Photos by Banjarconverto on Buzznet

Friday, January 27, 2006

Personal notes: X1900 XT in comparison to X1800 XT

A glimpse at X1900 XT additional traits:

  • 90 nm process (this is not an improvement over X1800! just my note).

  • 3 times the number of ALUs (Arithmetic Logic Unit) compared to X1800 XT , that is 16 x 3 = 48 ALUs or 'shader processor'.
  • This increase in ALUs accounts for the 20% more transistors that had to be added to the GPU.
  • Inclusion of 'Fetch4' - a method to speed up Shadow Mapping.
Taken from HardOCP :
"It works by exploiting the fact that most textures are composed of color values, each consisting of four components (Red, Green, Blue, and Alpha or transparency). The texture units are designed to sample and filter all four components from one texture address simultaneously. However, when looking up different types of textures with single-component values (such as shadow maps), Fetch4 instead allows four values from adjacent addresses to be sampled simultaneously. This effectively increases the texture-sampling rate by a factor of 4.

With Ultra-Threading technology providing fast flow control and Fetch4 providing fast texture lookups, the Radeon X1900 can render attractive soft shadows at speeds approaching those of traditional hard-edged shadow mapping techniques."

  • Ramp up Higher-Z by adding 50% more on-chip memory compared to X1800 XT.
All above would justify on beating 7800 GTX 512. What a recipe for success!

Thursday, January 26, 2006

The new King : X1900 from ATi!

Hail the new king of graphics in PC! Well, that's the story that invaded the graphics cards industry today. The new pixel accelerator from ATi seems to bring the company back into its winning track as it unleashes the potential behind its R580 architecture. Well, the credit has to go R520 too. Read over at Anandtech to know why. It seems that the flexibility of X1600 XT design has something to do with it.

Clearly, NVIDIA and Ati have chosen to embrace the path of 'more pixel shader operation per pipelines rather than blasting all pixels/textures to the output at nonsense rate'. If this is the new trend, then I wonder when I'll be watching a card equipped with 20,24,28 or 32 ROPs in the coming years. Maybe the Force be with them!

Another big story surrounding this event is the successful attempt by Ati to avoid 'yet another paper launch', thus giving itself another boost of success for the card. Following the announcement is the direct availability of 4 flavours of X1900 in the market: X1900 XTX, X1900 XT, X1900 Crossfire and X1900 AIW (All-In-Wonder). Way to go Ati!

Here are the specs:


X1900 XTX

X1900 XT

X1900 Crossfire

X1900 AIW

Core Clock

650

625

625

500

Memory Clock

775

725

725

480

Pixel shader (pipelines)

48

48

48

48

Texture unit (TMUs)

16

16

16

16

Vertex shaders

8

8

8

8

ROPs

16

16

16

16

Onboard Memory

512 MB

512 MB

512 MB

512 MB

MSRP

$649

$549

$599

$500

My personal opinion: Another credit should be given to NVIDIA for driving Ati nuts in achieving a successful launch for X1900. It's true that a good competition will give us, customers a very good impact.

I'll be back with the analysis of the benchmarks found in some reviews of X1900 after this!

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Benchmarking X800 GTO in NFSMW

I did some benchmarks for my ATi X800 GTO on Need For Speed Most Wanted, NFSMW. The purpose is to measure the performance of my graphics card, X800 GTO PCI Express in this game. Here is the test setup:

OS: Windows XP Pro Service Pack 2
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3000+ overclock to 2250 MHz (250 HTT x 9)
2 x 512 MB Kingston Value RAM (Dual Channel)
40 GB HDD PATA
Sapphire X800 GTO (500/550)
Omega driver 2.6.75a (based on Catalyst 5.11)
ATi Tool 0.24

Below is the graphics adapter settings:


ATI graphics card display setting

Direct3D desktop setting

As can be seen here, I like to keep the quality of texture and mipmapping to ‘Performance’ level, as I am a framerate freak. I’m also not sure how significant these settings can be to the game.

To obtain screenshots and perform benchmarks in this game, I used a little tool called FRAPS. For overclocking my graphics card, I used ATi Tool.

Now, here are the in-game video settings that I used to play NFSMW.


NFSMW-my benchmark setup

NFSMW-my benchmark setup2

It is obvious that I left some important settings (or should I say eye-candy) off, or reduced as I realize they are going to tax the performance severely if I maxed them out. My settings here represent my best gaming experience; a mixture of speed and realism while playing NFSMW.

To benchmark the game, I selected a Career Mode, and then chose Free Roam. I decided to create my own sprint circuit for the benchmark by selecting a small segment out of the whole city area. The benchmark ran for 60 seconds and then was recorded in the log file by FRAPS.

