Blig Merk wrote:
Leverages to nothing. The X1900XL has the 48 shader processors and it
is just barely faster in a few benchmarks than the 7800GTX which has
been out since fall last year. The only game that is significantly
faster with the X1900XL is FEAR and there is a lot of speculation that
is just due to the shader coding used in FEAR. The 7900GTX with unified
pixel vertex pipes comes out in a few weeks and it will shove X1900XL
back to being just a contender again. The shader processor path
apporach is not proving to be any big advantage and looks like it might
be weaker in the months ahead.
I have rarely seen such factual anamolies in a 9-line post.
There's no X1900XL. Not yet, any way. X1900XT and X1900XTX are both
512 meg cards with very impressive performance numbers. They chomp
down 7800GTX 256meg (in part because the 512meg is becoming some sort
of an advantage) and are also mostly ahead of the paper-launched
7800GTX-512 meg parts (that are selling for $750, if they can be found
anywhere). In comparison X1900XT is now available for $470-480 at
some places.
FEAR is a 'The way it's meant to be played' game. The fact that it
works well on X1900XT cards has a lot to do with its higher ALU:Tex
ratio (something, which most new games will employ, including Oblivion)
X1900XT are designed to make use of situations where the math
operations in shaders far outweigh the texture usage.
The 7900GTX is not based on unified architecture. It's very likely that
even G80 (the next-gen nVidia chip) is also not unified. It doesn't
mean that it'd be a bad performer or that the unified architecture is
absolutely necessary. I am just correcting another mistake in the
original post.
Finally here are some comparison numbers between X1900XT, 7800GTX-256
and 7800GTX-512 respectively.. 1600x1200 4xaa 16xaf
HL2:Lost Coast 80.2 65.2 78.9
Battlefield 2 109.7 68.6 89.4
Quake 4 72.8 65.2 85.3
FEAR 49 27 37
CoD2 34.9 26.4 32.3
Serious Sam 2 69.5 47.7 75.1
Far Cry HDR 84.5 64.3 84.2
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/...00_xt_preview/
When you add in features like FP-Blending+AA (which 7800GTX can't
do and 7900GTX won't either), angle-independent AF and of course
the forward looking shader:texture ratio, X1900XT at $480 is the best
graphic card one can find in the $350+ range.
--
Noman