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Today ATI announced the release of its PCI express range of video cards built around their latest graphic core technology. The graphics cards announced today are the PCI variant of the Radeon X800 along with the Radeon X600 and the Radeon X300. ATI have also announced the release of the ATI Axiom which will be covering the mobile sector. Full Press Release. This is the first time ive done a "preview" of an ATI range but there has been so much talk about PCI Express this year I feel its a worthwhile endeavour to even take a glimpse at the new hardware which will be hitting the shelves shortly. The R423 is virtually a carbon copy of the R420 series - ive covered this hardware technology extensively in the past and if you wish to refresh your memory you can do so here. This will cover almost all the bases for the R423 series. The primary difference is the interface medium with the R420 being an AGP slot design and the R423 being the new PCI express slot design. Much has been said about ATIs main rival Nvidia of late - that being Nvidia as they are making a single board with "bridge-chip" technology, from my sources inside several companies there are concerns about this single bridged design introducing certain problems with performance, I cant confirm or deny this as yet and it will be an interesting development to keep tabs on when the cards are ready for reviewing. We have access to some ATI PDFS and Powerpoint presentations which ill be sharing and discussing with you all today. Firstly the X800.
"The Worlds Fastest
VPU" quite a bold claim if it was coming from anyone else, but
we all know from reading the reviews lately its quite an accurate
statement.
Again ATI are concentrating on "High Definition Gaming", which means you can play your games at the highest resolutions with all the details maxxed.
3DC is one of the key elements of the new ATI hardware series, offering 4:1 compression which allows for better in game art and increased performance, ATI are pushing this as an easily implementable feature which should be making its way into many forthcoming games, The ruby demo makes use of 3DC and over 100 megabytes of textures were compressed to fit into the 256 onboard chip memory.
The X800 series - 160 million transistors on a 0.13 micron core at 500mhz and 1ghz GDDR3 memory speed. All the benefits we know and love, Smartshader HD, HyperZ HD, Videoshader HD and Smoothvision HD carry over onto the new boards.
I was recently speaking
with ATI and they have stated that the X800 PCI express card will
have a six pin power header which will replace the standard molex
connector which currently resides on the AGP counterparts.
Next: X600 & X300
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