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ATI Radeon X1800 GTO Launched

Posted by Zonk on Sat Mar 11, 2006 03:29 PM
from the my-6600-is-looking-kinda-flabby dept.
Graphics Software Entertainment Games Hardware
SippinTea writes "ATI has also hastened to market with a launch of their own this week, with a new Performance Mid-Range Graphics Card. The Radeon X1800 GTO is a chopped-down version of the Radeon X1800 XL with 12 pixel pipelines and less expensive, lower speed GDDR3 DRAM on board. It compares well with the new GeForce 7600GT but can it compete with a GeForce 7900GT for only a few dollars more?"
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  • Can you say "soft launch"? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Calibax (151875) * on Saturday March 11 2006, @03:32PM (#14899316)
    There's one significant difference between the nVidia launches this week and the ATI board launched the same day. The nVidia products were available on launch day from on-line stores but the ATI product won't be available for "a few weeks".

    It looks like ATI wanted to steal nVidia's thunder by announcing their latest product the same day. The small issue of not actually being able to manufacture their product yet doesn't seem to be very important to them.

    • There's one significant difference between the nVidia launches this week and the ATI board launched the same day. The nVidia products were available on launch day from on-line stores but the ATI product won't be available for "a few weeks".

      That's because ATI didn't foresee the launch of the 7600GT this early, and had to start the PR-machine for the counter-offensive (== announce the X1800GTO) much earlier that they'd have liked it.

    • Poor choice of words; if ATI's card will in fact be in stores in a few weeks, they're manufacturing them now.

  • Linux drivers? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Zugot (17501) * <bryan@[ ]sm.com ['ose' in gap]> on Saturday March 11 2006, @03:45PM (#14899347)
    The vesa driver is sooooo unacceptable.

  • Finally proof!! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by B5_geek (638928) on Saturday March 11 2006, @03:47PM (#14899352)
    I am offically an Old-Fart(tm).

    I looked at this and I thought, "so what, how many fps do kids need in their games anyways?"
    Then the exact next thought was: "Bah the drivers are still fubar in linux so why should I care."
    3rd: "How many /.'ers will make the same comments?"

    So offically, pass me a hat. I quit.
    Ahh games I do miss them so (the best FPS will always be StarSeige Tribes), and eye-candy; nah it'll probably slow down my compile times.

    • I looked at this and I thought, "so what, how many fps do kids need in their games anyways?"

      Same as always, but as the cards get beefier the games tear through more and more graphical resources, and then you can activate HDR, Full Scene AntiAliasing (FSAA), Anisotropic Filtering, ... to the point that top-of-the-line latest released games manage to be unplayable if you enable every single graphical option.

    • I looked at this and I thought, "so what, how many fps do kids need in their games anyways?"

      Nope, the right question is "how many polygons at 30FPS."
      In some games more polygons = more detailed models. I don't give a shit.
      In other games more polygons = more enemies on screen at the same time. And that's when fun really begins!
    • Heh, me too.
      I thought my X800 were cool, but I must admit that the latest year, I have found other things in life that were more important to me than having the latest grahics card. I don't even play games much anymore, so my purchase of the X800 ended up in being a waste of money, plus have this "funny" bug of the 2 pixels in the lower right of the screen, being duplicated across the first line on my HP LCD screen.(Problem first shows when installing the ati drivers).

      Second, it seems that all new cards are

  • Speed Check (Score:4, Funny)

    by robotsrule (805458) * on Saturday March 11 2006, @03:55PM (#14899373) Homepage
    If you put four of them together you can actually run the first full second of the trailer for the next version of Doom.

  • With all these new mid-range cards out.. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Clockwurk (577966) * on Saturday March 11 2006, @03:55PM (#14899378) Homepage
    Its a real shame Apple had to shackle its Pro notebook and consumer desktop with the uninspiring x1600. OS X relies on the graphics card for so much and they give it so little attention. I hope they follow the lead of other OEMs and make upgrades to their products as new stuff becomes available and not delay faster stuff so that Steve Jobs has something to talk about at Macworld or WWDC.
    • Apple has for a long time offered what is ATI's low end for the PC. Most PCs don't ship with as nice graphics as ATI's low end though, and Macs have come with independent video memory, unlike the many PC's that ship with integrated video through Dell and the like.

      The latest generation of integrated video is much better though, and I can see the latest offerings from ATI, Nvidia and Intel being sufficient for most non-gamers, as long as they have at at least 32MB of independent memory. I know ATI's chipset s
      • Anything is sufficient for non-gamers, and any graphics chipset -- shared memory or not -- released in the recent past is powerful enough to accelerate the most part of what OS X and Windows can load off. Hell, my old subnotebook's pathetic on-board Intel video was powerful enough to run WOW.
        • Using 100% shared memory for video causes small lags and stuters all over the place, except in the latest generation of integrated video. Even doing simple day to do things like scrolling, or selecting a menu has tended to cause this. Main memory bandwidth is the biggest bottleneck to the CPU, and the latency added during the moments when video memory needs updates is what causes the lag.

