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Sapphire X800XL FireBlade (512MB)

Radeon X800 XL - 512 MB
Product type: Graphics card
Manufacturer: ATI - Sapphire
Website: www.ati.comMSRP:  $449 USD
Seek best price for products of this type.

So it's Thursday the 28th. An email from ATI comes in, some NDA stuff and a request if we want to test their new x800 XL. Nothing really new you say? Yeah true. But next to the fact that the XL series likely is the best bang for bucks card from ATI available right now, this one is equipped with no less then 512 MB of memory (framebuffer). After giving Andrzej (ATI) some love (Ed: errr... Not gonna ask what type of loving you gave him Hilbert...) he sent out the sample that same day with the deadline set at today, Wednesday.

[BEGIN RANT]

Of course DHL, first-rate couriers, failed to deliver the package on Friday. Then we have the weekend. On Monday I had to leave for what, 30 minutes? Left a note on the door, please deliver package at the neighbors at number 3. Of course in that 30 minute windows DHL drops by. DHL refuses to deliver to the neighbors. DHL also refused to deliver the package on the same day twice, so the next option was Tuesday afternoon.

It's now 22 hours before our Non Disclosure Agreement expires and where I wanted to have a weekend of fun with this product it's going to be a somewhat rushed job. This my friends is the agony that shippers and recipients of packages go through time after time.

...sipping some more coffee to wash away the pain.

[END RANT]

Now what on this slowly warming up Earth needs 512 MB of framebuffer I hear you asking? A valid question. I hear you. There are however a couple of games out there that actually would love 512 MB to mess around with. Take for example Doom 3's Ultra Quality setting. It's there specifically for graphics cards with 512 MB in mind. Next to that when you look at the evolution of graphics cards we see framebuffer increasing very rapidly over a year to year basis.

It was 1997 when I wrote my first 3D accelerated graphics card review, which had 8 MB memory. That's roughly 8 years (and a very lame review) ago. Do you know what card it was? 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics, it had 8MB of memory. 1998, can you remember Voodoo2? It had 16 MB framebuffer.

Now a few months ago when you told me that 512 MB cards would make a difference I would have broken into laughter. But honestly if you follow the evolutionary path of the always increasing, faster and bigger framebuffer, then we see a little pause in 2003/2004. It's 2005 and yes, both NVIDIA and ATI are releasing 512 MB products. As always you can say, do you really need it right now? To be honest, probably not, but looking at the future of games in respect to image quality it is the next logical step.

Would you still be satisfied (in the high-end range) with 64 MB graphics card memory (framebuffer)? Nah I didn't think so. So with that in mind we just received the Radeon x800 XL 512 MB from ATI as manufactured by Sapphire. We'll be focusing this article on where we can actually see the difference, and that's purely for the enthusiast gamers right now. 1600x1200 with features enabled like six levels of antialiasing and 16 levels of anisotropic filtering as that's where you'll notice the difference with such an excessive amount of memory on that graphics' card of yours. In the end you need to decide whether or not it's worth to invest in such a large framebuffer in this point of time. And invest is the proper word here as the 512 MB products will cost you a lot of money. But hey .. we show you the facts 'mam. And a fact is, the more memory on card the higher detail and resolution you can engage.

This article will focus only on the higher resolutions with a lot of image quality settings enabled. Then we'll compare it with the standard x800 XL 256 MB and 'my precious' Radeon x850 XT 256 MB.

First let's have a brief look at the loveliness' called Radeon x800 XL, it's positioning in the market and of course it's features. Follow me please ..

There she is, ATI's Radeon x800 XL