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The RV420 Architecture

PowerColor's X700 line up along with ATI's and the rest of the industry's is based upon the RV420 architecture, a derivative of the R420 architecture that is the backbone of the X800 Pro and the X800 XT. As far as features go, the X700 is feature complete compared to the X800s; this means Shader Model 2.0b and 3Dc support are present on the X700 Pro, something that is not true with the X600. The differences come in the number of pixel pipelines and the memory controller; the X800 has either 12 or 16 pipes and a 256-bit memory interface while the X700 has 8 pipes and a 128-bit interface. This is the same approach taken with the 6600GT except for one thing - ATI has kept all 6 Vertex engines intact on the X700 series while NVIDIA has dropped theirs from 6 to 3 on their midrange cards. This should theoretically give ATI advantages in pushing geometrically intensive games or with slower processors.

For a more detailed look at the X700 family, we encourage readers to take a look at our X700 Launch as well as our X800 Launch Coverage where we explore some more technical details of ATI's R4xx series including 3Dc and Shader Model 2.0b.

Test Setup

Pentium 4 3.0 Ghz (LGA-775)
Soltek SL-915GPro-FGR (Intel 915G)
1024MB OCZ PC3200
Western Digital WD1200 IDE HD
ATI X600 Reference Card
PowerColor X700 Pro
NVIDIA 6600GT Reference Card

ATI has touted the 6 vertex pipelines as one of the advantages it has over the 6600GT's 3 vertex pipelines and how this would benefit the lower end of the processor spectrum some more. We picked this particular benchmark configuration for a couple reasons - the slowest 775 processor I have seen is the 2.8 while the 3.0 is a small step up and seems to be much more popular than the 2.8, gamers who would be buying a $200 video card would probably opt for a P4 over a Celeron. This is still a midrange card so we opted for a 915/DDR solution instead of a 925X/DDR2 solution. For those that are splurging on DDR2, they are probably looking at a card that is a step up. 1024MB of RAM was chosen because 512MB is cutting it a bit close in a few games.

Benchmarks

Half Life 2: Video Stress Test
Aquamark 3
Splinter Cell (tbilisi 1_1_1, 1_1_2)
Halo
X2 Rolling Demo
Call of Duty (brecourt)
Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Academy (rift sanctuary, taspir)
Unreal Tournament 2k4 (dm_metallurgy)
Far Cry (River Level)
DOOM 3
Counter-Strike: Source