[H]ard|OCP has a couple of articles on the more mainstream graphics from ATi. First is a a PCIe roundup of different Radeon X600 cards. Apparently PCI-Express is not the miracle worker many people thought it would be when it comes to performance on video cards. The simple fact of the matter is that PCI-E will be something special when we have that will actually utilize the bus, but that will be some time to come. With these X600XT based video cards it is all about the performance of the VPU and the local video card memory bandwidth, not the bandwidth that PCI-Express offers. These gaming content shown on these cards is not even coming close to being able to saturate an AGP8X bus let alone a PCI-Express one. That article can be had here. ATi hasn't sat down to let nVidia get away with the GeForce 6600 series, and has recently lifted the NDA on the Radeon X700 line. One thing is for sure, the GeForce 6600GT and the Radeon X700XT are very competitive products when it comes to overall gaming performance. If we had to edge out a card that offers up the better value we would have to lean towards the GeForce 6600GT at this point in time. In our two days of X700XT experience we saw it get held out of the top spot in terms of both framerate and image quality by the GeForce 6600GT. Keep in mind that the GeForce 6600 series also packs the performance potential of Shader 3.0 once start using it. I doubt ATi will sit around and let nVidia walk away though. You can get that preview over here.
Yep. With the radeon9xxx series ATi was the performance king but this new generation nVidia seems to be back on top. could go either way though, depends on what ATi does to regain its title.
It's still early on. The big issue with ATi right now seems to be making their cards available in all channels. Locally, I cannot find an Radeon X800 anywhere. On-line, sure, but usually you can find that stuff in-town shortly after it's available on-line. By the time the X700 is out, ATi will likely have another driver release or two under their belt which would hopefully bring up the performance of the X700's (and X800's). Of course, this is assuming that the design of the GPU itself isn't an issue. However, it's pretty early on to speculate, other than it's gonna be a banner cycle.
I think ATI has a couple problems right now. The X800 Pro is the only widely available card right now, while nvidia has both the 6800 and 6800GT. If I'm not mistaken, there isn't a big difference in price between the X800 Pro and the 6800GT. We all know the GT smokes the X800 Pro (although the vivo card are moddable to XT P.E. quite easily.....but you have to mod it !) The first reference game that was used to compare both cards is Doom3, an openGL game, making things look bad for ATI since they're stronger in Direct3D (we'll see with HL2) ATI used to be the feature king with its early DX9 implementation, but now it's the oppposite. The X800 is the previous series X 2 while nvidia added SM3.0 support. ATI used to be the image quality king, but now both sides seem to be pretty equal. All in all, the 6800 Ultra and X800XT (PE) are probably neck and neck, most of the time. However, people see this as ATI regressing.
