Introduction

ATi Radeon x800 Pro and XT Platinum Edition

The cheapest on-line price for the x800 Pro 
The cheapest on-line price for the x800 XT Platinum Edition 

Woaah, one month after announcing the product ATI finally sent out the reference samples to us for a review. There aren't that many samples available that's for sure. Welcome guys and gals to another Guru3D.com review. Today we are going to look at two new products from ATI's Radeon high-end range, their answer towards GeForce Series 6. In this preview we'll cover the new Radeon x800 Pro and the Radeon x800 XT (Platinum Edition).

Exciting times in the graphics industry you ask? You betcha... it's never been different though, yet it is more and more difficult for us journalists to test cards. We've seen a plague of optimizations and cheats from manufacturers that are very questionable. NVIDIA last year with their 3D Mark 03 clipping fiasco, generic optimizations and so on. It wasn't too long ago that a rather big discussion in the industry that a image filtering technology called Trilinear filtering was optimized by NVIDIA with the help of a mixture of filtering technologies (Brilinear). ATI remained clear of such questionable "tricks"... until the x800 launch, that is as we learned they are doing something similar. It started with their Radeon 9600 Pro series. Nobody noticed it yet it's there alright and now merged into the x800 series.

The discussion here is that if the GPU manages to produce the images at the same visual quality (that is noticeable to the human eye) at a faster FPS, should we really be worrying about the trilinear filtering? I personally believe that it's a legit optimization, as you can't see the difference with the naked eye. But... if you proclaim that your graphics card is rendering at trilinear filtering and it isn't then that's a bit too much to swallow if you just paid 400-500 USD for a graphics card isn't it? Some people don't care about it... other do. So the question here is, if you can't see the difference with your eyes, both companies are using it and it doesn't have a huge impact on image quality, is it something we should worry about? I mean, I've seen reviewers out there that take a still image, and then need Photoshop to blow up that images 400% to notice the difference... I mean come on that's not realistic.

Fact is that these weird manufacturers' tricks make reviewing a graphics card rather hard. The good thing here is that image quality wise the 6800 and x800 now are now the same, take two computers equip one with a x800 and the other with a 6800,look at a screenshot from both PC's and you cannot see the difference.

With that being said, let's start up this review beginning with a small overview of the Radeon x800 Pro and then the Radeon x800 XT Platinum Edition.

Cheapest on-line price for the Radeon x800 Pro
Cheapest on-line price for the Radeon x800 XT PE
Cheapest on-line price for the Radeon 9800 Pro 256-bit
Cheapest on-line price for the Radeon 9800 Pro 128-bit
Cheapest on-line price for the Radeon 9700 Pro
Cheapest on-line price for the GeForce 6800 256MB
Cheapest on-line price for the GeForce 6800 GT 256MB
Cheapest on-line price for the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra
Cheapest on-line price for the GeForce FX 5900 XT
Cheapest on-line price for the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra