ATI X800 XT out for benchmarking.

[Imperil]

and.. OUCH!

They did ok with current games. They kept up with the 6800 in a lot of games although in some it fell back. Also nVidia had a huge Z-buffer bug in their drivers when they rushed the released, with it fixed there was a big jump in framerate in some games.


So if the Radeon can keep up why did I say ouch?

Here's a quote from Tom's:

"The trouble is, there are also drawbacks to the fact that only little effort had to be put into this design. Technologically, ATi's 3D architecture has fallen behind that of NVIDIA, and it is now the green guys that can claim to have the more innovative chip and can rally support for new features. Although the X800 cards can now process longer and therefore more complex shader programs than the R9800XT, they are still limited to 24-bit floating-point precision and ShaderModel 2.0."

AND

"Nonetheless the R420 only seems to be a temporary solution. Already, the R480 is rearing its head in the roadmaps, and there's a good possibility that ATi may just introduce the R5xx series instead. "


A great effort by ATI getting the clocks up, but there is NOTHING new in these cards. Remeber the nVidia cards have all the new video features rivaling the All-In-Wonder series.

BUT

The biggest difference is in ATI's hack job to get a fast card out. A 24-bit pipeline and only shader model 2.0 without displacement mapping. Now this may not mean much to people right this second, but it will in 6-12 months.

The majority of developers are coding with PS3.0 and 32-bit shaders (which nVidia used because it is currently part of the DX9C spec), and when run on this new ATI card will slow down heavily (aka what happened to some FX cards this year).

Nice fast card for todays games and a good hit back at nVidia.. just too bad they are using 3 year old technology with nothing new to do it


Also keep in mind that ATI boosted the clock freq's on their cards right before the release. nVidia has already stated that the reference board was not clock to stock speed and will be faster, and that they didn't even debut the fastest version of the 6800, the Extreme.

[Archangelus]

Yep, this is just an attempt to hurry-up and stem the tide from Nvidia's new tech until ATI can bring their new designs up. 3dfx did that once. For those of you who are unfamiliar or have forgotten, 3dfx doesn't exist anymore......

-Arch

[Imperil]

This actually hurts the near future of 3D graphics. Since ATI is no longer pushing along with nVidia with features and performance, nVidia doesn't really have to try.

The 6800U is the #2 card on the product line for nVidia which is beating the #1 overclocked card from ATI. The nVidia card is "this years" meaning 32-bit and shader model 3.0 active, not ATI's 24-bit and shader model 2.0 that they've been using for what.. 3 years now?

So now nVidia is no longer pushed, we will probably see a slower next release in 6 months than usual while ATI plays catch up in features.