X800 Pro Video Card 8X AGP ATI $399.99 Click Here Sean Gibson - email

Introduction

We've been lucky enough to catch some of the best technologies when it comes to Video Cards here at NGE, and this time around we're taking a look at one of the most popular video cards on the market today - the ATI X800 Pro AGP Edition. Boasting a no-nonsense amount of power, 256MB of RAM, and a 475MHz Core Clock Rate, it's one of the fastest video cards you'll find right now, and almost unequaled in cost performance.

Obviously, you're getting a much stronger, faster, and more advanced card than what's been released previously in 2004. What really separates this card from the others is the Memory Bandwidth technology, as well as some of the new "HD" gaming technologies that ATI has developed for this card.

Features

The ATI X800 Pro offers the following features:

• 160 million transistors on 0.13 micron low-k fabrication process
• Up to sixteen extreme parallel pixel pipelines
• Six programmable vertex shader pipelines
• 256-bit quad-channel GDDR3 memory interface
• AGP 8X support or PCI Express support
• Support for Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 programmable vertex and pixel shaders in hardware
• DirectX® 9.0 Vertex Shaders
• Vertex programs up to 65,280 instructions with flow control
• Single cycle trigonometric operations (SIN & COS)
• DirectX® 9.0 Extended Pixel Shaders
• 128-bit, 64-bit & 32-bit per pixel floating point color formats
• Multiple Render Target (MRT) support
• Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL® via extensions
• 2x/4x/6x Anti-Aliasing modes
• 2x/4x/8x/16x Anisotropic Filtering modes
• High quality 4:1 Normal Map Compression
• 3-level Hierarchical Z-Buffer with Early Z Test
• Lossless Z-Buffer Compression (up to 48:1)
• Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
• FULLSTREAM video de-blocking technology for Real, DivX, and WMV9 formats
• VIDEOSOAP noise removal filtering for captured video
• MPEG1/2/4 decode and encode acceleration

The 256MB of on-board GDDR3 memory is awesome ... also the 2x/4x/6x Anti-Aliasing modes are perfect for some of the new, high-level graphic intensive games that just came on the market, speficially EverQuest II .

There's also something to be said for the latest Catalyst Driver Set (4.8), as it's the first driver set from either of the major video card manufacturers to have an overclocking utility built in. The highly easy to use and easy to understand "Overdrive" utility allows the driver set to automatically overclock the core of the video card to give you a little extra power.

Retail Bundle

Retail package include...

• ATI X800 Pro Graphics Board
• Install CD
• Composite and S-Video Cables
• HDTV Out Cable
• DVI to VGA Adapter
• Manuals
• Power Cable Connector

card benchmark & testing

We used the same system we tested other video cards on for this review...

Test System Specifications:
- AMD 2500+XP Processor
- GigaByte GA-7NNXP nForce2 Motherboard
- 512 MB PC2700 Dual Channel DDR RAM
- Windows XP Home
- DirectX 9.0b

We used the following for games using the popular FRAPS Utility which allows you to grab the framerate for ANY game you play, record the framerate as you play, and export it to a text file. Using this, we captured the frame rates using three different video cards with these three very popular titles (all were set in 1280x1024 mode):

- 3D Mark 03: A very popular benchmarking utility.

- Far Cry : One of the more advanced games on the market, Ubisoft has made a great game to benchmark cards on.

- Doom III : A very popular title to say the least

We also used the popular Futurmark "3DMark03" utility to see how well the card performed.

3D Mark 2003 - DX9 Benchmarking

3DMark 03 is the latest installment in the popular 3DMark series. 3DMark03 measures modern PCs’ 3D graphics performance. The numbers...

ATI X800 PRO SCORE: 8117 Marks

As far as cards that it comes close to in this test ... there's not much comparison. Chances are, if you're upgrading from one of the cards mentioned in this test to the ATI X800 Pro, you're going to see a serious jump in performance.

Doom III

Doom III is a very advanced game to benchmark ...

far cry (1280x1024 resolution, all max)

This is one of the more exciting titles out right now that really puts video cards to the test. This is perhaps the best "real world" test that we put the card through. The numbers ....

As you can see the ATI X800 Pro performed above and beyond the other video cards. This is the test, in the game most recently released, that we saw the most difference in performance.

installation

The video card is quite easily the easiest thing to install in your computer. ATI has made it very simple with this card, with an all-encompassing software CD for drivers and suite programs. Simply uninstall the OLD drivers first (some people forget this step), turn off your computer, take out the old card, and put in the new card. Don't forget to insert a power plug to make sure the card gets the juice it needs (otherwise it won't work).

Turn on the system, insert the CD or simply download latest Catalyst drivers (version 4.11 now right here) and install them. After that - you're ready to go!

impressions of performance

When you spend about $390 on a video card, the reason you are doing so is for one purpose only - to kick some pixel butt when it comes to using your favorite graphic design programs AND play the latest PC video games. No gamer in the real world has unlimited money to keep upgrading video cards every 4 to 6 months to keep up with the latest technologies - so for many of us it's important to keep our money invested with the right hardware to maximize the value and extend the life of the money we spend on hardware. It's with this sentiment that I look at the ATI X800 Pro video card, as it's performance in benchmarks and regular Windows XP usage is far superior to anything I had reviewed in the past. The driver set is very impressive, and I love the fact that ATI has included an automatic "idiot's way" to overclock the GPU.

The gaming performance of the ATI X800 Pro, as you can see from the results above, was impressive as there's a noticeable jump from existing cards that most gamers are using in their rigs right now - some of which are still really close in retail price. The GDDR3 and amount of Vertex Pipelines is extremely impressive ... and I definitely want to say that none of the features on this card (including the impressive clock speed of the VPU) is overkill. The games being released now in 2004 and especially in 2005 will *require* these kinds of specifications. For example, with this same ATI X800 Pro video card in my "super gaming rig" (Athlon64 3000+ system) I can run Blizzard's World of Warcraft with absolutely EVERYTHING turned on at 1600x1200 - which is great!! With Sony On-Line Entertainment's EverQuest II (noted hardware hog), I can play the game in a very impressive 1280x1024 with most of the goodies turned on. If I tried the same with a GeForceFX 5900 Ultra, I'm not even close to looking at running these top of the line games at these levels of resolution and detail.

Conclusions

The ATI X800 Pro is a very impressive video card that will definitely quench the thirst for the gamer and performance PC artist looking for a nice high-to-mid range video card that wants the most out of their hardware dollar. The performance of the card is extremely impressive and the value given the unit gets top marks. Undoubtedly, being able to run World of Warcraft and EverQuest II at such resolution levels in my top rig brings the card a perfect score for coolness, since I'm already the envy of all my geeky friends.

The card is highly useful and the longevity factor with the card gets a strong score since the card can easily be used for a long, long time. The card's main strengths are the performance graphics and next-generation technology built into the card. I love the fact that the card is HDTV ready, so if you want to play your games in HDTV on a big screen, it takes minimal effort. Overall, this is a great video card and the one of choice for my personal high performance gaming PC.

10 / 10 OVERALL SCORE 96% 10 / 10 9 / 10 10 / 10 9 / 10 9.6 / 10