Now, at the same time, I have another intention regarding this benchmark. I want to see the impact of varying the level of Texture Filtering in this game. Therefore, I varied it from Low, Medium and High (represented by the bar: Low-left, Medium-middle, High-right). The reason is that I realized by making the texture clearer and sharper, the game look more beautiful and realistic to me.

Here are the results for the initial benchmark:

Texture Filtering (or Anisotropy Filtering (AF) implementation) = Low
Min FPS = 39, Max FPS = 63, Average = 52.5

With this early benchmark, I varied the level of AF in the game. I further my test by investigating the effect of varying core clock and memory clock to the game. My point is, as I suspect that increasing AF will affect the FPS, I want to see which clock can compensate for the loss of FPS.

Further test revealed these results (initial result is also included):

AF

Min FPS

Max FPS

Avg FPS

Core/Mem

Low

39

63

52.5

500/550

Medium

37

71

52.3

500/550

High

34

59

47.9

500/550

High

35

60

48.3

500/600*

High

37

61

51.4

550/550**

I was interested in the average FPS in this benchmark, as it represented the whole performance throughout the game possibly at any scenes. A few points can be made here:

-I lost about 5 FPS going from Low to High in AF at default clocks.

-At High AF, I gained only about 0.4 FPS (0.83%) by increasing the memory clock to 600 MHz.

-At High AF, I gained about 3.5 FPS (7.3%) by increasing the core clock to 550 MHz. I almost gained the FPS that I lost by increasing the AF level this way.

Obviously, increasing the pixel/texel fillrate does help to sustain the increase in texture quality. The increase in memory bandwidth however doesn’t help much here, unless the graphics card is bottlenecking in that department. In this case, the pixel fillrate has increased to 550x12= 6.6 Gpixels/sec from 12x500= 5 Gpixels/sec.

Of course, there are a lot of assumptions taken here, such as the consistency of the circuit behaviour (traffic, route) that I took for each readings etc etc. However, I just need the results and some numbers to play with.

There are many things that I can do to improve the results, such as defragmenting the drive before testing, reinstall new driver for the video card etc.

Just expect to see better results though. I know NVIDIA 6800 GS perform better in NFSMW, in fact, most NVIDIA graphics cards perform better than ATi in NFSMW. However, one thing that I like about X800 GTO, is that I can overclock it like a B!

Monday, January 23, 2006

Sticky! : 6800 GS Collection of reviews

This entry is dedicated to list all reviews of GeForce 6800 GS from all manufacturers available on the web. The list will be edited from time to time to include more reviews for the card.

Point Of View GeForce 6800 GS AGP at Guru3D
Leadtek PX6800 GS Extreme at BitTech.net
EVGA e-GeForce 6800 GS at Techware Labs
XFX GeForce 6800 GS at PC Perspective
XFX GeForce 6800 GS XXX Edition at NVNews
MSI NX6800GS-TD256E at HardwareZone

I admire this for a reason that it really competes with 6800 GT at much cheaper price (MSRP USD250, but currently I saw it for less than USD200 around the web). Although intend to compete one-to-one with X800 GTO, this card smokes GTO big time!

6800 GS AGP unlockable????

Oh My! I just can't believe it. Another good card is reported to be unlockable to 16 pipelines! And it happens to be an AGP card. Apparently because it uses NV40 core (which vanilla 6800 AGP uses) the same principle also applies to GS variants (AGP only!). Well, that explains it; they are actually the same core.

However, the success rate is not 100% where there are several damaged unlocked quad pipes reported. If you experienced this, it is advisable that you locked the quad pipelines again.

I do understand that any 6800 GS AGP who knows about this will definitely try their luck at unlocking the card. Why? Personally, I think the gripe about this card is;

1. The card is priced at similar or higher than its PCI-E counterpart. Why? Mostly due to extra cost for HSI bridge being used.

2. The core clock for AGP card is significantly lower than that of PCI-E, that is 350 MHz compared to 425 MHz.

If I own one of this graphics card, I will try to unlock it too!

My GF4 Ti 4400















My third video card in my life (well, the fourth if you consider S3 Virge 3D to be a graphics accelerator, my first video card). MSI GeForce 4 Ti4400, once a force to reckon with. Along with his elder brother, GF4 Ti4600, they are the first to sports more than 1 vertex shader (I think!) It's two.

I can say that this card is an incremental improvement, refreshments from its predecessors. I mean, basically, higher clocks, add more of this, more of that etc. Bought this card for RM1000 in 2002, it served well in rendering Quake 3 experiences for me.

