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ATi's response to the release of the Geforce 6800 from Nvidia goes under the code name of R420, to us that buy the graphics cards it will be known as Radeon X800. At time of writing it will be released in two flavours. The X800 Pro and the X800 XT. We will mainly be looking at the features of the XT version here as the Pro version and others that will inevitably be released will be cut down versions of the XT. All the cards in the X800 series will be based on the R420 chip. The name X800 was chosen by ATI as the next logical step from the 9xxx series. They have simply moved on to using Roman Numerals so the X is a 10. The R420 definitely has the edge over its competitors when it comes to pixel pushing power. It makes a change for ATI to actually be ahead in the raw power stakes. The 525Mhz core of the X800 XT can draw 2100 pictures taken with a 4 megapixel camera ...... Per second. Just imagine the speed we are talking about here. Pixel pushing isn't everything anymore though but its a great start. Gamers like to have blistering speed as well as high image quality when using FSAA and Anisotropic filtering. We will look at these features a little later on. The Radeon X800 is fitted with the latest GDDR3 memory modules. It has 16 pixel pipelines like the Geforce 6800 and with its higher clock rates it can obviously push out a lot more pixels than the Geforce 6800. Infact it can shift 8400 Mega pixels per second.
There is not much extra to look at here that we haven't already said. The core speed of the X800 XT is the key pixel pushing feature being a massive 125Mhz faster than that of the Geforce 6800. The extra 50Mhz (DDR) in memory speed gives it a 1.6Gb/s boost over the Geforce. Its not a great deal to shout about considering the already immense speeds that these two graphics cards are working at.
In terms of power consumption the X800 is a tame beast. It doesn't drain your PSU like the Geforce 6800, this is mainly due to the number of transistors in the chip having approximately 82 Million Transistors LESS than the Geforce 6800. This not only has a beneficial effect on the power consumption but it also means than less heat is produced and so less intense and therefore quieter cooling can be used. The heatsink and fan that comes with the Radeon X800 as standard is a nice neat solution that is not too intrusive and doesn't make a lot of noise. The fan has two speeds, fast and slow (surprisingly enough). The fast mode only kicks in once a certain temperature is reached. And reports say that it is rarely required to go into fast mode. This gives you a nice quiet component inside your PC. Although the Radeon X800 is a completely different range of cards from ATI, the technology behind it all has not improved that much since the release of the Radeon 9700 Pro. The Pixel shader and the vertex shader technology is exactly the same of that used in the Radeon 9700 Pro (DirectX 9). This is obviously the down side to the new Radeon chip. The extra technology that the NV40 (Geforce 6800) has gives it a boost in the sales market. In terms of Vertex shaders although there is no new technology in there, there is an increase from 4 vertex shaders in the Radeon 9800 XT to 6 in the Radeon X800 XT. The Pixel shaders have been tweaked slightly to allow more instructions for longer code. However the card still resides in the DirectX 9 bracket so there is no major leap forward in this department. 3Dc is a compression technique used in the X800 to reduce the file size of high resolution textures. 3Dc uses its compression algorithm to compress what is known as a normal map. Normal maps are similar to bump maps in the way that the idea is to increase the amount of detail that a particular polygon can have. Normal maps are more detailed and so the file sizes are much higher and so the performance hit on the graphics card is much greater. Its more of a strain on the memory bandwidth. By using a compression on the normal map and saving it in a format that the graphics chip (GPU) can read you save the amount of data that has to be sent through the AGP bus. This means less strain on the Memory bandwidth. Now if you are creating a game with this in mind then you have two options here. You can keep the graphics you have and can increase frame rates or you can add even more detail to your images. This gives a games creators a license to once again take another step forward to making life like computer games. 3Dc itself is only a compression technique., the technology alone does not make the graphics look any better. It merely provides a boost which allows for more detailed images to be drawn on screen without the performance hit.
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