ATI Radeon X1950 XTX Benchmarks
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Editor’s Note: This article features only the X1950 XTX benchmarks. For the full review, read our full ATI Radeon X1950 XTX review.
The Radeon X1950 XTX really isn’t “new technology” in any meaningful way: It’s just new and faster RAM on an existing product, and some new cooling. We’ve talked about ATI’s technology to death and you know the score by now. Where the rubber meets the road on this product is in the performance benchmarks. Will 2GHz effective GDDR4 RAM really make that much of a difference?
To find out, we loaded our test cards into the following system. For Nvidia cards, we used the ForceWare 91.33 drivers. For ATI’s released cards we used Catalyst 6.8, and for the new X1950 XTX we used the official ATI driver that will ship with the card. Unfortunately, because of short testing lead time, we weren’t able to compare CrossFire and SLI using these new cards. We’ll have more on high-end dual graphics configurations—running at really high resolutions—in the near future.
We’ll be comparing the Radeon X1950 XTX against ATI’s previous best, the Radeon X9100 XTX, as well as a couple of high-end Nvidia based cards. There will be the SLI-on-a-card GeForce 7950 GX2 from eVGA, as well as XFX’s GeForce 7900 GTX XXX. The latter is worth taking particular note of, because it ships overclocked (the core is boosted from 650MHz to 700MHz, and the RAM from 800MHz to 900MHz).
| Component | Graphics Benchmark system |
| Processor | Core 2 Extreme X6800 |
| Motherboard and chipset | Intel 975XBX |
| Memory | 2 x 1GB DDR2 800 (5-5-5-12) |
| Hard drive | Seagate 7200. 7 160GB SATA drive |
| Optical drive | ATAPI DVD-ROM drive |
| Audio | Sound Blaster Audigy 2 |
| Operating system | Windows XP Professional with SP2 |
We use a variety of applications to measure 3D performance:
3DMark06: Futuremark’s latest synthetic 3D graphics and game performance benchmark is the only synthetic benchmark we use (that is, the only one that isn’t an actual game). It features fairly complex DX9 shaders and high dynamic range lighting, so it pushes graphics cards pretty hard and is a fairly good indication of overall relative graphics performance.
You can read much more about and its features in our feature article from last year.
Prey: Moving on from Doom 3 (it was getting a little long in the tooth), we’re now testing the latest and most graphically demanding title to use the Doom 3 engine. 3D Realms’ Prey doesn’t have a built-in timedemo, so we recorded our own.
Half-Life 2: The Lost Coast: Valve recently added high dynamic range rendering together with a graphics-intensive showcase level called The Lost Coast. The latest updates add a “Video Stress Test” option in the main menu. We run this and report the score.
Call of Duty 2: We have migrated from the demo version of Infinity Ward’s impressive WWII shooter to the full version, using our own custom recorded timedemo in an intense level during the African campaign of the single player game.
F.E.A.R.: Monolith’s new shooter is one of the prettiest, grittiest, and most graphically demanding games ever.
We use the built in performance test to measure average frame rate, with all settings turned up to the max. There is one exception: the Soft Shadows option doesn’t work properly with anti-aliasing. We disable it for all testing. Continued…
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Conclusion : ATI Radeon X1950 XTX 512MB DDR4
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Page 1 of 8 — It Ain’t Over Till the Fat Lady SingsPage 2 of 8 — The ATI Radeon X1950 XTX 512MB DDR4Page 3 of 8 — Test SetupPage 4 of 8 — Results — 3DMark05 Pro & 3DMark06 ProPage 5 of 8 — Results — Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory & F.
E.A.R (DirectX 9 Benchmarks)Page 6 of 8 — Results — Chronicles of Riddick: EFBB & Quake 4 (OpenGL SM2.0+ Benchmarks)Page 7 of 8 — Temperature TestingPage 8 of 8 — ConclusionPage 8 of 8 — Conclusion
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Conclusion
Just when we had thought that the battle for high-end graphics supremacy has reached an unofficial ceasefire with NVIDIA seemingly winning over the enthusiasts with both performance (the ‘SLI-on-a-card’ GeForce 7950 GX2) and mostly better value, ATI has revived its challenge with a late rally. While work continues from both sides on their respective next generation processors, the competition has intensified with ATI’s plans to release new products aimed squarely at NVIDIA’s best performers.
At the high-end segment, expect the Radeon X1950 XTX to be reinforced with the Radeon X1950 Pro as they take on the GeForce 7900 GTX and the GeForce 7900 GT. The mid-range Radeon X1650 PRO goes for the jugular of the GeForce 7600 GT.
