver, but that’s just a wild guess.

 

Far Cry – Pier
The Pier level in Far Cry is an outdoor area with dense vegetation, and it makes good use of geometry instancing to populate the jungle with foliage.

All of the ATI cards have the advantage in Far Cry. The X850 cards keep pace with the dual GeForce 6800 GT cards in SLI, and they leave the single 6800 Ultra well behind.

 

Far Cry – Volcano
Like our Doom 3 “heat haze” demo, the Volcano level in Far Cry includes lots of pixel shader warping and shimmering.

Things change in the Volcano demo. The GeForce 6800 Ultra is clearly faster until antialiasing and texture filtering come into play, and then the X850 cards pull even.

 

3DMark05 – Game tests
3DMark05 is intended to show us how a system would handle future games, with more demanding graphics loads than even the latest current games.

ATI’s new cards have a pronounced advantage over the GeForce 6800 Ultra in 3DMark05. Let’s see what its synthetic feature tests can tell us.

 

3DMark05 – Synthetic feature tests

The pixel shader test illustrates for us why the GeForce 6800 Ultra is sometimes able to keep pace with the Radeon X850 XT PE, despite a massive clock speed disparity. The 6800’s pixel shaders manage to perform better, clock for clock, than the R480’s—at least in this test. Both chips’ pixel shader units have a degree of internal parallelism, but NVIDIA’s often appear to do more work per clock than ATI’s.

On the other hand, ATI looks relatively strong in the vertex shader department.

 
Power consumption
With each of the graphics cards installed and running, I used a watt meter to measure the power draw of our test systems. The monitor was plugged into a separate power source. The cards were tested at idle in the Windows desktop and under load while running our Doom 3 “heat haze” demo at 1280×1024 with 4X AA.

Note that our power consumption numbers aren’t entirely comparable from card to card because we’re testing entire systems, and those are based on three different motherboards. Two of those motherboards are nForce4 boards, but the third is an AGP system. Also, notice that I’ve limited our testing to actual products that we have on hand, to the exclusion of underclocked “simulated” cards. Some folks have pointed out that different models of graphics cards may vary with respect to the amount of voltage going to the graphics chip or memory.

One direct comparison you’ll want to make here is between the Radeon X800 XT and the Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition. Although I tested the X800 XT’s performance on a different motherboard, I tested its power consumption on the same board as the X850 XT PE, so those numbers are directly comparable. Of course, the X850 XT PE runs at higher clock speeds and thus consumes relatively more power, but we should still be able to see the benefits of dynamic clock gating on the X850 XT PE.

Even with dynamic clock gating, the Radeon X850 XT PE consumes more power at idle than the Radeon X800 XT. However, considering that it runs at higher clock speeds and operates a more powerful fan, that’s not too bad. The X850 XT PE does consume less power at idle than the GeForce 6800 Ultra, even though it requires more power at full tilt.

Overclocking
I quickly used ATI’s Overdrive utility to determine a supposedly safe overclocked setting for the Radeon X850 XT PE. ATI’s tool settled on core and memory clock speeds of 590MHz and 1282MHz—up from 540MHz and 1180MHz stock. Those clock speeds actually produced some artifacting and, eventually, a lock up, but not before I got a benchmark score out of it:

I haven’t had time to play around and find optimal stable settings yet, but the X850 XT PE actually seems to have a little bit of headroom for overclocking.

 
Conclusions
The Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition’s performance has always been stellar, but the cards have been extremely hard to come by. If these new Radeon X850 cards can solve that problem, more power to them.

As most of you know, I rarely recommend that anyone actually purchase a $549 video card like the Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition, or even a $499 card like the X850 XT. That’s a very high price to pay when there are better values to be had at $399 and below. However, if you want to have the fastest single graphics card available, the Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition is it. The X850 XT PE came out on top in the majority of our tests, and it did especially well when 4X antialiasing and 8X anisotropic filtering were enabled. The most notable exception was Doom 3, where the GeForce 6800 Ultra was faster, but not by all that much. ATI’s decision to use application-specific optimizations in its video drivers, as NVIDIA has done for some time now, has allowed the Radeons to close the gap in Doom 3.

The more interesting developments in the Radeon lineup, for a cheapskate like me, are the lower-priced, R430-based options like the Radeon X800 XL. I’m especially curious to see how that card performs. Also, I have a feeling the green team will be responding with some changes of its own in the not-too-distant future. Maybe they’ll go for broke with a triple-wide cooler? 

Latest News

IPTV
Streaming News & Events

Operator of Illegal IPTV Streams Sentenced to Five Years in Jail

White House Announces New Set of Rules for Federal Agencies Using AI
News

White House Announces New Set of Rules for Federal Agencies Using AI

The US government has announced that federal agencies using AI tools will be required to follow new safeguards by December 1. The announcement comes from the Office of Management and...

4 Canadian School Boards Sue Three Social Media Giants
News

Four Canadian School Boards Have Sued Social Media Giants for Sabotaging Young Minds

Four of the largest school boards in Canada have filed a lawsuit against social media giants for being addictive, disrupting student learning, and harming their mental health. The lawsuit seeks...

Slothana goes parabolic
Crypto News

Traders Transfer $2.2 Million in Solana to Emerging Meme Cryptocurrency Slothana

Reddit Shares Fall 16% In A Day After Promoters Sell
News

Reddit Shares Fall 16% in a Day after Promoters Sell One Million Shares

Gold Miner Nilam Resources Shares Surge 22x Amidst Bitcoin Buying Announcement
Crypto News

Gold Miner Nilam Resources Shares Surge 22x Amidst Bitcoin Buying Announcement

BlackRock CEO Goes Bullish on BTC as Spot Bitcoin ETF Crosses $17 Billion
Crypto News

BlackRock CEO Goes Bullish on BTC as Spot Bitcoin ETF Crosses $17 Billion