PowerColor X1900 GT

This card’s memory overclocks like crazy with default voltage settings. From nominal 600 MHz (1200 MHz DDR) I was able to get it up all the way to 873 MHz (1746 MHz DDR). That’s waaaaaaay past the SAMSUNG specs of 700 MHz.

Introduction

The introduction of RADEON X1900 series brought bannana type smiles to our faces. ATI customers were happy to get more raw power for their SM 2.0 / SM 3.0 games. Beginning of 2006 ATI however offered only high-end boards and no cut down versions were available. Until Q2 2006 if you were in the market for new Canadian processor you were either stuck with X1900 XT or XTX — great cards, but expensive and bulky. Around May, ATI decided to kick NVIDIA’s green buttocks and take on GeForce 7900 GT. With that in mind, RADEON X1900 GT has been introduced.

Engine behind the GT is of course R580. Obviously it’s not a fully operational R580, but it sports 36 Pixel Shaders, compared to 48 for XT / XTX. As for texture units / ROPs, ATI decided to reduce them by 4 and ending up with 12 of each. There is “only” 256 MBs of onboard memory so keep that in mind. All other features were left alone — vertex shaders (8), dispatch processor, memory controller were left unchanged.

If you want to see the rest of the good info, read on. Ah, almost forgot to introduce the product I’m testing today. As you might have guessed though, it’s X1900 GT from our beloved PowerColor.

Should you require more detailed information on X1K GPUs please revisit our article: The X1000 series – ATI goes SM3.0

PowerColor is a consumer brand focused on providing cutting-edge graphics card products to retail customers. Our goal for the Tul brand is to be the industry’s number one provider of technology product solutions. Our goal for the PowerColor brand is to be the world’s number one brand of graphics cards. PowerColor is in effect owned by Tul Corporation, however the brands are operated independently of each other.

VPU Specifications

Since R580 is based heavily around R520, let’s recon some of its main features. The X1K line now sports Shader Model 3.0 which has been available from NVIDIA for over a year now. As with X1800, X1900 shares similar traits: Ultra-Threading Dispatch Processors, new cache architecture and Ring Bus. You can find more details about those features in my PowerColor X1800 XT review.

As for R580, the X1900 is fairly similar to X1600 design in terms of pipeline architecture. The pipeline is no longer in 1:1 ratio (ALU:Texture) as with R520, it’s 3:1 which means X1900 has 3 times more shading power over the X1800 – that’s where the 166 billion pixel shader operations / sec come from. ATI did say it’s the ideal balance — more would be an overkill and less could lead to insufficiency. Can this approach be utilized? Most definitely and likely with newer games. Hopefully Parallax Occlusion Mapping can benefit from it.

So, RADEON X1900 GT also shares the above design and benefits from it in a fashionly manner. Right below you can see the differences between GT and XT

• 12 ROPs (16 for XT / XTX)
• 12 Pixel Pipelines (16 for XT / XTX)
• 36 Pixel Shaders (48 for XT / XTX)
• 12 Texture units (16 for XT / XTX)

The rest stays the same, more detailed information right below

Video card	PowerColor X1900 GT	PowerColor X1800 GTO	PowerColor X1900 XT
GPU (256-bit)	R580LE	R520	R580
Chip Architecture	.09µ (TSMC fab)	.09µ (TSMC fab)	.09µ (TSMC fab)
Transistors	~384 Million	~320 Million	~384 Million
Memory Architecture	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit
Frame Buffer Size	256 MB GDDR-3	256 MB GDDR-3	512 MB GDDR-3
Pipeline architecture	12 ROPs 12 Pixel Pipelines 36 Pixel Shader units 12 TexUnits / pipe 3 ALU units / pipe 1 Z-samples / pipe	12 ROPs 12 Pixel Pipelines 12 Pixel Shader units 12 TexUnits / pipe 1 ALU unit / pipe 1 Z-samples / pipe	16 ROPs 16 Pixel Pipelines 48 Pixel Shader units 16 TexUnits / pipe 3 ALU units / pipe 1 Z-samples / pipe
Vertex Pipelines	8	8	8
TMU(s) per Pipeline	1	1	1
Engine	Ultra-threaded architecture	Ultra-threaded architecture	Ultra-threaded architecture
Bus Type	PCI-e 16x	PCI-e 16x	PCI-e 16x
Core Clock	575 MHz	500 MHz	625 MHz
Memory Clock	1200 MHz DDR	1000 MHz DDR	1450 MHz DDR
RAMDACs	2x 400 MHz DACs	2x 400 MHz DACs	2x 400 MHz DACs
Memory Bandwidth	38.4 GB / sec	32 GB / sec	46 GB / sec
Pixel Fillrate	6.9 GPixels / sec	6 GPixels / sec	10 GPixels / sec
Texel Fillrate	6.9 GTexels / sec	6 GTexels / sec	10 GTexels / sec
Geometry rate	1150 Mtriangles / sec	1000 Mtriangles / sec	1250 Mtriangles / sec
DirectX Version	9.0c	9.0c	9.0c
Pixel Shader	9.0c	3.0	3.0
Vertex Shader	9.0c	3.0	3.0

