Legit Video Card Reviews

ATI X1000 Series Video Card Roundup

Manufacturer: ATI
Product: X1300 Pro, X1600XT, X1800XL, X1800XT
Date: Sun, Dec 18, 2005 - 12:00 AM
Written By: Brian Wallace -
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Features

Anti-Aliasing: Ah, the jaggies. We all love them..right? The days of having the little buggers all over your screen have been over for a good while now but it has always come with a performance penalty. With this new generation ATI sought to give us not only great Anti-Aliasing but a minimal performance hit when enabled. How much you ask? Well it's always going to depend on what game you play but if we are talking Half Life 2, the custom time demo we recorded showed less than 7 fps difference going from  0xAA to 4xAA at 1600x1200. In Serious Sam 2 we see about a 12 fps difference. We'll get a bit more into the numbers later.

 Take a look below and see what kind of difference Adaptive AA can make to your gaming experience.


No AA


2xAA


2x Performance Adaptive AA


2x Quality Adaptive AA


4xAA


4x Performance Adaptive AA


4x Quality Adaptive AA


4x Quality Adaptive AA High AF

High Dynamic Range (HDR)

Dynamic Range defines the ratio between highest and lowest value that can be represented. More bits of data = greater dynamic range. Floating point has a much greater range than interger.

Dynamic range examples:

  • 8-bit integer - 256:1
  • 10-bit integer - 1,024:1
  • 16-bit integer - 65,536:1
  • 16-bit floating point - 2.2 trillion:1

Most displays can only recorgnize values between 0 and 255 (i.e. 8 bits per color component)

  • Requires tone mapping to preserve detail
  • Light bloom and lens flare effects can help conver a sense of high brightness

HDR rednering rakes advantage of color formats with greater dynamic range, which produces more realistic images.

High Quality Anisotropic Filtering

ATI has added a new AF mode as well named simply "High Quality" in the Catalyst Control Panel. This new mode has increased trilinear filtering precision which produces sharper, clearer textures. With this mode you will have no angle dependant filtering and won't see the "shimmer" effect on ground and wall textures as you're walking around.

Next Page - Test Setup


Review Index
Page 1 - Introduction
Page 2 - Under The Hood
Page 3 - Ring Bus Memory Controller
Page 4 - The ATI X1300 Pro, X1300 and X1300 HyperMemory:
Page 5 - The ATI X1600 XT and X1600 Pro
Page 6 - X1800 XT and X1800 XL
Page 7 - Features
Page 8 - Test Setup
Page 9 - Chronicles of Riddick
Page 10 - Doom 3
Page 11 - Far Cry
Page 12 - Serious Sam 2
Page 13 - Call of Duty 2
Page 14 - 3D Mark 2005
Page 15 - Adaptive Anti-Aliasing charts
Page 16 - Adaptive Anti-Aliasing cont.
Page 17 - Final Thoughts and Conclusions