Its service was put to an end in 2004 when I purchased another graphics card. Currently, the card is having some problems in displaying images to screen. I think it's not related to 3D rendering, because it happens also in 2D environment e.g. desktop. I'm still working on it tho.

Saturday, January 21, 2006

DailyTech's early review of X1900


It is true that the release of X1900 video card from ATi is getting closer. DailyTech has all the story about it and they even conducted an early benchmark of this graphics card.

Reading the article at that site makes me realize my biggest mistakes ever: the understanding of pixel pipelines and ROPs (Raster Operation Units). It makes me realizes that I have overcalculated the specs for 7800 GTX (or G70 architecture in general). 7800 GTX still boasts nearly similar pixel fillrate as 6800 Ultra, that is around 6.8 Gpixels/sec. I thought the ROPs for 7800 GTX is 24 (a common assumption many people do is the no. of pixel pipelines = no. of ROPs).

ExtremeTech has an article that explains this (for those who have already realized this, don't bang me for this!).

Back to X1900, many people including myself believe that this is what X1800 should have been.
My opinion is ATi has missed one product cycle to compete with NVIDIA for the same range of video card. For example;

6800 Ultra vs. X800 XT
7800 GTX vs. X1800 XT (this is where X1900 should be)
G71 vs. X1900 (G71 might beat X1900 here, who knows!)

Maybe other people have different opinion about this, maybe I'm wrong, but ATi certainly needs to catch up. X1900 might not hold the crown for a long time, as rumours regarding G71 is also appearing (only rumours!). Anyway, X1900 can be considered a true contender from ATi at the moment, period!




Friday, January 20, 2006

NFSMW - The Misfortunate Cross!

How many of you came across Cross during pursuit? Just in case you don't know which one, he drives the black corvette with white lightning stripes! Don't worry, he's not the star of the pursuit, but the one behind him is!

Sneak peek at 7900 GTX

Possibly the next 90-nm GPU from NVIDIA is dubbed G71, or 7900 GTX which is said to be launch in March!. It is also said to sport 32-pipelines of pixel processing, core clock of 700-750 MHz, and memory clock of 800-900 MHz GDDR3 (1.6 GHz to 1.8 GHz).

My personal opinion: this doesn't look like a next gen architecture from NVIDIA, but I'd rather say it's an incremental improvements over G70; more pipelines, ramp up clocks. Since G70 is almost twice the power of NV40, G71 graphics cards could retain the same increment due to another addition of 8 pixel pipelines. That of course, until we hear more news about this card.

Rumours regarding X1900 (R580) specs!

Personally, if this rumours is true, then I can safely say that R520 buyers are going to be devastated, cheated and so on because it looks like R520 acts just as a temporary solution, a filler until the real deal video card from ATi arrives. Face it, after a delayed launch of X1800 series in October, it takes just about another 3-4 month before ATi 'paper launch' (possibly!) another high end products.

Here we go:
- 48 pipelines ?? (it turns out to be 16-pipes with 3 pixel shaders each pipes!)
- 650 MHz core
- 750 MHz (1.5 GHz) memory
Above was taken from Sapphire X1900 XTX rumoured specs (I went to Sapphire siteand the specs are gone!)

Let's count some fillrate shall we?:
Pixel fillrate = 48 x 650 MHz = 31.2 Gpixels/sec. Is this true?? My X800 GTO fillrate is 12 x 500 Mhz = 6 Gpixels/sec. 5 times more! That's...emm (reaching for my pocket!).

Edited on 21 Jan:
It turns out that I was wrong about the calculations. X1900 has 16 ROPs, which means the peak pixel fillrate is 16 x 650 MHz = 10.4 Gpixels/sec.

GeForce 7300 GS emerged!

Another card from NVIDIA has emerged, GeForce 7300 GS. They didn't release 7800 GS, but they released this 4-pipelines card, so consider it as a low-end video card. It's meant to directly compete with ATi X1300. The core has everything that 7800 core can offer, S.M. 3.0, HDR, Purevideo etc.. oh, another thing, the core is based on 90 nm process (NVIDIA's first!).

I wonder how it's gonna perform with specs like this:
- Core = 550 MHz
- Memory = 400 MHz DDR2 (varies depending on manufacturers)
- Memory interface = 64-bit (that's poor!)
- 3 vertex shaders.
- SLI is not supported at the moment (sorry!)

Personally, I reckon that this video card will be better than X1300. What I think is that G70-based core is architecturally more efficient than R520 and its derivatives, with the exception of X1800 series (come one, 16 pipeline being a tad shy behind (and sometimes better!) than 24-pipeline counterpart? That has to count for something!).

Thursday, January 19, 2006

3DMark 06 is around the corner!


