ATI has launched a variety of bang-for-the-buck GPUs this year; the 16-pipe X800 XL and the eight-pipe X800 GT are particularly impressive. In fact, if it wasn’t for Shader Model 3.0 support, we’d have difficulty understanding why ATI even built this 12-pipe X1600 XT.
But ATI now has a whole family of GPUs that support SM 3.0, all of which are manufactured using a 90nm process that enables impressive core clock speeds—in this case, 590MHz.
The entire X1000 series also features an innovative “ring bus” memory architecture that enables ATI to hyper-clock the 256MB of GDDR3 memory on the X1600 XT to the tune of 690MHz. Despite these high speeds, this card requires only a single-slot cooler (the appeal of which is severely watered down by a very noisy fan).
Aside from feats of engineering, what has ATI wrought with the X1600 XT? Not much that we’re impressed with. In our real-world benchmark tests, this card’s performance was akin to nVidia’s GeForce 6800 and ATI’s X800 XL. That means it falls well behind cards based on nVidia’s slightly more-expensive GeForce 6800 GT, and it’s leagues behind the much-more costly GeForce 7800 GTX.
ATI’s reference-design X1600 XT squeaked past the Radeon X800 GT and the GeForce 6800 on most scores, but ATI’s mediocre OpenGL support enabled the nVidia card to outperform ATI by more than four frames per second in Doom 3. Move into 16-pipe territory, and both nVidia’s 6800 GT and ATI’s own X800 XL give the X1600 XT the beat-down.
The lesson here is clear: When it comes to GPUs, ground-breaking manufacturing processes and high clock speeds are no substitute for an abundance of parallel pipelines.
Month Reviewed: December 2005
VERDICT: 6
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