Sapphire Ultimate X1600 Pro and X1600 XT

Selecting the right video card when you're on a budget can be difficult. The major deciding factor for many gamers out there is price. As mouthwatering as it is to think about getting a top-notch SLI or CrossFire setup, it's a luxury that most simply cannot afford. Fear not though, as both Nvidia and ATI have some quality entry-level and mid-range graphics cards in their respective line-ups. Today we have two such cards with us, Sapphire's Ultimate X1600 Pro and X1600 XT. Aimed towards consumers looking for a silent video card at a budget price, Sapphire's Ultimate X1600s will appeal to those looking to build up an HTPC or a PC for casual gaming.

Both cards are based on ATI's RV530 GPU. The X1600 Pro and X1600 XT have 12 parallel pixel pipelines, 5 vertex shaders, 4 texture units, and 4 render backends (ROPs). Both cards also support DirectX 9.0c, OpenGL 2.0, are able to render cutting edge features such as HDR lighting with AA, and they are both CrossFire ready. The only real differences between the Pro and XT are clock speeds. 

The ATI Radeon X1600 GPU Features & Specifications

Features - ATI Radeon X1600 . 157 million transistors on 90nm fabrication process . Twelve pixel shader processors . Five vertex shader processors . 128-bit 4-channel DDR/DDR2/GDDR3/GDDR4 memory interface . Native PCI Express x16 bus interface . Dynamic Voltage Control Ring Bus Memory Controller . 256-bit internal ring bus for memory reads . Programmable intelligent arbitration logic . Fully associative texture, color, and Z/stencil cache designs . Hierarchical Z-buffer with Early Z test . Lossless Z Compression (up to 48:1) . Fast Z-Buffer Clear . Z/stencil cache optimized for real-time shadow rendering Ultra-Threaded Shader Engine . Support for Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 programmable vertex and pixel shaders in hardware . Full speed 128-bit floating point processing for all shader operations . Dedicated branch execution units for high performance dynamic branching and flow control . Dedicated texture address units for improved efficiency . 3Dc+ texture compression _o High quality 4:1 compression for normal maps and two-channel data formats _o High quality 2:1 compression for luminance maps and single-channel data formats . Multiple Render Target (MRT) support . Render to vertex buffer support . Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL 2.0 Advanced Image Quality Features . 64-bit floating point HDR rendering supported throughout the pipeline _o Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing . 32-bit integer HDR (10:10:10:2) format supported throughout the pipeline _o Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing . 2x/4x/6x Anti-Aliasing modes _o Multi-sample algorithm with gamma correction, programmable sparse sample patterns, and centroid sampling _o New Adaptive Anti-Aliasing feature with Performance and Quality modes _o Temporal Anti-Aliasing mode _o Lossless Color Compression (up to 6:1) at all resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions . 2x/4x/8x/16x Anisotropic Filtering modes _o Up to 128-tap texture filtering _o Adaptive algorithm with Performance and Quality options . High resolution texture support (up to 4k x 4k)

Avivo Video and Display Engine . High performance programmable video processor _o Accelerated MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264 decoding (including DVD/HD-DVD/Blu-ray playback), encoding & transcoding _o DXVA support _o De-blocking and noise reduction filtering _o Motion compensation, IDCT, DCT and color space conversion _o Vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing _o 3:2 pulldown (frame rate conversion) . Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time . HDR tone mapping acceleration _o Maps any input format to 10 bit per channel output . Flexible display support _o Dual integrated dual-link DVI transmitters _o DVI 1.0 / HDMI compliant and HDCP ready _o Dual integrated 10 bit per channel 400 MHz DACs _o 16 bit per channel floating point HDR and 10 bit per channel DVI output _o Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion (10 bits per color) _o Complete, independent color controls and video overlays for each display _o High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all outputs _o Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays _o XilleonTM TV encoder for high quality analog output _o YPrPb component output for direct drive of HDTV displays _o Spatial/temporal dithering enables 10-bit color quality on 8-bit and 6-bit displays _o Fast, glitch-free mode switching _o VGA mode support on all outputs . Compatible with ATI TV/Video encoder products, including Theater 550 High Performance Memory Controller . Fully associative texture, color, and Z/stencil cache designs . Hierarchical Z-buffer with Early Z test . Lossless Z Compression (up to 48:1) . Fast Z-Buffer Clear . Z/stencil cache optimized for real-time shadow rendering