ATI Mobility Radeon X1800 XT 256MB
ATI has fallen behind NVIDIA in the discrete mobile GPU performance stakes despite having a market share in excess of 70% for the past 11 eleven consecutive quarters. The red team's mobile division fastest mobile card before today's announcement was the Mobility Radeon X800 XT, usually featured in high-end desktop-replacement laptops from a range of partners.
The Mobility Radeon X1800 XT, as you may have guessed, is based on the desktop part's design. Featuring four shader cores, each comprising of four pixel shaders and eight vertex shaders, the Mobility Radeon X1800 XT design also features the same ringbus-type memory controller as on the desktop part.
The mobile part further leans on desktop heritage by using an ultra-threaded architecture, with a maximum of 512 concurrent threads. ATI's mobile partners will be given the opportunity of specifying maximum core and memory speeds of 550MHz and 1300MHz (effective), respectively, although partners will be free to lower clocks in confined designs. That compares well with a reference desktop's nominal 625MHz/1500MHz frequencies, so performance will be good, although the mobile card ships with 256MB of onboard memory, rather than the desktop's 512MB.
Tacking on to the performance aspects of an X1000-family card is ATI's Avivo video-processing technology. Avivo encompasses 10-bit colour processing support throughout the video-outputting pipeline. Hardware-assisted H.264 decoding offers the opportunity of watching high-quality content encoded in space-spacing content.
So just how fast is it, then? We took a look at the MR X1800 XT, housed in a notebook featuring an Intel Core Duo T2300 CPU and 1GByte of DDR2 RAM. The comparison SLI'd GeForce Go 7800 GTX notebook that featured an AMD Turion 64 ML-42 CPU and 1GByte of DDR RAM.
Not quite as fast as GeForce Go 7800 GTX 256MB cards in SLI, but faster than a single card clocked in at 400MHz/1000MHz.
ATI has got back into the high-end GPU game with its mobile derivation of its desktop X1800 XT GPU. What would have been absolutely killer would have been a mobile part based on the impressive X1900-series of GPU. ATI now has a viable presence in the £1,000+ desktop-replacement market. NVIDIA's GeForce Go 7800 GTX now has a very real competitor.
Decent performance, high feature count and immediate availability from rockdirect.com with its Xtreme CTX notebook.
