Introduction

Tackling the mainstream segment of the graphics market has been a difficult task for ATI the past twelve months. Since enjoying the success of the RADEON 9500 PRO and follow-up 9600 products in the earlier days of DirectX 9, ATI’s had a more difficult time as of late. Don’t believe us? Lets take a look back at what’s developed for ATI in the past year.

Around this time a year ago ATI was touting their RADEON X700 XT as the card of choice for the mainstream market. The X700 XT was supposed to compete against NVIDIA’s GeForce 6600 GT, and was clocked as such, boasting a 475MHz 8-pixel pipeline graphics core, with 525MHz GDDR3 memory. In our performance testing we found that the card was a good performer, outrunning the GeForce 6600 GT in some tests and losing in others. It’s only real weakness was that it didn’t support shader model 3.0, but the card’s 2.0b shaders were still capable of putting up good numbers in games such as Far Cry. It wasn’t a trailblazer like the RADEON 9500 PRO was, but at the same time it wasn’t an embarrassment either.

That is of course until the months of October and November passed with no cards in sight.

The RADEON X1800 XT and X1600 XT

The X1800 XL (bottom) X1600 XT (top)

The RADEON X700 XT ultimately never hit retail shelves. Instead ATI went back to the drawing boards, concocting their R430 VPU, which was based off of ATI’s high-end R480 chip, (only R430 had been designed to be cheaper to produce). R430’s key features were its 12-pixel pipeline architecture – four more pixel pipes than the X700 XT – and most notably, its 256-bit memory interface. In $200 RADEON X800 cards, the memory subsystem ran at 350MHz (700MHz effective). While this number is lower than RADEON X700 XT’s 525MHz, thanks to the X800’s wider 256-bit memory interface, the X800 actually boasts significantly more memory bandwidth: 22.4GB/sec in the X800 versus 16.8GB/sec on the X700 XT.

This allowed the RADEON X800 to easily outperform the X700 XT at high resolutions, especially once the visual quality is cranked up. The X800 also outran the GeForce 6600 GT in most benchmarks, the only problem was that most of ATI’s board partners passed over the 128MB RADEON X800 SKU at $200 initially, opting instead to focus on the more expensive 256MB boards at $250+. ATI’s board partners did this because they still had a lot of inventory of $200 256MB RADEON X700 PRO cards that they had to sell. The board partners knew if gamers had to choose between a $200 RADEON X700 PRO 256MB card or a $200 RADEON X800 128MB card those in the know would choose the X800, hurting X700 PRO sales. Once the channel was clear of $200 X700 PRO boards, ATI’s board partners began producing $200 X800 cards, but by then it was too late.

Just this August ATI announced two newer mainstream card offerings, the RADEON X800 GT and X800 GTO, both with high clock speeds and even more performance. ATI’s board partners have reported strong sales early-on for both cards, but ultimately ATI knows that they need a shader model 3.0 card if they really want to compete with NVIDIA in the mainstream space. This is important, as the mainstream and value segments are critical for gaining market share, not to mention that the bulk of ATI’s OEM business comes from these segments.

The X1300 PRO reference board (bottom) and X1600 XT card (top)

This MSI GeForce 6800 is much larger than the X1600 XT

The RADEON X1600 has been built to take back the mainstream market, but is it a homerun product like the RADEON 9500 PRO was, or does it strikeout? Let’s find out as we explore the performance of it and ATI’s RADEON X1300, which is meant to service the value sector.