Already, there’s talk in the grapevine that NVIDIA has plans to preempt ATI’s roadmap with a possible cut-down version of the GeForce 7900 GT, to be called predictably, the GeForce 7900 GS. Price cuts for the GeForce 7600 GT are also said to be forthcoming and more to be expected when they transition to the 80nm process. The next few months promise to be exciting for enthusiasts, as new products will need to be ranked and judged with their peers. Not to mention the potential price cuts. Already, the 256MB version of the X1900 XT comes at a stripped down price of US$279.
Like we predicted, a mere increase in memory clock speeds, DDR4 or not, doesn’t really help the Radeon X1950 XTX too much in performance. As the overclocked HIS Radeon X1900 XTX showed, the best Radeon X1900 XTX could still pose a threat to this new product. At the moment, it seems like present owners of a Radeon X1900 XTX or the XT version can forget about making a minor upgrade to the X1950 XTX, as there is no significant performance advantage from doing so.
We only saw a minor, incremental improvement for the benchmarks that we ran. Only if you are keen on playing all your games in full glory, with HDR and anti-aliasing, can we imagine the faster memory clocks paying off. ATI’s own benchmarks (which naturally showed the Radeon X1950 XTX as king of the hill) reflected this advantage, with all the games running at resolutions of up to 2560 x 1600.
Given the excellent cooler, one could probably overclock the core to the level of the HIS Radeon X1900 XTX IceQ3 and then perhaps we will find a more convincing score, but we’ll reserve our overclocking conclusion for a later date with real retail products. There is also the consideration to take that the improved memory performance and bandwidth will probably be much more of a boost when the Radeon X1950 XTX is used in a CrossFire configuration and with ATI pushing their triple card setup for GPU physics, it is too early to write off the benefits of GDDR4.
The good news is that just like AMD, ATI seems to be more competitive with better price propositions.
Initial rumors put the X1950 XTX at a US$399 price, which was a little over-deflated. As the launch of the card approaches, ATI has confirmed that the actual price tag would be around US$449, which thankfully still puts the X9150 XTX in direct competition against the GeForce 7900 GTX. With NVIDIA’s dual GPU GeForce 7950 GX2 not really threatened by the newcomer performance-wise, the Radeon X1950 XTX is probably banking on taking down its single core rival with a superior price/performance ratio at reduced thermal output. In the end, consumers should be the ones rubbing their hands in glee but they will still have to wait till September 14th before these cards are available in retail.
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Page 1 of 8 — It Ain’t Over Till the Fat Lady SingsPage 2 of 8 — The ATI Radeon X1950 XTX 512MB DDR4Page 3 of 8 — Test SetupPage 4 of 8 — Results — 3DMark05 Pro & 3DMark06 ProPage 5 of 8 — Results — Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory & F.E.A.R (DirectX 9 Benchmarks)Page 6 of 8 — Results — Chronicles of Riddick: EFBB & Quake 4 (OpenGL SM2.
0+ Benchmarks)Page 7 of 8 — Temperature TestingPage 8 of 8 — ConclusionPage 8 of 8 — Conclusion
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Calculations on video cards
The computing power of graphic processors will speed up not only video processing, but also the operation of a variety of programs. This will be possible thanks to the GPGPU technology.
Folding@home CPU and GPU: Similarities and Differences Programs that enter a computer’s central processing unit (CPU) are executed sequentially, one operation after another. In most cases, this approach is necessary, since the results of previous calculations are used to perform subsequent ones.
However, some operations are independent of one another and could well be performed at the same time — for example, when processing database queries, modeling natural phenomena, or encoding video. Parallelization of operations in solving such problems is limited by the structure of the CPU.
However, almost every computer has a great addition to the CPU — graphics processing unit (GPU). It was developed for this purpose in order to simultaneously calculate a huge number of points in the image. However, video processors only work through DirectX and OpenGL API (Application Programming Interface) graphical programming interfaces. Thanks to the technology of universal use of graphics processors (General-Purpose Computing on Graphics Processing Units, GPGPU), it became possible to use the GPU for a variety of tasks.
Programs based on GPGPU promise an unprecedented increase in computer performance. For example, the video encoding speed will increase by about 20 times.
Potential of the GPU: the best computer is a video card
The first step towards the universal use of video processors was the emergence of devices with support for DirectX 8. As you know, for DirectX 8, the GPU must have freely programmable pixel shaders (a kind of computing modules). Thanks to them (at least in theory) you can execute almost any program code.
When working with floating point numbers, the performance of the GPU is much higher than the CPU.
