Thanks sadatkarim for this news. ATI Technologies faced strong competition when NVIDIA Corporation unveiled its GeForce 6800 GT graphics chip earlier this year, but the Markham, Ontario-based graphics company reportedly preps a counter-attack with a new product based on the RADEON X800 XT micro-architecture.
A report over China-based web-site GZeasy.com claims that the new graphics chip from ATI will be called RADEON X800 GT and will be a down-clocked RADEON X800 XT graphics processor with 16 rendering pipelines. The so-called RADEON X800 GT visual processing unit will function at 425MHz and will carry 256MB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 900MHz onboard. Initially the new RADEON X800 product will be offered for systems with AGP 8x port.
Some sources close to ATI expressed doubts that ATI would launch a part with “GT” brand-name.
Earlier ATI offered only two graphics options for the high-end market: ATI RADEON X800 PRO and ATI RADEON X800 XT with 12 and 16 pixel pipelines respectively. While the high-end RADEON X800 XT delivers performance in-line with competing GeForce 6800 Ultra, the RADEON X800 PRO was not as fast as the rivaling GeForce 6800 GT in quite some cases. To oppose NVIDIA’s “GT” part ATI might add a new SKU into its plans.
News source: X-Bit Labs
A report over China-based web-site GZeasy.com claims that the new graphics chip from ATI will be called RADEON X800 GT and will be a down-clocked RADEON X800 XT graphics processor with 16 rendering pipelines. The so-called RADEON X800 GT visual processing unit will function at 425MHz and will carry 256MB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 900MHz onboard. Initially the new RADEON X800 product will be offered for systems with AGP 8x port.
Some sources close to ATI expressed doubts that ATI would launch a part with “GT” brand-name.
Earlier ATI offered only two graphics options for the high-end market: ATI RADEON X800 PRO and ATI RADEON X800 XT with 12 and 16 pixel pipelines respectively. While the high-end RADEON X800 XT delivers performance in-line with competing GeForce 6800 Ultra, the RADEON X800 PRO was not as fast as the rivaling GeForce 6800 GT in quite some cases. To oppose NVIDIA’s “GT” part ATI might add a new SKU into its plans.
News source: X-Bit Labs
Updates
According to the article at MSNBC, the new iPod will also contain the following features:
Personally, I am hoping that some of these new features will be made available to existing users through firmware updates. I guess we will just have wait and see...
when will these be in full supply?
christmas
o wait after doom 3 and hl2
...too late
WHERe?!
if your going to do more doom 3 then 6800 is what you want
if your going to do more hl2 then keep your x800
In Doom 3, the 6800 is the clear winner. However there has been no reasonable comparison done with HL2 yet.
Besides, HL2 is quickly becoming the next Daikatana.
It is amusing that the 6800GT outperforms the X800Pro, AND is cheaper. I currently have all ATi cards, but nVidia looks to have a winner this time round.
Still, competition is great.
Oh and SM3 is a gimmick, practically useless. Support for dynamic branching is the only half useful feature and even then that only typically improves performance by an insignificant amount. FYI, HL2 does not support SM3.
It offers over 15fps in some benchmarks for the new FarCry patch (where there is lighting involved), and they only have a basic implementation of it. That's HARDLY useless, and we haven't even seen a decent implementation of it yet.
"Considering" - What does that matter at all? The end performance is what matters, not what is on paper... it could be 128 pipeline, but if it wasn't faster it wouldn't matter.
I'm no nVidia fanboy; I just want the faster card. The 9800Pro I got was great for that, better than anything nVidia could manage for the price, so I was happy. Now the 6800GT is faster than the X800Pro, so I'll go with nVidia.
Well, over here they are about the same price wise, it depends on where you buy them. I've seen both go as low as $300 USD.
Believe me, I know what SM3 is capable of. It's only benefits are dynamic branching and higher instruction limits of which the former only provides a 2-5 fps increases in most cases and the latter is quite useless as by the time games come out that use large instruction shaders the card will be out of date and will run those games slow at any rate. Yes, sometimes there are bigger increases depending on the game, but for the most it's minimal. As for "basic" implementation, no...it's not. Crytek spent a good five months at least creating the patch. Nvidia wanted them to get the most performance possible out of using SM3, what you see is what you get. SM3 is more beneficial to developers because it makes things easier to code, it does not benefit the end consumer in any way other then what I already mentioned. FYI, Crytek did screw around with the lighting code in the new patch, so not all of the performance improvments you see are because of SM3 alone.
I think my point is quite relevent. By your logic an X800 XT with 24 pipelines would be fair game against the 6800 Ultra in it's current form. Sorry, but it's not.
Fair enough, I'm willing to admit the 6800 GT is indeed slightly faster. However, there are other considerations I take into factor, such as the fact that the X800 Pro does run cooler and draw less power as well as use a smaller pcb (all of which would be the better solution for shuttles for example). If you don't mind any of those then by all means get a GT.
Last edited by 21154 on 20 Jul 2004 - 03:11
Sorry, I'm not trying to be arguementative, but I don't understand that point. I was saying that the important thing is the overall speed and performance - if a 12 pipeline card outperformed a 326 million pipeline card, the pipelines surely wouldn't matter would they?
I know, but to many/most people those things are unimportant... but you don't need to just defend those points - I know that the X800XTPE outperforms the 6800UE in most benchmarks. It's not as if ATI has totally failed or anything, just in the mid/upper-range they are not as competitive currently. A new ATI card should liven up the competition; particularly if it is well priced.
No, they wouldn't; however, that is not the case here. The 6800 GT being a 16 pipe card is the primary reason for it being faster then the 12 pipe X800 Pro. And thus why it does matter.
Oh yeah... because programmers *never* use for() loops and If statements
And where did you get the idea that the x800 uses less power and runs cooler? That's contrary to what I've seen.
The 6800 GT is available at my local CompUSA (where I bought it, in fact). The x800 Pro is still not available anywhere nearby. And the only online retailers that claim to have it, have it priced well above the MSRP.
I think ATI's biggest problem with the x800 cards has bee supply issues and their "paper launch."
But given the horrendous experience I had with my last ATI card (9700 Pro), *I* didn't even consider their card in the first place.
If Doom 3 is your priority, you definitely should have picked up an Nvidia card.
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