Technology

Technology
So then, in today's article we are discussing the x800 series. They are much discussed already. The release of NVIDIA's 6800 series is a strong one and where ATI has been dominate for the past two years it now has a serious competing product. The two products that where developed under codename R420 are lined up against the 6800 series and manage to compete very well. First off the x800 Pro. A VPU build on a 0.13-micron fabrication process with 160 Million transistors.

The Pro product has 12 pixel pipelines opposed to it's bigger XT brother with 16. Make no mistake, both products have the same core yet the Pro version has 4 pipes disabled. I already noticed some interesting soft and hardmods on the web to enable these extra 4 pipes.

The VPU furthermore has two pixel shader units per pipeline, the pipes are organized into four groups of four, six vertex shader units, Four-way crossbar memory controller and 400-550 MHz DDR-3 memory. See any differences with the 6800 here? No? Good... as indeed it's the same. Differences need to be found in transistor count, architecture and the core frequency and memory bandwidth mostly.

I've placed an overview of the competing products in this chart:

Opposed to the GeForce 6 series ATI did not choose to support Shader Model 3 but uses 2.0b. This is being hotly debated, personally I would have loved to see it included on the x800 series, current games however do not support it just yet and whether or not it'll make a visual difference can be questioned. Differences will be mostly in performance increases. There will be a few titles out supporting Shader Model 3 among them Lord of the Rings; Battle for Middle-Earth, Stalker, Vampire: Bloodlines, Splinter Cell X, Driver 3, Grafan, Painkiller, Far Cry and more...

ATi Radeon x800 XT