ATI Radeon X1300

The X1300 graphics series comes in three variants. They are all classed as budget cards for the market and are all relatively cheap compared with the others in the X1000 series. The three cards are the X1300 Pro, X1300 and the X1300 Hyper Memory. The Pro version is the fastest, its worth pointing this out as previously in other graphics cards the Pro has been a lesser card than say an XT version. The X1300 standard is just that, the standard edition. Then we have the X1300 Hyper Memory. This is something we haven't seen in a while. Hyper memory sounds great, but the deal with it is that it only comes with 32Mb of memory on the card. You then have the option to use up to 128Mb of your system memory for the X1300 Hyper Memory to use. This of course has a negative effect on your system. Looking on the flip side of the coin though, it is a very cheap graphics card and if your not looking for a top of the range card, this could well be worth looking at for the price alone. Bear in mind it still has the new architecture and actually has a faster core than the standard X1300.

X1300 Pro, X1300 and X1300 Hyper memory Compared

Features of the X1300 (R515)

105 million transistors on 90nm fabrication process
Dual-link DVI
Four pixel shader processors
Two vertex shader processors
128-bit 4-channel DDR/DDR2/GDDR3 memory interface
32-bit/1-channel, 64-bit/2-channel, and 128-bit/4-channel configurations
Native PCI Express x16 bus interface
AGP 8x configurations also supported with external bridge chip\
Dynamic Voltage Control

X1000 Series Card comparison

To compare the different graphics cards in the series wave have the basic specs for the top cards in each range. Its not a sure fire way to pick a card but it does show you what extra speed the extra money will buy you. You can then decide for yourself which is the best buy.

ATI Radeon X1300

The Radeon X1300 is aimed at the budget end of the market, but that doesn't mean that its not a respectable graphics card. A 256Mb card with a 600Mhz clock and 800Mhz memory clock is a nice package for a bottom end card (pro version). So apart from the speed which is lower than the other cards in the series what other differences are there with the X1300?

Well pipelines are always a big factor in gaming performance at higher resolutions. More pipelines more pixels can be processed per second. The X1300 only has 1/3 of the pipelines than that of the X1600 and 1/4 of the X1800. The X1300 sits with 4 pixel pipelines. Not enough to play games with high resolutions but good enough with the speed it has to still keep casual gamers happy. Like everything these days though, quantity and speed are not the be all and end all. In today's market efficiency plays a big part in technologies real world performance. Even though you will still see ATI and Nvidia bang on about peak fill rates from time to time, it is losing its importance the overall performance of a graphics card. Remember that the X1300 is based on the same technologies as the X1600 and the X1800 so although it may not be as fast its still a next generation card with all the features. The X1300 is also crossfire enabled, read more below

Crossfire

Crossfire is ATI solution to SLI technology. This allows you to combine two graphics cards together and use them simultaneously to increase the performance of your graphics subsystem by almost double. This is proving a very popular way of upgrading, because you don't have to buy both graphics cards together. Upgrade to one now and buy another later when you need to upgrade again. Its the cheapest way as the graphics card prices will have come down. Certain requirements need to be met with crossfire but less so with the X1300 as it doesn't need a master card the X1300 can use the PCI express bus to link together providing a crossfire motherboard is used. Read our article on Crossfire

PCI Express

Like the vast majority of graphics cards released now. the Radeon X1300 uses the PCI Express bus and not AGP (AGP available with an extra hardware bridge chip), check your motherboard before purchasing one of these cards. Chances are you will have a PCI express slot if your motherboard is under 2 years old. Refer to your motherboard manual for details.

For more information on PCI Express read our article here

Full Chipset Details

Features

• 105 million transistors on 90nm fabrication process

• Four pixel shader processors

• Two vertex shader processors

• 128-bit 4-channel DDR/DDR2/GDDR3 memory interface

  • 32-bit/1-channel, 64-bit/2-channel, and 128-bit/4-channel configurations

• Native PCI Express x16 bus interface

  • AGP 8x configurations also supported with external bridge chip

• Dynamic Voltage Control

High Performance Memory Controller

• Fully associative texture, color, and Z/stencil cache designs

• Hierarchical Z-buffer with Early Z test

• Lossless Z Compression (up to 48:1)

• Fast Z-Buffer Clear

• Z/stencil xache optimized for real-time shadow rendering

Ultra-Threaded Shader Engine

• Support for Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 programmable vertex and pixel shaders in hardware

• Full speed 128-bit floating point processing for all shader operations

• Up to 128 simultaneous pixel threads

• Dedicated branch execution units for high performance dynamic branching and flow control

• Dedicated texture address units for improved efficiency

• 3Dc+ texture compression

  • High quality 4:1 compression for normal maps and two-channel data formats

  • High quality 2:1 compression for luminance maps and single-channel data formats

• Multiple Render Target (MRT) support

• Render to vertex buffer support

• Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL® 2.0

Advanced Image Quality Features

• 64-bit floating point HDR rendering supported throughout the pipeline

  • Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing

• 32-bit integer HDR (10:10:10:2) format supported throughout the pipeline

  • Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing

• 2x/4x/6x Anti-Aliasing modes

  • Multi-sample algorithm with gamma correction, programmable sparse sample patterns, and centroid sampling

  • New Adaptive Anti-Aliasing feature with Performance and Quality modes

  • Temporal Anti-Aliasing mode

  • Lossless Color Compression (up to 6:1) at all resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions

• 2x/4x/8x/16x Anisotropic Filtering modes

  • Up to 128-tap texture filtering

  • Adaptive algorithm with Performance and Quality options

• High resolution texture support (up to 4k x 4k)

Avivo™ Video and Display Platform

• High performance programmable video processor

  • Accelerated MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264 decoding and transcoding

  • DXVA support

  • De-blocking and noise reduction filtering

  • Motion compensation, IDCT, DCT and colour space conversion

  • Vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing

  • 3:2 pull down (frame rate conversion)

• Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time

• HDR tone mapping acceleration

  • Maps any input format to 10 bit per channel output

• Flexible display support

  • Dual integrated DVI transmitters (one dual-link + one single-link)

    • DVI 1.0 compliant / HDMI interoperable and HDCP read

  • Dual integrated 10 bit per channel 400 MHz DACs

  • 16 bit per channel floating point HDR and 10 bit per channel DVI output

  • Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, colour correction, and colour space conversion (10 bits per colour)

  • Complete, independent colour controls and video overlays for each display

  • High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with under scan support for all outputs

  • Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays

  • Xilleon™ TV encoder for high quality analogue output

  • YPrPb component output for direct drive of HDTV displays*

  • Spatial/temporal dithering enables 10-bit colour quality on 8-bit and 6-bit displays

  • Fast, glitch-free mode switching

  • VGA mode support on all outputs

  • Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions and refresh rates

• Compatible with ATI TV/Video encoder products, including Theatre 550

CrossFire™

• Multi-GPU technology

  • Inter-GPU communication over PCI Express (no interlink hardware required)

• Four modes of operation:

  • Alternate Frame Rendering (maximum performance)

  • Supertiling (optimal load-balancing)

  • Scissor (compatibility)

  • Super AA 8x/10x/12x/14x (maximum image quality)

HyperMemory™ 2

• 2nd generation virtual memory management technology

  • Improved PCI Express transfer efficiency

• Supports rendering to system memory as well as local graphics memory

Useful Links For the Radeon X1300