ATI Radeon X1900 XTX And CrossFire: R580 Is Here

HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM: We used two different test systems for this article.  We tested our NVIDIA based cards on an Asus A8N32-SLI, nForce 4 SLIX16 chipset based motherboard, but tested the ATI based cards on an ECS KA1 MVP Radeon Xpress 200 motherboard.  Both systems were powered by an AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 processor and 1GB of low-latency Corsair XMS RAM. The first thing we did when configuring these systems was enter each BIOS and loaded the "High Performance Defaults."  The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows XP Professional with SP2 was installed. When the installation was complete, we installed the chipset drivers, installed all of the other necessary drivers for the rest of our components, and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating and System Restore were also disabled, the hard drive was defragmented, and a 768MB permanent page file was created on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance," installed all of the benchmarking software, and ran the tests.

The HotHardware Test System AMD Athlon 64 FX Powered

Performance Comparisons with ShaderMark v2.1 (Build 1.30a) Details:http://www.shadermark.de

Shadermark v2.1

For most of our recent video card-related articles, we've stuck to using games, or benchmarks based on actual game engines, to gauge overall performance. One problem with using this approach exclusively is that some advanced 3D features may not be fully tested, because the game engines currently in use tend not to use the absolute latest features available within cutting-edge graphics hardware. In an effort to reveal raw shader performance, which is nearly impossible to do using only the games on the market today, we've incorporated ToMMTi-System's ShaderMark v2.1 into our benchmarking suite for this article. ShaderMark is a Direct 9.0 pixel shader benchmark that exclusively uses code written in Microsoft's High Level Shading Language (HLSL) to produce its imagery.

ShaderMark Test Conducted @ 1600x1200x85Hz

If you look back at our Radeon X1K family launch article, you'll see that the GeForce 7800 GTX skunked the Radeon X1800 XT in all but six of ShaderMark's performance tests. This time around though, we used the much higher clocked 512MB GeForce 7800 GTX and pitted it up against the new Radeon X1900 XTX.  As you can see, the X1900's 48-pixel shader processors propel's ATI's latest well ahead of NVIDIA's best in all but three tests. Something interesting to note is that in the Dual-Layer tests with Flow Control, ATI actually loses one test by about 17% and wins the other by only 3%, even though ATI has been touting the Radeon X1K's family's ability to handle dynamic flow control as one of the GPU's strong suits.