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Under The Hood

Alright then, let's have a look at what the X1600 XT ICEQ ITURBO from HiS has in store for us feature wise. As you can see in the chart below, the X1600 XT is based on the RV530 graphics core. The Radeon X1600 has three Pixel Shader cores each, processing four pixels per cycle (a quad is also what we call these) and thus has 12 pipelines. Next to that it is equipped with 5 vertext units. On-board we have 256 MB framebuffer memory that allows the card to utilize plenty of space. Memory however is 128-bit which definitely limits framebuffer bandwidth and thus overall performance. Let's have a look what the BIOS fires back at us:

$ffffffffff ----------------------------------------------------------------
$ffffffffff Display adapter information
$ffffffffff ----------------------------------------------------------------
$0000000000 Description : RADEON X1600 Series
$0000000001 Vendor ID : 1002 (ATI)
$0000000002 Device ID : 71c0
$0000000003 Location : bus 5, device 0, function 0
$0000000004 Bus type : PCIE
$000000000f PCIE link width : 16x supported, 16x selected
$0000000009 Base address 0 : e0000000 (memory range)
$000000000a Base address 1 : none
$000000000b Base address 2 : f3000000 (memory range)
$000000000c Base address 3 : none
$000000000d Base address 4 : 00009000 (I/O range)
$000000000e Base address 5 : none
$ffffffffff ----------------------------------------------------------------
$ffffffffff ATI specific display adapter information
$ffffffffff ----------------------------------------------------------------
$0900000000 Graphics core : RV530 (12x1)
$0900000002 Memory bus : 128-bit
$0900000001 Memory type : unknown
$0900000003 Memory amount : 256MB
$0900000004 Core clock : 587.250MHz
$0900000005 Memory clock : 693.000MHz (1386.000MHz effective)

Crossfire Capability

NVIDIA's SLI has been the best marketing solution in 2004 and is also the easiest way to explain what Crossfire exactly is. We just published a big article and test on Crossfire which you can find here.

ATI simply had to answer the NVIDIA SLI issue and offer a competitive solution. Their answer is of course Crossfire. Why two graphics cards you ask ? Pretty much everybody is getting a little annoyed by the fact that you constantly have to upgrade your graphics card each year. Technology is moving so fast plus, well, let's face it .. the graphics chip/card manufacturers really love the fact that you need to buy a card each year.

A good alternative without spending too much money is to add a second similar generation graphics card to the one you already have in your PC and effectively double your brute rendering gaming performance. This is the concept that is SLI and now for ATI Crossfire. You take two graphics cards that you connect to each other and double up that horsepower in your PC. The idea is not new at all though .. if you are familiar with the hardware developments over the past couple of years you'll remember that 3dfx had a very familiar concept with the Voodoo 2 graphics cards series. There are multiple ways to manage two cards rendering one frame, think of Supertiling, it's most simple form. Each card will render a frame (even/uneven) or simply the upper or the lower part of the frame. Now that sounds more easy than it is though because you need to have everything right on your PC.

If you do decide to go the Crossfire path then please do so with the new X1000 series graphics cards. The x800/850 series' biggest limitation with regards to gaming is namely a maximum resolution of 1600x1200 at 60 Hz, and trust me when I say in the next year or two high-end gamers will all be moving towards 1920x1200 or higher resolutions.

There are some disadvantages, the biggest one being your wallet. You need a specific ATI Crossfire ready mainboard, you need a serious processor to be able to handle the two graphics cores, you need a power supply that can handle all these components and you need to invest in two graphics cards. So all in all that is a rather expensive crusade. It, however, is an extremely fun crusade though.

AVIVO (Advanced Video in and Out)The media revolution? This is actually the headline used in their presentation. ATI's green friends have a lot of these features integrated already for a while now and wrapped most of it up under the PureVideo en/decoders.

As we all know, and as I've been preaching for a while now, we see the living room entertainment coming to the PC more and more in a very fast fashion. One of the most popular things we've noticed here in Europe has to be HDTV and everything related to it. The trend started last year already and hey even yours truly bought a HDTV in recent times. It's coming fast and quite frankly, thank God for that as watching content in HD is simply fantastic. How does that relate to graphics cards? In more ways then you think, just look at the latest trend of HTPC's, Home Theater PC's. Things like Media Center PC's here and there? Do you get where I'm going with this?

Yes exactly this kind of thing is what I am talking about. This is the future of media playback and the PC is going to play a very important role in that. Since it's a PC, you probably want a graphics card in there that can support all the cool and extensive features. Media playback and decoding is a process that can, is and will be moved towards the graphics card. Both NVIDIA and ATI already had excellent implementations of it. With exactly this kind of stuff in mind they introduced the new AVIVO feature. Avivo features according to the ATI website:

• Supports hardware MPEG-2 compression, hardware assisted decode of MPEG-2, H.264 and VC-1 video codecs, and advanced display upscaling
• 64 times the number of colors currently available in current PCs; higher color fidelity with 10-bit processing throughout Avivo´s display engine
• Resolutions, such as 2560x1600 or higher, on the latest digital displays using dual-link DVI, as well as high color depth support over DVI
• Advanced up or down resolution scaling on any flat panel display using ATI´s solutions
• Video capture with features like 3D comb filtering, front-end video scaling, and hardware MPEG video compression
• Hardware noise reduction and 12-bit analog-to-digital conversion
• Supports standard TV, HDTV, video input and all PC displays via digital (DVI, HDMI) and analog (VGA, Component, S-Video, composite) ports

Avivo will be an integral component in all of ATI´s upcoming desktop, mobile, chipset, workstation, and software products. As stated Media Center PC are getting really popular. TV is going digital and HD/HD2(?) Blu-ray and HD-DVD are coming. Digital photography is everywhere. AVIVO is a video and display platform that perfects the video quaility. AVIVO will be integral in all future ATI products. Vibrant high fidelity images and video.

Smooth vivid playback. Flawless playback for both SD and HD televison that's what this stuff is intended for from a decoding point of view. With two dual link DVI ports which are supported on the entire X1000 range, two High def sceens can be connected.

I'm actually using the card as we speak and it's connected to two Dell 1920x1200 screens. It works lovely.