ATI Radeon 9800 XT Review - PAGE 1

Introduction

Late in the holiday season, the jolly man from Fedex filled our stockings not with coal but with packing foam, today's equivalent of coal. As we were about to lay it into him (and permanently cement ourselves on the other fat man's naughty list) we noticed that the package had something else, a blistering 9800 XT courtesy of ATI. As shown in non-scientific studies from major non-accredited universities, Christmas shopping at the last minute makes you more of a man. We figure the same principle applies to reviews that come out late in the holiday season.

Since the release of the 9700 Pro, ATI has executed perfectly at every step in both the mid and high range segments. The 9700 Pro was succeeded by the 9800 Pro during the spring and come fall, we have the 9800 XT. The mid range segment has been filled by the 9500 Pro, 9600 Pro and the 9600 XT which we have recently reviewed here. Drivers on the ATI side have been improving steadily and although they still have their share of issues, ATI's driver development team has made huge strides with the improvement of the Catalyst series of drivers. Although recent parts such as the 5950 and 5900 have been solid cards, Nvidia has largely been kept at bay as they are playing the role of the underdog, a position they have not been in since the early 3dfx days. The performance of the 5950 and the 5900 have been good in most cases, but they have faltered in Pixel Shader 2 performance which has raised some eyebrows as the next generation of games that come out will be relying on these features more.

The 9800 XT is the fall/winter refresh for the R3xx core and is an improvement over the 9800 Pro released earlier this year, the clock rate was bumped up slightly; the core goes from 380 mhz to 412 mhz while the memory is now at 730 instead of 680 on the Pro. The XT also comes with 256 MB of memory over the 128 found on the regular 9800 Pro. There are no new major architectural changes on the 9800 XT, just some minor improvements and tweaking. The VPU is still being built on a .15 micron core unlike the 9600 series which debuted at .13. ATI's RV400 series, their next high-end part, is rumored to be built on the .13. ATI's strategy seems to revolve around testing out next-generation processes with their mainstream parts before moving the high-end down to it. This strategy has worked well for them as the R3xx series did not run into the manufacturing debacle that Nvidia experienced while trying to release the NV30.

Now that the obligatory history lesson is done, we take a look at the subject at hand, ATI's 9800 XT.

He's a badass. He needs to leer less and scowl more