Believe it or not, 3DMark 06 is here. I myself never 'mastered' the score in 3DMark05 yet. Anyway, here are among its new features:
  • HDR - High Dynamic Range is included!
  • CSM - Cascaded Shadow Maps - new type of of depth shadow is implemented.
  • Shader Model 3.0 (I thought this was included in 3DMark 05 already?)
  • New Test: Game Test 4 called Deep Freeze - it's about an abandoned Antartic base.
  • New CPU Test - tougher physics algorithms are implemented. Final score will include
    CPU test score, unlike previous 3DMark which exclude it.
Now, regarding the video cards, it seems that my 'enhanced' version of X800 GTO model, which is Sapphire X800 GTO 2 (modded into 16 pipelines for the benchmarking) didn't shine that much. In fact, it lost too many times to 6800 GS, a dedicated 12-pipeline card. Come on ATi, don't make me regret buying your card! And this isn't even an OpenGL test yet.
Just read it over at FiringSquad for the full story. I have something to think about!

edited on 20 January;
  1. 6800 GS tops all test in Shader Model 2.0, Game 1 and Game 2 test.
  2. X1600 XT tops all test in Shader Model 3.0 and Game 3, followed closely by 6800 GS in the second place.
  3. X1600XT and 6800 GS performed very close to each other in Game 4 test.
Where the heck is X800 GTO 16? Far from it.

X800 GTO under the stress in NFSMW!


This scene is captured when I was playing the Challenge mode, Challenge No. 64 if I'm not mistaken. You are required to achieve 200,000 cost to state and evade the pursuit using tricked out Fiat Punto. Still fail to complete it! Posted by Picasa

My video card seems to handle this game fine, although for the best framerates, I didn't max out the setting in NFSMW. You could notice the level of anisotropy filtering used here; just look at tree on the lower right. The texture is not well laid out there.

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

The current situation

I'm about to sell my PC to anybody who are interested. It is built out of my spare components as I constantly upgrade my PC specs to meet up with the demanding PC gaming scenario (I blame Doom 3, Quake 4, FEAR for this!).

The secondhand PC specs are as below:

AMD Athlon XP 2200+
512MB DDR333 DDR SDRAM
40 GB HDD
16X DVD-ROM
Integrated Graphics
Integrated 5.1 Sound
Integrated 10/100 LAN
Keyboard, Mouse
17-inch Refurbished Monitor

A few people already called stating their interest for this RM600 package. hmmm...

Anyway, currently I am pretty much satisfied with the performance of my Sapphire X800 GTO Fireblade on Quake 4. Having spent about 3 hours tweaking and benchmarking, I managed to get around 88 FPS at 1024x768 with 4xAF and 4xAA. Not the best around but it felt okay. I didn't turn on the shadows, but I'm planning to set it on and see how much it will tax on my system. I wonder if switching to SATA will enhance the performance a little bit...

My current PC Specs:

AMD 64 3000+ (1.8GHz) OCed to 2.25 GHz (250HTT x9)
Abit K8N
2x512 MB RAM Kingston CL3 Dual-channel
40 GB HDD (main)
80 GB HDD (backup)
Sapphire X800 GTO (OCed to 525/550)
LiteOn DVD-Writer
Power Atrix 5000 Casing
Coolermaster 380W TruePower

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

A song to capture the moment

Dragostea din tei by O-zone
=======================

Ma ia hii
Ma ia huu
Ma ia ha
Ma ia haha (x4)

Alo, salut, sunt eu, un haiduc
si te rog, iubirea mea, primeste fericirea. Alo, alo, sunt eu, Picasso
ti-am dat beep si sunt voinic
Dar sa stii, nu-ti cer nimic.

Vrei sa pleci dar nu-mã, nu-mã iei
Nu-mã, nu-ma iei, nu-mã, nu-mã, nu-mã iei
Chipul tãu si dragostea din tei
Mi-amintesc de ochii tãi.

Vrei sã pleci dar nu-mã, nu-mã iei
Nu-mã, nu-mã iei, nu-mã, nu-mã, nu-mã iei
Chipul tãu si dragostea din tei
Mi-amintesc de ochii tãi.

Te sun, sã-ti spun, ce simt, acum
Alo, iubirea mea sunt eu, fericirea.
Alo, alo, sunt iarasi eu, Picasso
ti-am dat beep si sunt voinic
Dar sã stii, nu-ti cer nimic.

Vrei sã pleci dar nu-mã, nu-ma iei
Nu-mã, nu-mã iei, nu-mã, nu-mã, nu-mã iei..........

Guess what I've come out with :

nvidia radeon ati geforce

A revelation

Today, I just realize something....a new video card

I need 7800 GT!