          Given two identical machines, except one with shared memory and one with independent video memory, the first will be perc

    • Re:With all these new mid-range cards out.. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MojoStan (776183) on Saturday March 11 2006, @11:55PM (#14901063)
      Its a real shame Apple had to shackle its Pro notebook and consumer desktop with the uninspiring x1600.
      I think the Radeon x1600 is a fine GPU for their "professional" notebook and a very good GPU for their "consumer" desktop.

      The Mobility Radeon x1600 in their mid-sized MacBook Pro is ATI's second-best current-generation mobile GPU. The Mobility Radeon x1800 is ATI's current high-end part and the only noticable difference (for most users) between x1600 and x1800 is 3D gaming performance, which is not worth the extra cost for the vast majority of MacBook Pro buyers. The x1800 is more appropriate for Alienware gaming notebooks or giant Dell XPS desktop replacement notebooks.

      I think the (non-mobile) Radeon x1600 in the iMac is a heck of a nice GPU for a "consumer" PC. Any current generation GPU (like Radeon x1300 or GeForce 7300) would be a fine choice IMO because the extra 3D gaming performance would be a waste for the vast majority of iMac buyers. Anyone that needs more gaming power than an x1600 shouldn't be buying an all-in-one computer with non-upgradable graphics. It would be nice, however, if Apple offered a headless upgradable desktop that wasn't a freakin' workstation.

      OS X relies on the graphics card for so much and they give it so little attention.
      Are you talking about stuff like Quartz Extreme and Core Image/Video? I think the Radeon x1600 gives plenty of GPU power for OS X. Heck, Intel's maligned GMA 900 integrated graphics seemed to have snappy OS X performance [slashdot.org] on the Intel Developer Macs. Core Image only requires a Radeon 9500 or GeForce FX 5200, which are both two generations older than the Radeon X1600.

  • A quick run down of how this works (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 11 2006, @03:56PM (#14899379)
    1. Spend hundreds of millions of dollars developing top of the line graphics card.
    2. Sell it for $500
    3. Spend a few more million dollars figuring out how to cripple top of the line graphics card.
    4. Sell it for half the price.
    5. Profit?
    6. Consumers figure out how to re-enabled all the features that were crippled making there $250 graphics card perform almost equal to the $500 version.

    • Re:A quick run down of how this works (Score:4, Informative)

      by wyldeone (785673) on Saturday March 11 2006, @04:16PM (#14899440) Homepage Journal
      That's completly untrue. These cards are able to be sold for cheaper because they don't need as high manufacturing standards as the top of the line cards. For those, every pipeline has to be perfect (or within an acceptable range of that) in order for it not to be thrown away. The brilliant thing about selling these kinds of cards, is that they don't have to just throw them away. Instead, they disable the faulty pipelines and sell them for cheaper. Thus they make $250 instead of nothing. Some people who buy them get lucky and get ones with mostly good pipelines. They can then renenable the pipelines, and get better performance. However, there will be problems like video corruption.
      • I am using a radeon 9500 right now that is software modded to perform similar to a radeon 9700. Saved me more than 100 dollars at the time, and it works great. About 3 other people I know got in on the same deal, and only one of us has had problems with faulty pipelines. I know that this may have been a rare case, but it does happen that a large percentage of the lower-end "crippled" product is actually crippled. I doubt ATI saved 100 dollars making it a 9500 instead of a 9700.

      • That's completly untrue. These cards are able to be sold for cheaper because they don't need as high manufacturing standards as the top of the line cards.

        What usually happens is that in the initial run of that group of graphics cards, they take perfectly capable cards and downrate them.

        Why? To get their product out on the market.

        Smart people figure out which cards can be softmodded (BIOS Flash) or hard-modded (messing with the PCB) and they go buy that card and bump it up to full power.

        Eventually nVidia/ATI

  • Another graphics chip, in case the 20+ already out there aren't enough choice for you.

    FTFA:

    Fortunately, years later we find a dramatically different competitive landscape on the graphics card front, as today's mainstream and performance segment GPU's are equipped with the technology and features that would annihilate flagship GPU's from a few short generations ago.

    And then:

    Looking at these basic specifications, it is certainly impressive to think that this is a $249 graphics card that has all of the f

  • Gratuitous product launches (Score:5, Insightful)

    by D. Book (534411) on Saturday March 11 2006, @04:19PM (#14899452)
    Am I the only one who suspects the reason we now have a ridiculously confusing range of video chips is less to do with product differentiation and manufacturing efficiency than the publicity that accompanies each new launch? ATI and nVidia seem to have themselves stuck in this game where if one were to announce a new product every month and the other every two months, the relative disadvantage in the reporting on the latter company will result in a significant loss of consumer recognition.

