Introduction

With today’s launch of Intel’s 915 and 925 family of chipsets, PCI Express finally makes its debut on the PC. In case you didn’t know, PCI Express is Intel’s next generation bus that’s been designed to replace today’s PCI and AGP devices. On the graphics side, PCI Express can deliver up to twice the bandwidth of AGP 8X when fully configured, ushering in the capability to perform a wide variety of applications beyond just gaming.

Can you spot the PCI Express card?

PCI Express X800 XT and X600 XT

Of course, since we tend to focus on games around here, we wouldn’t be doing our job if we didn’t discuss the ramifications of PCI Express for gamers. Not only does the new interface provide more bandwidth than AGP, it also opens up new possibilities for game developers, for instance collision detection and physics calculations can be offloaded to the GPU. In fact, in a post on Beyond3D, Dany Lapage (Lead Programmer on Splinter Cell 3) mentioned scenarios that weren’t possible before on the PC, summing up the benefits of PCI-E by saying “All of this can be done on the CPU but people are going to start looking at the GPU to do other things than just graphics. All of this because of PCI-E”

In preparation for PCI Express’s debut, ATI has been busy preparing a top-to-bottom family of native PCI Express solutions. ATI feels this gives them a distinctive advantage in both performance and cost over NVIDIA, and based on our talks with board partners who have seen PCI Express hardware from both companies, this is true. Here’s a look at ATI’s AGP and PCI Express parts for this summer:

ATI’s RADEON lineup
Model	Pixel Pipelines	Core Clock (MHz)	Memory Memory Clock (MHz)	Memory size and type	MSRP	PCI-E/AGP
RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition	16	520	560	256MB GDDR3	$499	Yes/Yes
RADEON X800 XT	16	500	500	256MB GDDR3	~$450	Yes/No
RADEON X800 PRO	12	475	450	256MB GDDR3	$399	No/Yes
RADEON X600 XT	4	500	370	128MB/256MB DDR1	~$199-$299 depending on display/memory configurations	Yes/No
RADEON X600 PRO	4	400	300	128MB/256MB DDR1	~$199-$299 depending on display/memory configurations	Yes/No
RADEON X300	4	325	400	128-bit interface 128MB/256MB DDR1	~$79-$199 depending on display/memory configurations	Yes/No
RADEON X300 SE	4	325	400	64-bit interface 128MB/256MB DDR1	~$79-$199 depending on display/memory configurations	Yes/No

Notes

As you can see, ATI has no plans for an AGP X800 XT board, or AGP-based X600 and X300 cards. Meanwhile, the X800 PRO will be AGP only. Keep in mind that this chart summarizes ATI’s current plans and not those of its board partners: we saw quite a few PCI Express X800 PRO boards at Computex a few weeks ago. Don’t expect to see an AGP X600 or X300 card from any manufacturers however.

The X600 XT and RADEON 9600 XT

Another shot of the X800 boards

ATI is currently shipping all of its PCI Express cards to OEM and SI channels, with retail availability to follow later at an unspecified date, the prices listed above indicated with a tilde should be considered approximations until they officially ship. According to ATI: “PCI Express products that are "shipping now" are shipping to OEM and SI customers. As there isn't an upgrade or DIY market for PCI Express graphics cards we will not be shipping to retail until later. Retail availability of these products has not yet been fully determined. Some may be available from ATI and its partners, some from partners only. The final retail availability will be somewhat dependant on the retail market for build-your-own PCI Express systems.”