To recap, RADEON X1900 GT has the following pipeline configuration: 12:1:3:1

Where 12 implies Texture units per pipeline, 3 stands for ALUs per pipeline and 1 is the number of Z-samples per pipeline. Confusing? It might be for a lot of you, but I will not go into much detail on the architecture. It’s been covered very well over at Beyond3D. Additionally you can read all about it in our X1900 preview.

Radeon® X1900 Graphics Technology – Specifications

Features

• 384 million transistors on 90nm
• fabrication process
• 36 pixel shader processors
• 8 vertex shader processors
• 256-bit 8-channel GDDR3
• memory interface
• Native PCI Express x16 bus interface

Ring Bus Memory Controller

• 512-bit internal ring bus for memory reads
• Fully associative texture, color, and Z/stencil cache designs
• Hierarchical Z-buffer with Early Z test
• Lossless Z Compression (up to 48:1)
• Fast Z-Buffer Clear
• Optimized for performance at high display resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions

Ultra-Threaded Shader Engine

• Support for Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 programmable vertex and pixel shaders in hardware
• Full speed 128-bit floating point processing for all shader operations
• Up to 512 simultaneous pixel threads
• Dedicated branch execution units for high performance dynamic branching and flow control
• Dedicated texture address units for improved efficiency
• 3Dc+ texture compression o High quality 4:1 compression for normal maps and two-channel data formats
• High quality 2:1 compression for luminance maps and single-channel data formats
• Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL® 2.0

Advanced Image Quality Features

• 64-bit floating point HDR rendering supported throughout the pipeline
• 32-bit integer HDR (10:10:10:2) format supported throughout the pipeline
• 2x/4x/6x Anti-Aliasing modes
• 2x/4x/8x/16x Anisotropic Filtering modes
• High resolution texture support (up to 4k x 4k)

Avivo™ Video and Display Engine

• High performance programmable video processor
  • Accelerated MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264 decoding (including DVD/HD-DVD/Blu-ray playback), encoding & transcoding
  • DXVA support
  • De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
  • Motion compensation, IDCT, DCT and color space conversion
  • Vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
  • 3:2 pulldown (frame rate conversion)
• Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
• HDR tone mapping acceleration
  • Maps any input format to 10 bit per channel output
• Flexible display support
  • Dual integrated dual-link DVI transmitters
• DVI 1.0 / HDMI compliant and HDCP ready
  • Dual integrated 10 bit per channel 400 MHz DACs
  • 16 bit per channel floating point HDR and 10 bit per channel DVI output
  • Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion (10 bits per color)
  • Complete, independent color controls and video overlays for each display
  • High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all outputs
  • Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
  • Xilleon™ TV encoder for high quality analog output
  • YPrPb component output for direct drive of HDTV displays
  • Spatial/temporal dithering enables 10-bit color quality on 8-bit and 6-bit displays
  • Fast, glitch-free mode switching
  • VGA mode support on all outputs
• Compatible with ATI TV/Video encoder products, including Theater 550

CrossFire™

• Multi-GPU technology
• Four modes of operation:
  • Alternate Frame Rendering (maximum performance)
  • Supertiling (optimal load-balancing)
  • Scissor (compatibility)
  • Super AA 8x/10x/12x/14x (maximum image quality)

Power supply notes

• Connection to the system power supply is required:  450-Watt power supply or greater, 30 Amps on 12 volt rail recommended (assumes fully loaded system)
• PCI Express compliant power supply (recommended). Connect directly to the power supply with a 6 pin PCI Express power connector
• For CrossFire™: 550 watt power supply or greater, 38 Amps on 12 volt rail

The Card

RADEON X1900 GT, X1800 GTO and X1800 XL look alike. In a sense they are the same cards just carrying a “different” chip. That silicon can be either a full fledged R520 / R580 (unlockable) or locked up R520 / R580 with disabled quads and texture units — it all depends on the vendor and which chips they get. Some AIBs will sell unlockable chips. If you’re lucky enough to get the card you should be golden to unlock it. Anyway, the size of both cards is the same, so is the length.