True, over the past four years, CPU performance has quadrupled — from 5 Gflop / s (Pentium 4) to 20 Gflop / s (Core 2 Duo), but GPU performance has increased over the same period from 15 Gflop / s (ATI Radeon 9700 ) up to an incredible 520 Gflop/s (NVIDIA GeForce 8800 series).
The advantage in computing speed is due to the increase in the number of tenders in the graphics chip. If the program uses all shaders at once, then the calculations will be performed simultaneously in 48 threads (as, for example, in ATI Radeon X1950 XTX). The fastest quad-core CPUs run in four threads, while commonly available dual-core CPUs run in two threads.
(inset) GPGPU to accelerate biological research
The very first GPGPU application for the general public was Stanford University’s Folding@home (F@h). In this project, the calculation of the folding and unfolding of protein molecules is distributed among the computers of many thousands of users. The results of the calculations are used to identify the causes of various diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. The use of the GPU will significantly increase the speed of calculations: after all, the performance of the Radeon X1950 in operations of this kind is almost 20 times higher than that of the Core 2 Duo E6600.
Processor vs. video card: differences in details
Maybe now the CPU is not needed, and a modern personal computer will cost only one video chip? Not quite pack. The advantage of GPUs is limited to a narrow scope of specific tasks: the data packets to be processed should not depend on each other, and these packets should be almost identical. There are no such restrictions for the CPU: the central processing unit is still able to work with any type of data and any program.
In other words, the GPU is the best choice for processing data, while the central one is better for solving problems.
Prospects for development: the tools have already been created
The introduction of new technology was hampered primarily by the lack of appropriate software. Until the end of 2006, there were no standard SDK (Software Development Kit) libraries that could be used to write programs for the GPGPU platform in programming languages such as Java, C or C ++. I had to program using graphical interfaces, DirectX and OpenGL. But graphical interfaces are devoid of many computational operations. This limited set of instructions made it difficult to port existing programs to the GPGPU environment. In addition, the functions of GPUs from different manufacturers differ so much that a program designed for one chip rarely works on a competitor chip, and this makes it unsuitable for the mass market.
Nevertheless, major video chip manufacturers clearly see great potential in GPGPU technology and have already created GPGPU libraries: Close to the Metal (AMD) and Cuda (NVIDIA). Both sets of libraries work with the compiler for the C programming language. In addition, last September AMD introduced the FireGL video card, conceived only to work with GPGPU applications. The first servers with a graphics cluster are already running.
200 times faster: an unprecedented increase in speed
Modern developments in combining hardware and software components of a PC have finally opened wide access to the potential of video cards for programmers. True, there are still very few applications that use the capabilities of GPGPU, but they also demonstrate the advantages of the new technology. The most famous GPGPU programs today are tools for calculating physical effects, as well as the well-known project of Stanford University Folding@home. Moving in the same direction, NVIDIA claims that with the help of the new technology, it was able to speed up the process of modeling exchange rates by almost 200 times.
Perhaps in the near future we will have CPU-free anti-virus programs and web servers that process database queries at a tremendous speed.
List of games for ATI Radeon X1950 Pro
DEXP_KM-5002BU OVERVIEW
List of games for ATI Radeon X1950 Pro
This article (list of games for ATI Radeon X19 video card0063 Air Rivals
Alganon
Alien Swarm
Aliens vs Predator
All New World of Lemmings
All Points Bulletin: Reloaded
Allods Online
Alpha Prime
Alternativa
Altitude
Amnesia: The Dark Descent
Anarchy Online
Angels Online
Anomaly: Warzone Earth
APOX
Arcadia
ArcaniA: Gothic 4
Archlord
Area-51
Argo Online
ARMA 2: Operation Arrowhead
Armed and Dangerous
Asda 2: Evolution
Ashen Empires
Assassin’s Creed
Assassin’s Creed 2
Atlantica Online
Audition
Aura: Fate of the Ages
