Thoughts
ATI's new mid-range power-house has arrived with a significant splash. Effectively dropping R420 (well, R423 with its native PCI Express interface) onto TSMC's 110nm process, chopping half the fragment shaders out and halving the memory bus width, has enabled ATI to create the cost-effective, powerful mid-range part that they wanted.
Vertex shader performance is class-leading, on-chip video decode is class-leading, pixel shader performance is very strong, and apart from a few hiccoughs with a couple of tests, overall performance was very strong. In our mix of mainly theoretical tests, it doesn't oust the 6600 GT in terms of overall performance, but neither does it yeild. ATI fixed the X700 XT's clocks at the very last minute, and it shows. Also, ATI once again feed a GPU with just the right amount of bandwidth (you need to scale both core and memory together for meaningful performance jumps), judging things very well.
It's not as feature packed as its major rival, and in that sense it falls down a little. However, the GPU's major pixel shader profile under DirectX 9.0 means that developers are able to target both mid-range architectures and not be running up against PS2.0 instruction limits, they key to emulating most initial Shader Model 3.0 effects. With ATI's mid-range hardware also supporing vertex instancing and 3Dc normal map compression, it's not feature-lite in any sense, just it's not as feature-heavy as NV43.
My biggest concerns with RV410 lie not in performance or the feature set, but in availability and thermal performance. Examination of the two reference boards we had shows that RV410 isn't a cool wee beasty under load, when clocked at 475MHz. Even with a copper cooler, some likely thermally-related issues cropped up during testing and we're keen to get a further sample back in-house to eliminate some specific issues.
Availability, at least to retail, seems an issue too. It's no secret that ATI's sample allocation for the press hardware was on the low side this time around, and while that's no real meaningful metric by which to guage immediate shipping capacity, it doesn't inspire confidence. I ask ATI, is RV410 ready to ship in large numbers?
ATI do as well a job as NVIDIA at creating a mid-range powerhouse part from their flagship architectures, and that's what we like to see.
Price wise, ATI's official price point of $199 for the XT variant matches NVIDIA's agressive pricing for their 6600 GT. It's a race for both boards to get to retail so we can see if those assertions are correct.
While it was a shame we couldn't include specific X700 PRO performance numbers and analysis, it's possibly the more attractive board, based on the early analysis I performed. We'll cover that discretely and explain why as soon as we're able to.
Do I recommend X700 XT over 6600 GT? No, not in the configurations evaluated for their respective articles, but there's very little in it, and retail availability and pricing will decide what you the customer picks up.
It displaces 9800 XT with consumate ease, an AGP version is highly anticipated, but NVIDIA are arguably pushing more of the right buttons with NV43 at the time of writing.
