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ATI Radeon X1950 XTX Performance Preview August 23, 2006 Brandon Sandman Bell |
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Summary: With 48 pixel shaders, 512MB of GDDR4 memory operating at 1GHz (2GHz effective), HDCP support, and an all-new redesigned cooling unit that runs much quieter than the X1900 XTX, ATI's Radeon X1950 XTX is certainly designed to impress. But does the new card live up to the hype? Find out in today's article!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 17 ) |
The Radeon X1950 XTX: DirectX 9’s last hurrah
With this in mind, it’s perhaps somewhat fitting that ATI has chosen to close the chapter on DirectX 9 with the imminent arrival of their last high-end DirectX 9 part, the Radeon X1950 XTX, just over four years to the day that the Radeon 9700 Pro was first introduced to the world.
So does the Radeon X1950 XTX live up to the legacy of previous DX9 cards from ATI? Let’s find out!
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R580+ graphics core
The Radeon X1950 XTX is built on ATI’s new R580+ graphics core. R580+ is largely the same as R580, the chip is still based on TSMC’s 90-nm manufacturing process and sports ATI’s 48-pixel shader architecture, with 8 vertex shaders, 16 texture address units, 16 ROPs and contains 384 million transistors. The one key difference lies in R580+’s memory controller, which has been reworked to support GDDR2, GDDR3, and now GDDR4 memory.
GDDR4 is a new type of graphics memory that’s been designed to consume less power than GDDR3 when running at the same clock frequency. As a result, GDDR4 can be pushed to much higher clock speeds than GDDR3. The 1.1GHz GDDR4 modules used on the Radeon X1950 XTX can push up to 2.2Gbps per pin. In comparison, the fastest GDDR3 modules Samsung lists on their website top out at 900MHz (1.8Gbps/pin), while the Radeon X1900 XTX utilized 800MHz GDDR3 modules offering a max data rate of 1.6Gbps/pin.
The memory configuration itself of R580+ carries over unchanged, the chip boasts the same 256-bit (external) memory controller, with eight 32-bit memory controllers for greater efficiency.
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The Radeon X1950 XTX’s R580+ graphics core runs at the same speed as the X1900 XTX, 650MHz, while the board’s memory subsystem now runs at 1GHz (2GHz effective), versus 775MHz in the Radeon X1900 XTX. This change nets the Radeon X1950 XTX an additional 22% in peak memory bandwidth, up from 49.6GB/sec in Radeon X1900 XTX to 64GB/sec in the Radeon X1950 XTX.
In other words, other than the memory subsystem, the rest of the GPU carries over unchanged. But that’s not the only area ATI’s improved on the X1900 XTX, as the Radeon X1950 XTX also sports a brand new cooling unit as well.
| Cooling the X1950 XTX | Page:: ( 2 / 17 ) |
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One of the chief criticisms Radeon X1900 XT and XTX end users had with their cards was the noise level produced by the board’s heatsink/fan unit. Quite frankly, at full tilt the card’s fan was unbearable. Fortunately, if you kept your case well-ventilated with good airflow the fan’s RPMs never had to hit top speed, even when running with two cards in CrossFire mode, but the X1900 XT still ran noticeably louder than competing cards from NVIDIA such as the GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB and the GeForce 7900 GTX. Many Radeon X1900 XT/XTX owners swapped the stock ATI heatsink/fan unit out for aftermarket coolers, while Sapphire equipped their X1900 XTX Toxic board with a water cooler from Thermaltake to resolve this issue.
For the Radeon X1950 XTX, ATI took these complaints to heart, developing a brand new redesigned heatsink/fan unit that incorporates heat pipe cooling for the first time in a desktop ATI graphics card.
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In practice, we’ve found that heat pipes can do an extraordinary job of keeping CPUs and GPUs cool, which is why they’re used so frequently nowadays on aftermarket coolers, but the downside is they’re so effective at transferring heat off the component in question that they tend to carry a lot of heat themselves. Therefore, in order for the heat pipe to be most effective, it’s usually used in concert with a large heatsink or a large fan, or a combination of both as we see on the GeForce 7900 GTX. In fact, NVIDIA uses four heat pipes on the GeForce 7900 GTX. Unlike NVIDIA, ATI uses copper rather than aluminum for their heatsink and heat pipe (although NVIDIA uses a copper base plate that rests directly over the GPU on the 7900 GTX). Copper is used because of its superior thermal conductivity in comparison to aluminum. Basically, NVIDIA uses more heat pipes which are also larger than ATI, but ATI attempts to get around this by employing copper throughout their cooling units, rather than NVIDIA, which is predominantly composed of aluminum.