    So they keep coming up with new variations that are trivially different from the existing products - a clock speed adjustment here, a few pipes disabled there - primarily to keep their name in the media. Even the "unannounced" chips are broadly reported, usually with something like "quietly released" in the headline.
  • ATI used to suck with linux drivers. If you wanted a fairly recent 3d card in linux, you had to go with nvidia.

    Is that still the case? If so, then I can't see why I would be interested in ATI.
    • IMX, ATI sucks with Windows drivers (Catalyst Control Center, anyone?). nVidia is the only video vendor with any decent Linux driver support.
        • Grandparent was confusing things; it's AIGLX which relies on an extension the ATi drivers don't have (texture-from-pixmap), not XGL. XGL just requires a working OpenGL implementation, iirc. (AIGLX and XGL are basically two very different ways of acheiving the same awesome.)

          And the fact is, you should know better anyway, you cannot expect Linux support from the latest and greatest hardware for such a minority of users when a good percentage of the market is still Windows based, thus being where the games

  • Why? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Vo0k (760020) on Saturday March 11 2006, @04:30PM (#14899483) Journal
    I once set Q3Arena to deathmatch, one of the void maps, against bots. 300 of them. Frag limit bumped to something like 500 and it wasn't much. The game was completely crazy but incredibly fun. With some luck you lived 10 or 15 seconds, the trick was not to not be killed but to frag at least two before you get fragged. The saw glove appeared to be extremely good weapon because at a good location you could run through a row of 30 or so bots shooting each others' backs, and get 30 frags in a row.

    The problem? It was running at about 5 FPS.
    Now I'd like to get a card that would enable this kind of gameplay at reasonable speed. Crowded cities, armies of troopers, hordes of demons. Power in numbers, not detail. Completely new gameplay style. Screw high degree of reality, allow me to perform a multi-kill of 40 with one shot.
  • Radeon X1800 XL with 12 pixel pipelines and less expensive, lower speed GDDR3 DRAM

    The 7900GT has 24 pixel pipelines 65nm process and is cheaper. nuff said.
  • well this card is placed really nice in the 200-300 price bracket. if u take a look at the card at that price range 7600GT will be low range and 7900GT will be outta budget. i think its better than nvidia 7600GT(only if 7600GT had 256bit memory bus y nvidia y). the moment nvidia launched 7600 and 7900 products ATi decreased the prices. i don't think we are gonna see the X1800 GTO soon in the market. as all ATi lauches are mostly paper launches. but i think its a good move from ATi they have created a new se
  • Tech Forum Watch [techforumwatch.com] has a good round up of the recent launches including the GTO, Quad SLI & Notebook SLI.

  • These launches are not totally about PR (Score:5, Insightful)

    by EMIce (30092) on Saturday March 11 2006, @05:38PM (#14899784) Homepage
    They are about offering more about bang than the other guy for your buck. The midrange $150-$200 range is where you get the most for your money, and each time one competitor offers a better value, the other can't afford to sit back for too long. The midrange GPU segment is one incredibly efficient market and the that is why there are these frequent releases. Each company is fighting to stay ahead.

    One reason for this is that most midrange buyers are enthusiasts, and judging by the # of comments for a product on newegg, one can see that as soon as a better value is offered by a new chip, sales quickly shift towards it. The Nvidia 6800 GS was selling like hotcakes for just the tiny stopgap period it was put out, just to best the ATI x800GTO until the 7600 GT showed up.

    I'm shopping for a card for a friend now, and have noticed that the midrange is good, but for high resolution play at 1600x1200 or 1920x1200, the midrange is barely cutting it now, so it becomes important to get the most bang for your buck, especially if you have an LCD with native high res and want to maintain quality. The new 7600 GT is about 15% faster than the 6800 GS, even w/ a 128 bit memory bus, and definitely hits a sweet spot at $190. It should run most popular titles comfortably at 1920x1200 and has next generation shader 3.0, unlike ATI's offerings below $200.

    Unfortunately for ATI, they haven't offered the best midrange value since their 9xxx line. ATI took Nvidia's crown a while back but Nvidia has had it back for some time now.
  • Wouldn't you expect that a "GTO" edition of a card is better than the plain-jane version?

    Recently I upgrade my card. If it wasn't for Tom's Video Card charts and some more reviews to round that out, it would have been impossible to tell which cards were better than which - let alone which is the best value.

    I really think the numbering and naming schemes do the companies a disservice.

    • Re:Too many video cards (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Ossifer (703813) on Saturday March 11 2006, @04:07PM (#14899408)
      Is it me or are there just too few silent video cards out there?

