facebook rss twitter

Review: ATI Radeon X1900 XT and XTX

by Ryszard Sommefeldt on 24 January 2006, 00:54

Tags: ATi Technologies (NYSE:AMD)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qael5

Add to My Vault: x

ATI R580 Specification

R580 vs R520

ATI R580 GPU Properties
GPU ATI R580 ATI R520
Process and Fabricator 90nm @ TSMC, 90GT w/ low-k
Die Size 18.5mm² 13x12mm
Transistor Count 384 million 321 million
DirectX Shader Model Shader Model 3.0
Basic Configuration (VP/FP/ROP) 8/48/16 8/16/16
Vertex Shader Info VS3.0 (no texld)
5D FP32, co-issue MADD, branch
single cycle trig functions
Fragment Processor Info PS3.0
4D FP32, dual-issue ADD+MADD, branch
single cycle trig functions
ROP Info 6x Int8/FP16/FX16/Int10 MSAA (2 subsamples/cycle)
2x Z-only rate
FP/FX16 blender
Texture processing 16 FP32 address units, 4 samplers
Bilinear filter for integer samples
Memory Interface 256-bit, 512-bit ring bus
GDDR->GDDR4
GPU R580 R520
Display output 2x dual-link DVI TMDS transmitters
ATI Avivo

As you can see, ATI spent around 60 million transistors adding thrice the fragment ALUs and all the associated extras, including thread control logic and register file space.

In the top configuration of X1900 XTX - 650MHz GPU, 774MHz memory - theoretical rates work out as follows, versus X1800 XT.

Theoretical Rates for ATI Radeon X1900 XTX, versus Radeon X1800 XT
ATI Radeon X1900 XTX ATI Radeon X1800 XT
Core Clock 650MHz 625MHz
Memory Clock 775MHz 750MHz
Pixel fillrate 10.4G pixels/sec 10.0G pixels/sec
Texture sampling rate 41.6G samples/sec 40.0G samples/sec
Z-only fillrate 20.8G samples/sec 20.0G samples/sec
Vertex transform rate 1.30G tris/sec 1.25G tris/sec
VP MADD issue rate 5.20G instr/sec 5.00G instr/sec
FP MADD issue rate 31.2G instr/sec 10.0G instr/sec
Memory bandwidth 49.60 GB/sec 48.00 GB/sec

Fragment processing monster? Looks that way. Want to see a board? Thought you'd never ask.