Wrapped around all this is a ducted fan enclosure. It’s responsible for taking the heat that comes off the heatsink and heat pipe and blowing it outside your system’s case. NVIDIA’s system also blows some air outside the case, but NVIDIA’s system also blows air out the right side of the card as well. It’s not a fully enclosed system like ATI’s.
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In operation, ATI’s new heatsink/fan unit works quite well, running noticeably quieter than the Radeon X1900 XTX cooler, in fact it even runs quieter than NVIDIA’s GeForce 7600 GT and 7900 GT reference boards, but it’s still not as quiet as the GeForce 7900 GTX. It’s a good cooler though and to demonstrate its effectiveness we tried to record audio clips of the cooler in action while running looped 3DMark runs, but the cooler ran so quietly that we couldn’t record any good clips even with the microphone set at a distance of 10”. Like the X1900 XTX, the PCB of the X1950 XTX carries a lot of heat, so you may want to ensure that you've got adequate airflow blowing across the board, but other then that we were quite pleased with the new ATI cooler.
Other changes
The rest of the X1950 XTX’s board design is pretty similar to the Radeon X1900 XTX. Interestingly enough, ATI uses only six Pulse PAO511 inductors on the X1950 XTX, versus seven on the Radeon X1900 XT/XTX (including the X1900 XT 256MB), while VRM circuitry is now cooled by a copper heatsink versus the aluminum heatsink that was used previously on the XTX. In addition, ATI continues to provide VIVO support with the Radeon X1950 XTX, with this functionality being provided by ATI’s venerable Rage Theater chip, while high-bandwidth digital content protection (HDCP) support is integrated for the first time in a desktop Built By ATI graphics card. Previously this feature was exclusive only to ATI’s high-end FireGL workstation cards. A limited number of ATI’s board partners have also released HDCP-compliant graphics cards, but these were limited to the less powerful Radeon X1600 Pro GPU.
Price and availability
We’ve been told by ATI that the Radeon X1950 XTX will carry an MSRP of $449, and should be hitting retail shelves next month on September 14th. In addition to Built By ATI cards, ATI’s lined up all the usual suspects in terms of board partners, so expect to see boards from ASUS, Connect3D, Gigabyte, GeCube, HIS, MSI, PowerColor, Sapphire, and others shortly.
Image quality
Before we begin to discuss the performance offered by the Radeon X1950 XTX, it’s important that we go over image quality. To address this topic we’ve created a dedicated article on this subject which can be found here. In the article we take a look at ATI’s various AA modes (including adaptive AA) as well as their AF, comparing it to NVIDIA’s GeForce 7900 GTX.
| Test Systems | Page:: ( 3 / 17 ) |
System Setup
Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800
ASUS P5W DH Deluxe (for ATI systems)
ASUS P5N32-SLI SE Deluxe (for NVIDIA systems)
2GB Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C4
ATI Radeon X1950 XTX 512MB
ATI Radeon X1900 XTX
ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB
ATI Radeon X1800 XT 512MB
Catalyst 6.8
BFG GeForce 7950 GX2
Driver version ForceWare 91.45
NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX
Driver version ForceWare 91.33
250GB Maxtor Hard Drive Maxline III SATA Hard Drive w/16MB Cache
Windows XP Professional SP2
DirectX 9.0c
Benchmarks
Pacific Fighters 4.04 (with Perfect landscape setting for ATI and NVIDIA)
Half-Life 2 Lost Coast
Far Cry 1.33 (1.4 patch for ATI cards)
F.E.A.R. 1.07
Quake 4 1.2
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
Battlefield 2 1.3
Lock On: Modern Air Combat
Call of Duty 2 1.2
Note: All adaptive AA benchmarks were taken with ATI's supersampling mode "quality", while transparency AA benchmarks were conducted with NVIDIA's supersampling mode as well. 6xAA performance was conducted with adaptive AA turned on also.
