Introduction

The mainstream graphics segment has seen a number of exciting developments in recent months. While the latter half of 2003 was a disappointment to many enthusiasts, with the RADEON 9600 XT and GeForce FX 5700 family delivering minor performance enhancements over their predecessors, today’s X700 and GeForce 6600 cards are capable of outperforming cards that were selling for $500 a year ago, such as the RADEON 9800 XT and GeForce FX 5950 Ultra. This is a pretty remarkable feat, especially when you consider the $200 (or less) price tag these cards are going for.

These cards owe a great deal of their success to TSMC’s 0.11-micron manufacturing process. By moving from 0.13-micron down to the smaller 0.11-micron process, ATI is able to affordably double the number of pixel pipelines in a mainstream offering from the four pipelines found in the RADEON 9600 family to eight in RADEON X700.

TOXIC X700 PRO poses with X700 PRO reference board and 6600 GT

TOXIC X700 PRO and ATI RADEON X700 PRO 256MB

This change has a dramatic effect on fill rate: RADEON 9600 XT features a 500MHz, 4-pixel pipeline core boasting a fill rate of 2.0 Gigatexels/second. In comparison, RADEON X700 PRO is clocked slightly slower, 420MHz, yet thanks to its eight pipeline architecture it possesses a higher fill rate of 3.36 Gigatexels/second. ATI improves performance even further by adding six vertex shading units; this is triple the amount found in the RADEON 9600 family.

ATI is able to pull this off while maintaining high clock speeds. The X700 PRO’s 420MHz core clock is 8MHz higher than RADEON 9800 XT’s 412MHz core. This gives the X700 PRO a fill rate advantage over all of ATI’s high-end DX9 offerings from 2002-2003. In fact, in our Sapphire Hybrid RADEON X700 PRO review, we found multiple cases where the Hybrid X700 PRO card was faster than RADEON 9800 PRO, and was even capable of challenging the RADEON 9800 XT in some circumstances, including DOOM 3’s high quality mode with 4x anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering enabled.

TOXIC X700 PRO and the Sapphire Hybrid RADEON X700 PRO 256MB

TOXIC card is a dual slot design

The bottom line is that the new manufacturing process helps to bring one key feature found in high-end cards (8 pixel pipeline architectures) down to the mainstream level more affordably than if TSMC’s larger 0.13-micron process had been used: keep in mind that not only is 0.11-micron a smaller process, allowing ATI to yield more chips per silicon wafer, it’s also a cheaper manufacturing option for ATI as TSMC’s 0.11-micron process doesn’t contain features that are more costly to implement such as low-k dielectric. The new process is able to do this, yet still maintain high clock speeds, as evidenced by the RADEON X700 PRO’s high clock speed of 420MHz.

With their TOXIC X700 PRO, Sapphire takes this platform and builds on it with better cooling. This, in turn, allows Sapphire to clock their board higher than other X700 PRO manufacturers…