Sapphire Hybrid Radeon X800 XL

It has been a little over two months since we first got to play with ATI's Radeon X800 XL, and we have now begun to receive retail products based on this eagerly anticipated GPU in the HotHardware labs.  For those unfamiliar with the Radeon X800 XL, it is a .11 micron GPU, with 16 pixel pipelines, 6 hardware vertex shaders and all of the other features found in ATI's X8xx series of products.  We've covered the technology behind the Radeon X800 series of GPUs in detail in this article, and our original X800 XL coverage can be found right here. If you'd like to get more familiar with ATI's current flagship GPU architecture, we suggested reading those two articles; they'll fill you in on all of the pertinent details. For now though, let's get acquainted with the first retail X800 XL to arrive, the Sapphire Hybrid Radeon X800 XL.

This card's specifications mirror those of ATI's reference card, but there are some minor aesthetic differences that we'll cover a bit later.  Sapphire also bundles their cards with a different assortment of software titles and accessories than ATI's own cards.  Check it out...

      
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Sapphire Hybrid Radeon X800 XL (PCI Express) Features & Specifications

ATi Radeon X800 XL •_400MHz engine •_.11 micron •_1.0GHz memory data rate •_256-bit memory interface •_256MB GDDR3 memory •_16 pixel pipes •_6 vertex pipes •_6.4 Gigapixel/second fill rate •_32GB/s Peak Memory Bandwidth •_HYPER Z support for HD resolutions including Hierarchical Z, color and Z compression •_Hierarchical Z and Early Z •_Z Compression •_Fast Z Clear •_Z/Stencil Cache Six Vertex Engines •_Workstation class vertex processing power •_600 million polygon transforms per second •_5.7 billion vertex shader operations per second •_Workstation-class performance High-detail Geometry •_Designed for next-gen games with massive polygon counts •_Allows huge numbers of characters on screen at once •_High definition foliage and particle effects 3Dc Compression Technology •_Lossless Normal Map Compression •_4:1 Normal Map Compression technology

Smart Shader HD •_Long pixel shaders •_1536 instructions per pass •_High-detail geometry shaders •_Infinite length shaders (multipass via F-buffer) •_Single pass trig functions (Sine & Cosine) SmoothVision HD •_Sparse sample pattern AA with gamma correction •_Temporal AA (up to 12X effective) •_Centroid AA •_16X Anisotropic filtering with adaptive heuristics HyperZ HD •_Optimized for performance at high display resolutions, including HDTV resolutions •_Lossless z-buffer compression (up to 48:1) •_Rejects up to 256 occluded pixels per clock •_Up to 32 Z/stencil operations/clock VideoShader HD •_High-quality video processing & acceleration •_Real-time user programmable video effects •_Video post processing and filtering •_MPEG 1, 2, 4 encode and decode acceleration •_FULLSTREAM Video Deblocking •_WMV9 decode acceleration •_High-quality resolution scaling •_Adaptive Per Pixel Deinterlacing •_Motion Compensation •_Noise removal filtering •_Display Rotation

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Sapphire included a well balanced array of software and accessories with their Hybrid Radeon X800 XL. The software titles bundled with the card included two full-version games, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Pandora tomorrow, Cyberlink's popular PowerDVD DVD playback software, and Sapphire's own proprietary RedLine overclocking / tweaking utility. A driver CD was also included with the card, along with a complete user's manual, and a few cables and adapters (a DVI-to-DB15 adapter, an S-Video-to-Composite adapter, component output cables, a composite video cable, and an S-Video cable).