As all high-end boards these days this GT carries 2 dual DVI links, Avivo and everything else X1800 GTO, XT does. Did I mention this is still a single slot solution? Yep and it’s not that loud either.

Click a picture to see a larger view

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Physically X1900 GT, X1800 GTO are the same size as X1800 XLs. They come with the back brace which holds the HSF in place. The cooling system is rather quiet, but when fan is cranked up it can get noisy. The back bracket features dual DVI links and VIVO support. The card carries a standard display support: VGA compatible, VESA compatible BIOS for SVGA and DDC 1/2b/2b+ This board also sports an external power supply socket. The above are 6-pin PCI-e connectors so make sure you plug in more juice, otherwise the card wont boot. Notice voltage regulators are also there covered with anodized heatsink.

PowerColor X1900 GT features Avivo technology:

Avivo™ Video and Display Platform

• High performance programmable video processor
  • Accelerated MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264 decoding and transcoding
  • DXVA support
  • De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
  • Motion compensation, IDCT, DCT and color space conversion
  • Vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
  • 3:2 pulldown (frame rate conversion)
• Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
• HDR tone mapping acceleration
  • Maps any input format to 10 bit per channel output
• Flexible display support
  • Dual integrated dual-link DVI transmitters
    • DVI 1.0 compliant / HDMI interoperable and HDCP ready
  • Dual integrated 10 bit per channel 400 MHz DACs
  • 16 bit per channel floating point HDR and 10 bit per channel DVI output
  • Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion (10 bits per color)
  • Complete, independent color controls and video overlays for each display
  • High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all outputs
  • Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
  • Xilleon™ TV encoder for high quality analog output
  • YPrPb component output for direct drive of HDTV displays
  • Spatial/temporal dithering enables 10-bit color quality on 8-bit and 6-bit displays
  • Fast, glitch-free mode switching
  • VGA mode support on all outputs
  • Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions and refresh rates
• Compatible with ATI TV/Video encoder products, including Theater 550

Bundle

The card came in a shiny pink looking box — that’s right, dark pink which looks actually nice! The front and back highlight cards specifications and features. The back of the box sports specs and some catch phrases. The sides show system requirements.

As X1800 GTO this GT box also comes with Crossfire information sticker as well as X1K main features sticker which seems to appear on most of current ATI products

Click a picture to see a larger view

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When it comes down to cables, PowerColor includes the same set of wires found on X850 XT PE, X1800 XT, X1800 GTO & X1900 XT:

Accessories

• Composite cable
• Power cable
• S-Video cable
• HDTV cable
• VIVO cable
• 2x DVI-I connector

Software

• ATI drivers
• CyberLink DVD Solutions
  • PowerDVD 5
  • PowerProducer 2 Gold
  • DVD PowerDirector 3
  • Power2Go 3 Medi@show 2

It seems most high-end PowerColor products come equipped with the same set of cables / software. In other words if you buy a card for $299 it will have same equippment as the one for $599. Kind of old and boring and I’m definitely going to take points for that.

Setup and Installation

All of our benchmarks were ran on Athlon64 3000+ system @ 2.5GHz. The reason I decided to up the CPU clock for R580/R520 is the fact that default clocks would be limiting the cards by a whole lot. It still is limiting at low resolutions in some benchmarks, but I’ve tried to create as little bottlenecked environment as possible.

Our PowerColor X1900 GT sample will be crusing along with X1800 GTO, X1900 XT, X1800 XT as well as X1800 XL. The table below shows test system configuration as well benchmarks used throughout the review.