      • Both Galaxy and Gigabyte are currently exposing fanless GF 7600GT at CeBIT (and are planning fanless 7900GT and GTX).

        Fanless graphic cards are becoming more and more common on the retail market, while they virtually didn't exist a year ago...

        • Fanless graphic cards are becoming more and more common on the retail market, while they virtually didn't exist a year ago...

          Funny, my THREE PROCESSOR 12MB Creative 3D Blaster Voodoo2 was purely passive cooling - no fans, not even a heatsink. When did that come out... 1995?? Same with my Voodoo3 2000 PCI. ATi Rage/Rage Pro/RageIIC (digging them up as I dig thru my old hardware box here.) Same thing. Those are pretty old, as well. Matrox G400 - no fan or heatsink, either.
            • Just to feed the troll...

              Back then, even though they had fewer transistors, these cards were larger, less efficient, and produced LOADS of heat (I could fry an egg on a voodoo2 faster than the equivalent AMD processor back then.) The main differences between back then and today are heat, power consumption, amount of power packed into one core, and a significantly smaller die size.

              Go crawl back under a rock, idiot.

    • From the video card manufacturers' point of view, if they can sell people cards at different prices, then they can reach all the different reservation prices. One guy wants top-of-the-line, another wants midrange, another wants cheap. It's the way the free market works.

      I would take issue more with the naming conventions. They are all just strings of letters and numbers anymore, and they just get larger and more complicated.

    • Yet not enough with free software drivers. If any video card company wants to increase the number of customers that they have and get a competitive edge, they could release technical information that would help free software developers, or write some free software drivers themselves.
      • Ground control to major tom! Free OSs are NOT a major share of the graphics powerhouse market, sorry. Linux support isn't the turning point in Nvidia and ATI's stalemate, as much as the slashbots would like it to be. Man, I'm SOOO getting modded down of this....

    • Re:Too many video cards (Score:4, Funny)

      by eyegone (644831) on Saturday March 11 2006, @06:05PM (#14899923)
      And too (two) few companies.

      • Re:Too many video cards (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        So you start with how the cards fare in FPS type games, then go on to tell people what to look for in linux media servers? This is exactly why there are tons of cards out there, everybody is looking for something different.

        Personally I want a card that can drive my 1900x1200 display in native resolution while I'm playing FPS, so I'm pretty sure that low end card isn't cutting it. Really, I want a card that can run two of them, since I don't want to upgrade my relative new system to one that will properly h

        • I'd say the # of people running 1900x1200 displays is the minority. Specially since most monitors are 1280x1024 or less.

          You can get by with decent gaming on a 6600 which will cost you 140$. You don't need to buy a 7800 for 500$ to play Farcry or something. Filtering like what I suggested will land you a card in the 6xxx series that doesn't cost more than 200$ and will let you play games at decent refresh rates and resolutions.

          So yes, there are a lot of cards out there but it's usually fairly easy to pick
        • Um... the 5200 series was actually a fairly decent card. I was playing UT2k4 on it at 800x600 with >30fps frame rates. For a card that cost me literally 92$ CDN that ain't bad.

          Last I checked a Voodoo card from 1997 wouldn't get 30fps at 800x600x32bpp while playing UT2k4.

          Nice troll though. It's kinda funny actually, most of the trolling on slashdot and on usenet come from anonymous sources. It's almost like you ARE a coward and think that disrupting a conversation is ok to do, so long as you can post

          • Re:FX5200? Why? (Score:4, Informative)

            by masklinn (823351) <.ten.nnilksam. .ta. .gro.todhsals.> on Saturday March 11 2006, @08:19PM (#14900464)
            Actually a Voodoo 3 would barely be installable to start with, the last official Voodoo3 drivers are for Windows 98, to use a Voodoo3 on a W2K/WXP box you have to use sub-par unofficial drivers (I know it, because I used to run a W2k box with a Voodoo3)
          • Nowadays, you can get 5200s for next to nothing. I've seen $0-$30 after rebate from eVGA, the top nVidia board maker. Pretty good, and totally worth it even if you have to throw it out in a year.
            • I'd never buy stuff off ebay. I'd rather pay more and support a store I like [e.g. which is reputable] then mail order a card off the net from someone I don't know. Even if you get the card it may not be in the best shape [e.g. perma-heated, static shocked, etc].

              That and when you make nearly six figures spending an extra 60$ or whatever on a video card isn't a big deal [specially in light of my first point].

              Tom
        • i can see ur point there but X700 stands no where in front of X1800 GTO. u are comparing two different segments of the cards. the top end version of in that series was X850XT PE and even that version doesn't stand in front og this new GTO. first of all GTO has new features like SM3.0 support. Hardware accelaration for video. and the good thing is it consumes less power than X850 XT PE and performs better. u have more silent PC and less power dissipation. technology is moving and u can't ignore that.:)

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