| 3DMark 06 | Page:: ( 4 / 17 ) |
3DMark 06 – Direct3D
| HDR: HL2 Lost Coast | Page:: ( 5 / 17 ) |
Half-Life 2: Lost Coast – Direct3D
| Battlefield 2 | Page:: ( 6 / 17 ) |
Battlefield 2 – Direct3D
| Battlefield 2 Performance 1600x1200 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 7900 GTX | 86 | 107 |
| GeForce 7950 GX2 | 115 | 144 |
| GeForce 7900 GT | 62 | 76 |
| Radeon X1900 XTX | 100 | 137 |
| Radeon X1950 XTX | 103 | 139 |
| Radeon X1900 XT 512MB | 97 | 131 |
| Radeon X1800 XT 512MB | 87 | 107 |
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| Quake 4 | Page:: ( 7 / 17 ) |
Quake 4 – OpenGL
| LOMAC | Page:: ( 8 / 17 ) |
Lock On: Modern Air Combat – Direct3D
| Lock On: Modern Air Combat 1600x1200 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 7900 GTX | 62 | 144 |
| GeForce 7950 GX2 | 27 | 137 |
| GeForce 7900 GT | 45 | 129 |
| Radeon X1900 XTX | 32 | 128 |
| Radeon X1950 XTX | 35 | 128 |
| Radeon X1900 XT 512MB | 30 | 127 |
| Radeon X1800 XT 512MB | 30 | 128 |
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| F.E.A.R. Performance | Page:: ( 9 / 17 ) |
F.E.A.R. – Direct3D
| F.E.A.R. Performance 1600x1200 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 7900 GTX | 28 | 103 |
| GeForce 7950 GX2 | 39 | 249 |
| GeForce 7900 GT | 22 | 78 |
| Radeon X1900 XTX | 25 | 123 |
| Radeon X1950 XTX | 26 | 132 |
| Radeon X1900 XT 512MB | 23 | 121 |
| Radeon X1800 XT 512MB | 22 | 89 |
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| Oblivion Mountains HDR | Page:: ( 10 / 17 ) |
Oblivion – Direct3D
| Oblivion Performance 1600x1200x32 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 7900 GTX | 31 | 58 |
| GeForce 7950 GX2 | 39 | 69 |
| GeForce 7900 GT | 21 | 40 |
| Radeon X1900 XTX | 33 | 43 |
| Radeon X1950 XTX | 34 | 55 |
| Radeon X1900 XT 512MB | 31 | 52 |
| Radeon X1800 XT 512MB | 27 | 44 |
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| Oblivion Foliage HDR | Page:: ( 11 / 17 ) |
Oblivion – Direct3D
| Oblivion Performance 1600x1200x32 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 7900 GTX | 18 | 29 |
| GeForce 7950 GX2 | 24 | 38 |
| GeForce 7900 GT | 13 | 20 |
| Radeon X1900 XTX | 26 | 35 |
| Radeon X1950 XTX | 27 | 35 |
| Radeon X1900 XT 512MB | 26 | 33 |
| Radeon X1800 XT 512MB | 23 | 30 |
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| Call of Duty 2 | Page:: ( 12 / 17 ) |
Call of Duty 2 – Direct3D
| Far Cry HDR | Page:: ( 13 / 17 ) |
Far Cry – Direct3D
| Far Cry Performance 1600x1200 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 7900 GTX | 48.2 | 81.3 |
| GeForce 7950 GX2 | 60.4 | 115.2 |
| GeForce 7900 GT | 34.2 | 58.7 |
| Radeon X1900 XTX | 50.8 | 73.8 |
| Radeon X1950 XTX | 54.2 | 77.6 |
| Radeon X1900 XT 512MB | 48.5 | 70.3 |
| Radeon X1800 XT 512MB | 37.7 | 52.5 |
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| Adaptive AA Performance | Page:: ( 14 / 17 ) |
| F.E.A.R. Performance 1600x1200 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 7900 GTX | 27 | 100 |
| GeForce 7950 GX2 | 39 | 245 |
| GeForce 7900 GT | 20 | 77 |
| Radeon X1900 XTX | 24 | 123 |
| Radeon X1950 XTX | 25 | 128 |
| Radeon X1900 XT 512MB | 23 | 117 |
| Radeon X1800 XT 512MB | 22 | 87 |
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LOMAC
| Lock On: Modern Air Combat 1600x1200 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 7900 GTX | 55 | 127 |
| GeForce 7950 GX2 | 30 | 137 |
| GeForce 7900 GT | 40 | 99 |
| Radeon X1900 XTX | 30 | 86 |
| Radeon X1950 XTX | 33 | 94 |
| Radeon X1900 XT 512MB | 28 | 82 |
| Radeon X1800 XT 512MB | 29 | 79 |
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| 6xAA Performance | Page:: ( 15 / 17 ) |
| F.E.A.R. Performance 1600x1200 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| X1900 XTX 4xAA | 24 | 123 |
| X1900 XTX 6xAA | 14 | 100 |
| X1950 XTX 4xAA | 25 | 128 |