Components	– DFI NF4 Ultra-D – Athlon64 3000+ Venice – G.Skill F1-4000BIU2-2GBHV DDR500 – Thermaltake Toughpower 550 Watt PSU – PowerColor X1900 GT 256 MB – PowerColor X1800 GTO 256 MB – PowerColor X1900 XT 512 MB – PowerColor X1800 XT 512 MB – HiS X1800 XL 256 MB
Software	– Windows XP SP2 – DirectX 9.0c – nForce4 6.53 drivers – CATALYST 6.4
Synthetic Benchmarks	– 3DMark 2005 v1.2.0 – 3DMark 2006 – D3D Right Mark 1.0.5.0 beta 4
Gaming Benchmarks	– F.E.A.R / ingame benchmark + Fraps – Half-Life 2 / custom d13c17 timedemo + Fraps – Doom 3 / default timedemo + Fraps – Quake 4 / custom timedemo – NFS: Most Wanted / Fraps – Far Cry 1.32 / custom timedemo + Fraps
Notes	For R420 CPU was clocked at default 1.8GHz For R5x0 CPU was clocked at 2.5GHz to reduce limitation

Because X1900 GT / X1800 GTO / X1800 XL are long cards you have to make sure you have sufficient room inside your case. If you don’t then you need to clear the way for this card — relocate your HDs for example or in the worst scenario buy a bigger case.

Installation went smoothly. Just popped the card in and turned it on (make sure you do not forget to plug in external power cable). As most fans on high-end boards these days it’s not a quiet solution, but not loud either comapred to X18(9)00 XT(X). The sound is rather pleasing in 2D mode, but when going into 3D with additional overclock it can get loud.

3DMark05 / 06

I’ve used Futuremark’s 3DMark 2005 to measure the actual throughput of our PowerColor X1900 GT and compared it against other high/middle-end boards. Additionally I’m including scores from Futuremark’s newest 3DMark06.

F.E.A.R

Game Overview

An unidentified paramilitary force infiltrates a multi-billion dollar aerospace compound, taking hostages but issuing no demands. The government responds by sending in special forces, but loses contact as an eerie signal interrupts radio communications. When the interference subsides moments later, the team has been obliterated. As part of a classified strike team created to deal with threats no one else can handle, your mission is simple: Eliminate the intruders at any cost. Determine the origin of the signal. And contain the crisis before it spirals out of control.

As you probably know, F.E.A.R uses a very sophisticated game engine (FEAR).

• Rendering
  • FEAR is powered by a new flexible, extensible, and data driven DirectX 9 renderer that uses materials for rendering all visual objects. Each material associates an HLSL shader with artist-editable parameters used for rendering, including texture maps (normal, specular, emissive, etc.), colors, and numeric constants.
• Lightning Model
  • FEAR features a unified Blinn-Phong per-pixel lighting model, allowing each light to generate both diffuse and specular lighting consistently across all solid objects in the environment. The lighting pipeline uses the following passes:
    • Emissive: The emissive pass allows objects to display a glow effect and establishes the depth buffer to improve performance.
  • Lighting: The lighting pass renders each light, first by generating shadows and then by applying the lighting onto any pixels that are visible and not shadowed.
  • Translucency: The translucent pass blends all translucent objects into the scene using back to front sorting.
• Visual Effects
  • FEAR features a new optimized, data driven effects system that allows for the creation of key-framed effects that can be comprised of dynamic lights, particle systems, models, and sounds. Examples of the effects that can be created using this system include weapon muzzle flashes, explosions, footsteps, fire, snow, steam, smoke, dust, and debris.
• Sample Lights
  • FEAR’s lighting model is very flexible and allows developers to easily add new lights. Existing lights include:
    • Point Light: The point light is a single point that emits light equally in all directions.
    • Spotlight: Similar to a flashlight, the spotlight projects light within a specified field of view. The spotlight can also use a texture to tint the color of the lighting on a per pixel basis.
    • Cube Projector: Similar to the point light, the cube projector uses a cubic texture to tint each lit pixel.
    • Directional Light: This lighting is emitted from a rectangular plane and is used to simulate directional lights like sunlight.
  • Point Fill: Although similar to the point light, the point fill is an efficient option because it does not utilize specular lighting or cast shadows.

A more detailed overview of other F.E.A.R technologies can be found over at Touchdown Entertainment. These include: Havok Physics Engine and Modeling / Animations System.

