Introduction

Gigabyte and ATI X800 PROs (top) RADEON 9800 XT

9800 XT and X800 PROs again

Similar sized coolers, 9800 XT and Gigabyte X800 PRO

With the latest generation of graphics cards, ATI and NVIDIA’s traditional sources of strength have been completely reversed. Whereas ATI was the technology leader, first to market with DX9 hardware in the form of the RADEON 9700 PRO, and then, with latter 9800 PRO and 9800 XT RADEON cards, the proven leader in 2.0 shader performance. This was first demonstrated in FutureMark’s 3DMark 03 synthetic benchmark and later proven in actual 2.0 applications such as Tomb Raider and more recently, in Far Cry.

NVIDIA, on the other hand, has maintained the advantage in more traditional raw performance metrics. NVIDIA’s GeForce FX 5900 Ultra held nearly a 600Mtexels/sec fill rate advantage over RADEON 9800 PRO, and provided up to 4.8GB/sec more peak memory bandwidth than ATI’s RADEON 9800 PRO 256MB, which shipped with slightly faster memory than the 128MB variant. NVIDIA’s follow-up card to the 5900 Ultra, the 5950 Ultra, boasted similar advantages over RADEON 9800 XT.

Today, ATI’s RADEON X800 series no longer pushes the edge of the technology curve, as ATI has elected to skip shader model 3.0 and instead focus on enhancing the gaming experience by opening up new screen resolutions with improved performance. In many cases ATI’s high-end X800 XT Platinum Edition provides double the performance of ATI’s previous flagship, with the X800 PRO following closely behind it at a lower price point. ATI has also provided a new temporal anti-aliasing mode and a new compression technology for normal maps, 3Dc. We highlighted all of these changes in our performance preview of these parts two months ago.

ATI reference X800 PRO and Gigabyte X800 PRO

Gigabyte X800 PRO and NVIDIA reference 6800 GT

NVIDIA on the other hand has a large, 16-pipe, 222 million transistor behemoth in their NV40 core, which powers the GeForce 6800, 6800 GT, and 6800 Ultra. This has prevented them from scaling to the higher clock speeds found in ATI’s X800 lineup – whereas ATI’s X800 XT Platinum Edition is clocked at 520MHz core, GeForce 6800 Ultra churns along at a pedestrian 400MHz – and thus given ATI a considerable fill rate advantage.

As a result, the first wave of reviews have given the performance crown to the X800 XT Platinum Edition, although the GeForce 6800 Ultra isn’t far behind in most tests. The only area where ATI really falls behind is in OpenGL applications like Quake 3 and Call of Duty. At the $400 price point the GeForce 6800 GT typically runs ahead of the X800 PRO, but the kicker here for NVIDIA has been availability: GeForce 6800 GTs have only hit the market recently, whereas X800 PROs have been selling for well over a month now.

To illustrate this, we have Gigabyte’s RADEON X800 PRO card, the GV-R80P25D, before we’ve seen any of Gigabyte’s GeForce 6800 boards.

Initially this may not seem like much of a surprise, as the X800 PRO was always scheduled to ship ahead of GeForce 6800, but Gigabyte’s GV-R80P25D was one of the last boards to be announced. In fact Gigabyte’s PR for it is barely a month old today!

Gigabyte, in case you didn’t know, was actually the first manufacturer to incorporate the dual-GPU strategy now employed by the likes of ASUS and MSI, except in the case of Gigabyte, they went from solely supplying ATI cards, to supplying ATI and NVIDIA boards. Before signing on with ATI, Gigabyte was an NVIDIA board partner, so when they went dual-GPU last year, they were in a sense actually going back to NVIDIA while maintaining their ties with ATI at the same time.

Gigabyte used their new partnership with NVIDIA to produce the GV-N595U-GT, one of the few overclocked GeForce FX 5950 Ultra cards on the market. This made it one of the fastest 5950 Ultra boards in existence and launched Gigabyte’s “GT Edition” brand of overclocked graphics cards. Not bad for a company known for building quality motherboards, eh? Let’s see what they have in store for the X800 PRO!