ATI Radeon x1900 series

Today marks the launch of the X1900-series of cards from ATI. I'm sure anyone that respects my take on anything wants to know what I think about these new cards, and I will get to the architecture changes and differences from nVidia's offerings soon enough. First off, let me talk about ATI's actual launch and what it means for the company.

As of around 11:30AM EST, ATI's stock has only pushed up a couple tenths of a percent, which is something I was not expecting. Maybe no one on Wall St. even noticed this launch. There's something to be said for that, certainly. When nVidia did their product launch last June for the G70-series of cards, it was a very big deal. First off, a large number of gamers from all over the West Coast showed up to play Battlefield 2 for the first time in it's wholeness. Then, in a large ceremony, nVidia had demos of the new hardware, systems built up from Voodoo, Falcon NW, and Alienware there to show off what a ton of power can really get you. Then the kicker, there were cards for sale on 3 different websites as soon as the speaches ended. It was a fantastic approach and generated a ton of publicity for them. It's what a product launch should be, in my opinion.

ATI elected to just ship some cards out early and tell everyone when it was OK to start selling them. Reviewers had their hands on these cards for a while now, and have done an excellent job showing off their strengths and weaknesses. However, I think ATI has failed miserably on this product launch. There was a ton of expectation, however at Newegg.com, probably the largest online reseller in the US, ATI's cards are still not around. I saw a Saphire model, but only when searching for X1900XTX specifically, and even then it was on auto-notify. In one review, there was a picture of X1900XTX cards in stock at Newegg, but still no luck on getting one just yet. They will probably show in the next couple hours, but I'm really not nearly as impressed as I was with the 7800GTX launch when cards were ready when nVidia said they would be. I don't think just shipping them out is enough to get a good launch.

So the launch still needs work, but what about the card itself? First, on the outside, it's still a X1800 pretty much. Same cooler and same PCB, so the only thing that's changed is what's under the hood. Replacing the r520 of the X1800 is the r580. This is basically the same chip with a couple major changes that unfortunately don't quite add up to a ton of help just yet. First off, ATI has separated out the pixel shaders from the pipeline, and quadrupled the number of them to 48. This should help out in Shader Model 3 and HDR stuff, and to be honest we see a pretty solid gain in the latest titles.

More interesting to me is the new Hirearchical-Z setup in this chip. The idea behind this tech is that if a pixel isn't actually visable, you shouldn't waste any time on trying to shade it or work with it any more. The r580 has 50% more die devoted to this process than the r520, and it seems to help a good bit. While increasing resolutions, this card has less of a drop off up to about 16x12. After that the level of work is just too much for pixel hiding to help, but with most people aiming for highest detail at 16x12, this is a welcome push for the industry.

So how about the actual numbers on this baby? Well, I hate to say I told ya so, but I did. Without a big jump in memory speed like the 7800GTX 512mb had, this card's high-dollar price point is a little dissapointing. ATI could really pump that riduculous number of shaders a lot more effectively with some more memory speed. Granted, without a bump in ROPs, these shaders didn't really help the card enough to justify a $650 price point. The 7800GTX 512mb card is better at SM2, which is still out there, and is competative at SM3 stuff too, especially when looking at SLI versus CrossFire.

And a final note about CrossFire. They still need a lot of work on this tech, as it just doesn't have enough benifit to go with as opposed to SLI. Image quality may be a little better at sometimes and a little worse at others, but SLI's lack of a dongle, support for 4 displays when disabled, and overall ease of setup without a Master Card involved, makes SLI the choice for enthusiasts to this day. Sorry ATI, but your new mousetrap just isn't any better than the old one.

One last note here, albeit minor, the fellas over at the Tech Report found an interesting little bug in ATI's shader implementation. Here's the link so you can read it yourself. As they state at the end of the page, ATI's drivers have seemingly broken the heck out of shadow mapping w/o flow control. In fact, there's just no shadow there on any of the r5xx cards. Here's another big strike-out for ATI on the driver level. Unfortunately for them, nVidia actually has improved their drivers while ATI broke theirs.

So what's the bottom line here? I think we're seeing more of good-'ol ATI as usual. They're trying to climb back into the fray, but are having a lot of trouble doing it. Half-baked is the first description that comes to mind, and by the time the drivers are fixed and everything is working like it should, nVidia will have a brand-spanking new G71 to woop-up on ATI again. Although my hopes were very high for this card, a lack of good drivers at launch and an even bigger issue of not having agreements with Newegg and the like for immediate availablility has really crippled this product. I haven't even begun to discuss the effect of breaking out the shaders and quadrulpling them on the GPGPU movement I touched on yesterday, as I imagine not having straight pipelines could be difficult to program for. GPGPU was something that ATI was touting as being a good design of their r520 too! WTF guys?!

Well, ATI is trying very hard, so now the guys up north just need to get the details right for the next big thing, which I'm sure will be all over the tabs as soon as this launch fades away. I have to say, it looks like '06 will be going to nVidia again. Later ya'll!