Half-Life 2

We all love Half-Life 2 and we all want best performance out of our hardware. This has to be one of the most graphic demanding games currently on the market. Half-Life 2 is built around Source engine which utilizes a very wide range of DirectX 8 / 9 special effects. Those include:

• Diffuse / specular bump mapping
• Dynamic soft shadows
• Localized / global valumetric fog
• Dynamic refraction
• High Level-of-Detail (LOD)

Note that users with DirectX 7 and older hardware (NVIDIA MX series for example) will not be able to enjoy the above effects. Let’s see how middle-end / low-end X1K graphic cards perform.

Doom 3

Although this game needs no introduction, I will go over some of the game features and technology behind Doom 3. It took the guys at id Software over four years to complete this project. Lead programmer, John Carmack spent an awful lot of time designing the game engine, but his hard work paid off — to some extent since this is first title which houses Doom 3 engine.

Let’s look at some of the engine tech features which are present in Doom 3:

• Unified lightning and shadowing engine
  • Dynamic per-pixel lightning
  • Stencil shadowing
  • Specular lightning
• Realistic bumpmapping
• Dynamic and ambient six-channel audio

However you look at it, Carmack’s lightning engine is the essence of Doom 3. With OpenGL being the primary API, shaders have been put to a heavy use in order to create the realisticly looking environment. Instead of using lightmaps the game engine now processes all shadows in real-time. This technique is called stencil shadowing which can accurately shadow other objects in the scene. There are disadvantage to this method however:

• Requires a lot of fillrate
• Fast CPU is needed for shadow calculations
• Inability to render soft shadows

Quake 4

This is another good title worth looking at. With success of Quake 3, id Software decided (after few years) it would be proper to have a sequel. Designed over at Raven Software’s farm, Q4 features rich single player as well as intensive and popular multiplayer mode.

It uses Doom 3 engine so you should be familiar with available effects. In any case, I listed them below

• Unified lightning and shadowing engine
  • Dynamic per-pixel lightning
  • Stencil shadowing
  • Specular lightning
• Realistic bumpmapping
• Dynamic and ambient six-channel audio

Need For Speed: Most Wanted

We have quite a few sequels in this review and this is another one, this time from Electronic Arts. If you’ve played NFS Hot Pursuit you know what I’m talking about. There are a lot of ideas taken out from the older NFS. The main difference between Most Wanted and Underground (in terms of graphics) is addition of HDR-type effects. It’s pseudo-HDR (more like bloom), but looks lovely nonetheless. Additionally the game sports flashy new reflections, better object geometry, improved lightning system and finally physics engine.

Far Cry 1.32

The company behind this game is Crytek. It was pretty much the first title which used a heavy load of PS 2.0 shaders. For our benching purposes we are using the full version with the newest 1.32 patch applied (mainly fixes SM 3.0 issues that caused graphic corruption on newer ATI hardware). Anyone who played this title will admire the draw distance, beautiful outside vegetation and incredibly spooky indoor environment. The game also features topnotch self-learning A.I and very realistic physics.

Far Cry’s CryEngine is pretty scalable, however you’d need at least DirectX 8 class hardware to enjoy the refractive water effects, ripples, real time per-pixel lighting, specular bump-mapping or volumetric effects.

The map of choice was Research. It’s a high-polygon map with both outdoor and indoor environment.

Overclocking and Conclusions

I’ve heard various comments on X1900 GT overclocking. Some reviewers were able to push the core past 620 MHz, others were maxing out the memory at 630 MHz (standard voltages). I did not expect anything better than that. Just like RADEON X1900 XT / XTX, X1900 GT uses 2D and 3D clocks. In normal working environment where no 3D applications are running the core speed would settle at 500 MHz. Whenever an app initializes 3D API, CATALYST drivers bump the clocks all the way up to 575 MHz. This way chip does not get too hot when not needed. Okay, so I’ve loaded up my favorite RADEON program, ATITool and started bumping core clock.

It didn’t take me much time to find out the maximum frequency this core could take at standard voltage. I ended up at 594 MHz — stable and artifactfree. I was able to get it up to 600 MHz, but I’ve noticed artifacts so that was a no no. Next up was memory overclocking. Now this has been a task that took me a while. From standard 600 MHz (1200 MHz DDR) I was able to push those chips all the way to 873 MHz (1746 MHz DDR). No vMods, no tempering with the card at all. That’s right, memory rated at maximum frequency of 700 MHz is pushed further by 173 MHz.