| X1950 XTX 6xAA | 18 | 107 |
| X1900 XT 512MB 4xAA | 23 | 117 |
| X1900 XT 512MB 6xAA | 15 | 97 |
| X1800 XT 512MB 4xAA | 22 | 87 |
| X1800 XT 512MB 6xAA | 15 | 70 |
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| Overclocking | Page:: ( 16 / 17 ) |
| Conclusion | Page:: ( 17 / 17 ) |
So why aren’t we seeing a bigger performance increase? Let’s speculate shall we…
It’s possible that ATI may have increased memory timings/latency for their X1950 XTX boards. Video cards tend to be much more sensitive to these types of adjustments, much more so than the system memory on your motherboard. ATI may have had to bump up timings slightly in order to keep power consumption or thermals down. Remember that first-generation GDDR2 modules used in the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra and Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB ran notoriously hot when they were first released. If the memory timings or latency used are higher, that would negate some of the performance advantage provided by GDDR4’s added memory bandwidth.
Another possibility is that R580 isn’t as memory bandwidth-starved as you’d expect. The only reason we doubt this is the case though is because we ran benchmarks with 6xAA/16xAF with adaptive AA enabled and found that even in this case the Radeon X1950 XTX doesn’t really pull away from the older X1900 XTX. Clearly 1600x1200 with 6xAA/16xAF should be enough to truly allow the X1950 XTX’s new GDDR4 memory subsystem to really flex its muscles shouldn’t it? If we had to bet on one of these two theories, we’d put our money on the X1950 XTX’s new GDDR4 memory modules requiring higher latencies than GDDR3. Samsung’s own website supports this theory, listing a range of higher latencies for their GDDR4 modules than their GDDR3 memory modules.
As a result of this, the Radeon X1950 XTX doesn’t reclaim the single-card performance crown from NVIDIA. That title still goes to the GeForce 7950 GX2. The Radeon X1950 XTX definitely gave the GeForce 7950 GX2 a run for its money in a couple of apps, and actually delivered better overall performance in our Oblivion testing in our demanding foliage area, although the two are definitely neck-and-neck with each other there. Considering that ATI plans to sell the X1950 XTX for $449, that should make it the more attractive option if you're on a budget (street prices for the GeForce 7950 GX2 currently sit at $540 and up).
We’re going to be taking a look at Radeon X1950 XTX CrossFire performance shortly. But basically, if you want the Cliff Notes version its more of the same, ATI’s Radeon X1950 XTX CrossFire board is clocked at the same speeds of 650MHz core/1GHz memory, supports HDCP, and ships with one dual-link DVI port (like its predecessor, the Radeon X1950 XTX we’re evaluating today supports two dual-link DVI ports). It also carries the same price tag as the Radeon X1950 XTX, priced at $449. Ever since ATI’s CrossFire technology originally debuted with the X800 we’ve been asking ATI to charge the same price for CrossFire boards as non-CrossFire cards so we’re glad to see that they listened to this advice.
To sum it all up, ATI’s Radeon X1950 XTX builds largely on foundation laid with the Radeon X1900 XTX. ATI’s basically resolved the XTX board’s biggest issue – noise – with the Radeon X1950 XTX, and spiced the package up by including HDCP support as well as outfitting the board with faster GDDR4 memory. This change nets the X1950 XTX slightly more performance, which is never a bad thing. It’s a fitting end to the DX9 generation from ATI, but if you’ve already got a good DX9 card and you’re satisfied with its performance, you’d probably be better served by waiting it out to see what the next-generation of DirectX 10 cards will offer. We know that we certainly can’t wait to see what develops!