ATI RADEON X850 Preview - PAGE 1

Introduction

It just seems like yesterday that ATI's RADEON X800 XT PE was splashed across the numerous front pages of the hardware community. The sharp chill outside, the dreary mess of puddles and forlorn looking trees is a reminder that it is not May anymore - winter is nigh upon us. A quick look at the calendar shows that it has been actually about six months since the release of ATI's R420 architecture that marked their entry into this year's high end performance video card sweepstakes. While there has been talk in the hardware community about the lengthening of product cycles beyond the traditional six month product cycle, ATI seems to be having none of that and today they are introducing not one but five addition cards based on the X800 series anchored by their new flagship card, the X850 XT Platinum Edition.

Ruby is back for some more action in Dangerous Curves. Grab the MPEG here courtesy of ATI.

The Specifications

As we mentioned, the high end will now be filled by the X850 XT Platinum Edition and it will be joined by the X850 XT, X850 Pro, X800 XL, and a regular X800.

The X800 XT and X800 PRO are not quite done yet - all of the newly announced cards are to be PCIe-only so the X800 Pro will still be servicing the AGP segment. ATI was non-committal about the timeline of AGP parts and pressing upon the issue, we were told of a possible January announcement date. ATI did not comment whether the AGP parts would be respun silicon parts or if they have developed a bridge chip like NVIDIA's HSI bridge so there are still some questions up in the air.

The X850XT and X850 XT PE will be available in a Dual DVI + ViVo configuration or a VGA+DVI+TVo configuration. The X850Pro will be VGA+DVI+ViVo only.

The X800 is a very interesting part - it is a 128MB solution much like the X700 XT but for 50$ more there are an additional 4 pipelines and the 256-bit memory bandwidth. The X700 XT-256MB cards that several manufacturers are putting out may be a bit of a hard sell in comparison. The reason that the price of the X800 can be kept so low is that it uses regular DDR instead of the more expensive GDDR3. Another part that will be a hit is the X800 XL - a 16 pipe part that is only $350. It should be faster than the X800Pro and for 50$ less. This part should give the extremely popular 6800GT a good run for its money.

The X850 XT PE improves upon the X800 XT PE very slightly - roughly a 4% increase in speed and a 5% increase in memory clock. We should note that ATI decided to throttle the core clockrate of the X700 XT slightly as the limiter is the memory clockrate and with the X850 XT PE, it is the memory clock that increases more by a relative amount.