Avencast: Rise of the Mage
B
Back to the Future: The Game
Baldur’s Gate
Baldur’s Gate6 Enhanced Edition Baldur’s Gate9 : Tales of the Sword Coast
Baldur’s Gate 2: Shadows of Amn
Baldur’s Gate 2: Throne of Bhaal
Batman: Arkham Asylum
Battle of Destiny
Battlefield 1942
Battlefield 1942: Secret Weapons of WWII
Battlefield 1942: The Road to Rome
Battlefield 2
Battlefield 2: Special Forces
Battlefield 2142
Battlefield 2142: Northern Strike
Battlefield Heroes
Battlefield Play4Free
Battlefield Vietnam
BattleForge
Battlestar Galactica Online
Bioshock
Bioshock 2
Blacklight: Retribution
Blacklight: Tango Down
Blade Kitten
Blood Rayne 2
Blowout
Blue Toad Murder Files
Boiling Point
Booster Trooper
Borderlands: The Pre-Sequal
Borderlands 2
Bounty Bay Online
Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30
Burn Zombie Burn
C
Cabal Online
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth 90 Call of Duty
of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
Call of Duty: United Offensive
Chaser
Chime
Chrome
Chrome: SpecForce
Cold War
Combat Arms
Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2
Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3
Command & Conquer: Renegade
Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars
Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight
Commandos: Strike Force
Condemned: Criminal Origins
Constantine
Crashday
Creature Conflict: The Clan Wars
Crime3 Cronous Craft 9006
Crysis: Warhead
CT Special Forces Fire For Effect
D
Dark Horizon
Dark Messiah of Might and Magic
Darkest of Days
DarkStar One
Darwinia
Day of Defeat: Source
DC Universe Online
DCS: Black Shark
Dead Space 2
Deadlight
Death to Spies
Death to Spies: Moment of Truth
Dekaron
Delve Deeper
Desert Rats vs Afrika Korps
Deus De Exus
: Human Revolution
Deus Ex: Invisible War
Disciples 3: Renaissance
Doc Clock: The Toasted Sandwich of Time
DogFighter
Doom 2: Hell on Earth
Doom 3
Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil
Dragon Age: Origins
Dragon Age: Origins — Awakening
Dragon Age 2
Dragonica
Dreamfall: The Longest Journey
Driver 3
Driver 4: Parallel Lines
Droplitz
Duke Nukem Forever
Dungeon Siege 2
Cal3 Dungeonland
The Duty3 Dungeons Storm
E
Empire: Total War
Enemy Territory Quake Wars
Enemy Zero
EVE Online
F
F. E.A.R
F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin
Fable: The Chapter
Fable 3
Fallen Earth: Blood Sports
Fantasy Tennis
Farcry
Farcry 2
Fiesta Online
Final Doom
Fish Fillets 2
Formula 1 2010
Free Realms
Future Wars
G
Gotcha
Gothic
Gothic 2
Gothic 2: Night of the Raven
Gothic 3
Gothic 3: Forsaken Gods
Grand Fantasia
Grand Theft Auto 4
Grand Theft Auto 4: Episodes from Liberty City
Greed Corp
Ground Control 2: Operation Exodus
Guild Wars
Guild Wars 2
Gun
H
Half-Life
Half-Life: Blue Shift
Half-Life: Opposing Force
Half-Life 2
Half-Life 2: Episode One Episode Two
Halo: Combat Evolved
Halo 2
Haunted House
Hearts of Iron 3
Hearts of Iron 3: Semper Fi
Heat Online
Hello Kitty Online
Heroes of Annihilated Empires
Hitman: Codename 47
Hitman 2: Silent3 Hitman 3: Contracts
Hitman 4: Blood Money
Hoard
Homefront
Homeworld 2
Horrid Henry
I
IGI 2 Covert Strike
J
Jade Dynasty
James Bond 007: Blood Stone
James Bond 007: Quantum of Solace
Jolly Rover
Just Cause
Just Cause 2
K
Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days
Keepsake
Kerbal Space Program
King Arthur: The Role-playing Wargame
King Arthur: The Saxons
Knights Of The Temple: Infernal Crusade 9L EverQuest
Lost Horizon
M
Mafia 2
Magicka
Major League Baseball 2K10
Mass Effect 2
Max and The Magic Marker
Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne
Medal of Honor
Medal of Honor: Airborne
Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault
Medieval: Total War
Medieval 2: Total War
Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance
Metin 2
Minecraft
Monday Night Combat
Moonbase Alpha
Mount & Blade
Myst III: Exile
Myst IV: Revelation
Myst Online: URU Live
Myst V: End of Ages
N
Nail’d
Napoleon: Total War
Nation Red
NecroVisioN: Lost Company
Need for Speed: Carbon
Need for Speed: Most Wanted
Need for Speed: World
Neverend
Neverwinter Nights
No Time To Explain
NosTale
NyxQuest: Kindred Spirits
O
Oh No! More Lemmings
Orcs Must Die
Orcs Must Die 2
Order of War
Original War
Overlord
Overlord 2
P
Pariah
Perimeter
Pool Paradise
Portal 2
Pound of Ground
Prey
Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands
Project Earth
Project Freedom
Project Snowblind
Proteus
ProtoGalaxy
Psi-Ops
Puzzle Agent
Puzzle Dimension
Q
Quake 2
Quake 4
Quake Live
R
R.