Reviews
Radeon X1K Family:
“Another driver checkbox addresses a long-standing complaint
of mine: angle-dependent anisotropic filtering. The R500 series includes
a new, higher quality anisotropic filtering method that's not angle dependent.
Most newer GPUs haven't included the ability to turn off angle-dependent
aniso, and I'm pleased to see that ATI has made it happen.”
TechReport.com
“With the X1000 series of boards, ATI have done something
that Nvidia doesn't have currently - a top to bottom line-up of cards that
feature the same high end features from the least expensive card to the most.”
Neoseeker.com
“… the ATI X1000 series video cards compete well with
their equally MSRP-priced competition. What is going to be best for the future
though is yet to be seen. If we want to make an educated guess, we could
say the X1000 series has more potential with its ability to do HDR with AA,
and it possibly has much faster dynamic branching performance. It all comes
down to the game content developers and what features they put into their
games.”
HardOCP.com
“Add on features like adaptive antialiasing and a higher-quality
anisotropic filtering mode, and it's clear that ATI's new offerings
are much more than a simple speed upgrade. From a feature-set perspective,
ATI appears
to match or exceed Nvidia's 7800 series at every turn.”
ExtremeTech.com
Architecture:
“On NVIDIA hardware, programmers need to be careful to make
sure that shader programs are designed to allow for about a thousand
pixels at a time to take the same path through a shader. Performance breaks
down
if different directions through a branch need to be taken in small
blocks of pixels. With ATI, every block of 16 pixels can take a different
path through
a shader. On G70 based hardware, blocks of a few hundred pixels must
take the same path. NV4x hardware requires larger blocks still - nearer to
900
in size. This tighter granularity possible on ATI hardware gives developers
more freedom in how they design their shaders and take advantage of
dynamic branching and flow control. Designing shaders to make sure every
32x32 block
of pixels are doing the same thing is more difficult than only needing
to worry about every 4x4 block of pixels.”
AnandTech.com
“With flow control active, the ATI cards are also much faster
than their NVIDIA counterparts. This is the sort of shader that can
benefit from ATI's finer threading granularity for looping and branching,
obviously.”
TechReport.com
Image Quality:
“Another driver checkbox addresses a long-standing complaint
of mine: angle-dependent anisotropic filtering. The R500 series includes
a new, higher quality anisotropic filtering method that's not angle
dependent. Most newer GPUs haven't included the ability to turn off angle-dependent
aniso, and I'm pleased to see that ATI has made it happen.”
TechReport.com
“As if all of these enhancements weren't enough to top off
ATI's already industry leading antialiasing (NVIDIA's grid aligned sample
patterns just can't touch ATI's fully programmable sample patterns in quality),
ATI has also vastly improved antialiasing performance with the X1000 generation
of hardware. Neither NVIDIA nor previous generation ATI hardware can match
the minimal performance hit the X1000 series incurs when enabling standard
AA.”
AnandTech.com
“As far as new features go, we are quite happy with the high
quality anisotropic filtering offered by ATI and we hope to see NVIDIA
follow suit in future products as well.”
AnandTech.com
“The color quality of the ATI renderings is significantly
better than Nvidia's, and all of ATI's tones come across much fuller
than Nvidia's.”
Neoseeker.com
