MaximumPC 2006 04

reviews TESTED. REVIEWED. VERDICTIZED

 MA XIMUMPC APRIL 2006

A

fter failing to deliver on some mighty

big promises with its R520 architec-

ture (the X1800 series), a humbled

ATI went quietly back to the drawing board.

And this time, it came up with a winner: The

X1900 XTX—powered by the company’s

new R580 GPU—is a beauty and a beast.

In the process, ATI successfully chal-

lenged some of our assumptions about

what makes a powerful videocard. Based

on the spectacular performance of nVidia’s

20-pipe GeForce 7800 GT and 24-pipe

7800 GTX, our eyebrows went up when

we heard that the X1900 XTX would have

only 16 pipes. But ATI proved us wrong. By

pairing those 16 pipes with 48 pixel-shader

units, the company managed to build a

part that’s slightly faster on most bench-

marks than nVidia’s 512MB 7800 GTX.

But we’re less impressed by the X1900

XTX’s speed than we are by its image quali-

ty. ATI had boasted that its Avivo technology

would improve every aspect of the visual

experience, but early drivers failed to expose

its best features. We had all but dismissed

Avivo as market-

ing hype, because

nothing we saw

in ATI’s dog-

and-pony shows

materialized in

the products we

reviewed.

Our opinion

evolved, however,

with the driver

release accom-

panying the All

in Wonder X1800 XL (reviewed February

2006), and it morphed further with the

X1800 XT CrossFire Edition (reviewed

March 2006). The X1900 XTX’s HQV

benchmark score hasn’t changed since

then—although it still spanks nVidia’s

PureVideo decoder scores—but the dif-

ference in color saturation (which the HQV

benchmark doesn’t measure) is absolutely

striking: Avivo is for real. Besides, Avivo

improves the quality of all video, while

PureVideo works with only MPEG-2 videos.

The X1900 XTX is slightly less exciting

when measured in terms of its performance

with games. As you can see from the

benchmark chart, it squeaks past nVidia’s

reference-design 512MB 7800 GTX on

some fronts, but trails it on others. And as

we’ve seen with other X1000-series cards,

a single X1900 XTX paradoxically runs

just a little faster in an nForce4-chipset

environment than it does with ATI’s own

Radeon Xpress 200 chipset (we tested the

card with an Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe moth-

erboard and a Sapphire Technology PC-

A9RD480Adv, respectively). But if you want

to build a CrossFire

system, you’ll have

to buy an ATI chipset.

(We’ve heard reports

that some OEMs are

building CrossFire

systems using nForce4

motherboards, but

these drivers aren’t

available to individuals.)

It’s important to

note, however, that

the areas in which the

X1900 XTX outperforms the 7800 GTX

dovetail with the direction in which game

developers are headed: ATI’s highest-end

card trails nVidia’s in 3DMark03 perfor-

mance by nine percent, but it bests nVid-

ia’s 3DMark05 score by nearly 13 percent.

We’re still evaluating the recently released

3DMark06 for inclusion in our benchmark

suite, but it was enlightening to see that

the X1900 XTX outperformed the 7800

GTX on this test almost entirely due to its

Shader Model 3.0 and high dynamic-range

lighting performance.

When you pit CrossFire against SLI,

however, ATI’s 3DMark05 advantage shrinks

to less than two percent, and it edges

out nVidia’s cards by just three percent at

3DMark06. We’re not big fans of CrossFire’s

external connection cables, either.

So, ATI has bested nVidia for the first

time in a long time: The X1900 XTX is

slightly faster than a 512MB 7800 GTX,

and it’s widely available as we go to press.

As nVidia bends down to pick up the

gauntlet, however, it should be thinking

of more than just horsepower: It needs an

answer to Avivo, as well.

—MICHAEL BROWN

ATI Radeon

X1900 XTX

Graphics goodies from the Great White North, eh?

ATI’s Radeon X1900 XTX might be only slightly faster than nVidia’s

512MB GeForce 7800 GTX, but ATI’s card is leagues ahead of nVid-

ia in terms of image quality.

$650, http://www.ati.com

ATI RADEON X1900 XTX

CINEMASCOPE

Slightly faster than nVidia’s

best, but Avivo is the real

selling point.

KINESCOPE

CrossFire remains a hoopty

dual-card solution that must

be disabled for movies.

9

MA XIMUMPC

KICKASS

GPU ATI X1900 XTX

MEMORY 512MB GDDR3

CORE CLOCK 650MHz

SPEED

MEMORY SPEED CLOCK 775MHz

SPECS

X1900 7800 GTX X1900 XTX TWO 7800

XTX 512MB W/X1900 XT GTX 512MB

CROSSFIRE IN SLI

BENCHMARKS

Best scores are bolded. Doom 3 tested at High Quality, 1600x1200, 4x AA. 3DMark03, 3DMark05, and 3DMark06 tested using default settings.

DOOM 3 (FPS) 71.2 72.0 94.7 99.3

3DMARK03 18,252 19,840 29,326 29,777

3DMARK05 11,073 9,566 12,751 12,521

3DMARK06 4,995 4,660 6,776 6,568

3DMARK06 SM 2.0 2,288 2,168 3,643 3,653

3DMARK06, HDR/SM 3.0 2,541 2,202 4,067 3,642

HQV SCORE 93 56 WNR 56