ATI has introduced a new video card that in spite of its familiar name implements numerous innovations. We are talking about the Radeon X1950 PRO. Although the video card’s name is similar to the top of the range X1950 XTX, the X1950 PRO has a completely new architecture thanks to the use of the RV570 GPU.

The suggested retail price for the X1950 PRO is impressive because of its relatively low cost. At $199, you should be able to pick up a 256 Mbytes version of the video card. The video card is classified as being in the midrange market and should be able to fit the budget of a large portion of money conscious gamers. Although it might not be the solution of choice for hardcore gamers, the Radeon X1950 PRO offers a number of perks including a new approach to Crossfire technology that doesn’t require cables, support for AVIVO technology, and the promise of high resolutions with stronger performance. The architecture of the X1950 PRO is based on the same architecture of the X1900/X1950 XTX, and thus it only supports DirectX 9 and Shader Model 3.0. It is important to note that the X1950 PRO is not AMD’s next generation DirectX 10 supporting GPU.

Recently, many people have been asking us what the sense in buying a video card that only supports DirectX 9 is when DirectX 10 video cards are right around the corner. Since the launch of the G80 is only a few weeks away, many people see spending money on a DirectX 9 video card as an unwise decision.

In order to effectively answer this question, we must analyze the situation and the usefulness of DirectX 10 video cards. Microsoft Vista, the only operating system that will support DirectX 10, will not be launched before 2007. Since Windows Vista is the only operating system that will support DirectX 10, it will thus be the only OS that will be able to fully take advantage of the new DirectX 10 architectures. As some of our readers might know, it nearly always takes game developers a couple of months in order to fully take advantage of a new DirectX version. Even more time is required for them to deliver the final product to the market. In addition, since DirectX 10 will only run on Vista, game publishers would end up losing revenue if they immediately made the move to DirectX 10 and didn’t wait for Vista to get more widespread in the market.

Taking the above paragraph into consideration, buying a current generation is a reasonable choice. For users who are looking to buy a video card in the high-end sector of the market, it would make sense to wait and buy a next generation video card. However, if you are a user looking to buy in the price range of $200, then it would not be a waste of money to go ahead and buy a current generation video card.

The following table displays the North American pricing for the most recent solutions from ATI and NVIDIA. As can be seen, the Radeon X1950 PRO comes for a suggested retail price of $199. The NVIDIA 7900GS comes for the same price as the Radeon X1950 PRO, thus it is naturally the main competitor from NVIDIA for the X1950 PRO.

The following table shows the technical characteristics of the most recent solutions from NVIDIA and ATI:

The Radeon X1950 PRO is based on the famous code named RV570 architecture. The GPU is completely new and is the first ATI GPU constructed under an 80 nanometer process. The GPU is based on the R580 architecture, which is used for the Radeon X1900 and X1950 video cards. The main difference between the two architectures, however, is that the RV570 comes with 36 pixel shaders while the R580 has 48. The number of texture mapping units and ROPs has also been cut down from 16 to 12. The amount of vertex shaders remains untouched at 8.

The X1950 PRO also uses a completely new way of handling Crossfire. As you will see later on in this article, the Radeon X1950 PRO does not require the use of a Master Card in order to implement a Multi-GPU Crossfire setup. ATI has also done away with the external Crossfire connector cable. More is to come about this later in the article.

The card has a 256bit memory bus width and uses GDDR3 memory clocked at 1,380 MHz. The maximum bandwidth per second is 44.1 Gbytes. As can be seen, the Radeon X1950 PRO has technical specifications that are very similar to the Radeon X1900GT. Both video cards have 8 units of vertex shaders and 36 pixel shaders. The main difference between the two cards is that the X1950 PRO has a core clock of 1.38 GHz while the Radeon X1900 GT has a core clock of 1.2GHz.

Radeon X1950PRO (GPU RV570)    -    Radeon X1950XTX (GPU R580)

Comparing the RV570 GPU to the R580 GPU, the GPU which is being used in the high-end Radeon X1950XTX cards, it is evident that with their more recent GPU, the RV570, ATI has significantly reduced the dimensions of the chip’s surface. The RV570 has dimensions approximately equal to 17x14 millimeters, while for the R580 GPU the dimensions are 19x19 millimeters. The area of the RV570 GPU is 238 millimeters. This is a reduction of 34% in respect to the 361 square millimeters of the RV580 GPU.

For the new RV570 GPU, ATI has chosen a new card layout. The card, including its cooling solution, only takes up a single slot. The cooling solution covers all major components of the video card and is covered by a semi-transparent layer of red plastic.

The GPU is surrounded by 8 GDDR3 memory chips that add up to a total of 256Mbytes with a total clock of 1,380MHz. The GPU itself is in direct contact with the heatsink, allowing for better transfer of heat. Directly to the left of the GPU in the bottom left corner of the photo the ATI Rage Theater card can be seen.

As we said earlier on in this article, the X1950 PRO uses a new method to implement Crossfire technology. There is no longer any need for a Master card in order to have a Crossfire setup. ATI has also knocked off any need for the external cable and has replaced it with internal connectors similar to what NVIDIA uses for their SLI technology.

dall'altro verso il basso: SLI, Crossfire, SLI

Although the Crossfire connector looks very similar to the SLI connector, it has a different way of being implemented. ATI has given each card two contacts and so, instead of one, two connectors are used. In theory, this is to supply advanced bandwidth between the two cards and is used to help avoid bottleneck conditions that are a result of the use of extremely high resolutions and filters.

Benchmarks

3DMark 05

Far Cry

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

Doom 3

Half Life 2

Serious Sam 2

Call Of Duty 2

Fear

The above test had similar fill rates between the Radeon X1950 PRO and X1900 GT. In single texturing, the main reason behind the similar fill rate results is that both cards have only 12 pipelines. Moving on to multitexturing fill rates, the X1950 PRO has slightly better fill rates compared to the X1900 GT. This is because the video memory of the X1950 PRO is more advanced and has better bandwidth helping reduce bottlenecks. Its effectiveness in this situation, however, is rather limited.

Initially, the two Radeon solutions the X1950 PRO and X1900 GT have very similar vertex shader results. In advanced vertex shading the X1950 PRO pulls slightly ahead of the X1900 GT. Apparently the superior bandwidth of the X1950 PRO’s memory has an impact on these tests also.

Historically, the synthetic pixel shader tests usually have better results with NVIDIA video cards. In this test, the Radeon X1950 PRO again has a slight advantage over the Radeon X1900 GT.

The Radeon X1950 PRO performs very well in the Perlin Noise benchmark of 3D Mark 2006. The X1950 PRO has a considerable margin of advantage over the Radeon X1900 GT. In addition, it outdoes all NVIDIA competitors. The results raise the thought that ATI has been able to improve the shader management in the RV570 architecture due to the fact of how much it is able to outperform the X1900 GT which utilizes the R580 core.

Overall, it turns out that the Radeon X1950 PRO surpasses the Radeon X1900 GT at higher resolutions. Again, the main reason behind the X1950 PRO’s stronger performance compared to the X1900 GT is due to the superior video memory bandwidth. The X1950 PRO is also able to keep a respectable net margin of advantage over its main NVIDIA counterpart, the GeForce 7900 GS.

It is old news that Doom 3 usually works better with NVIDIA cards. The Radeon X1950 PRO therefore is only able to beat the Radeon X1900 GT. The performance gap, however, between the GeForce 7900 GS and Radeon X1950 PRO is reduced as filters are increased.

In Splinter Cell: CT, the picture turns much better for the Radeon X1950 PRO. The X1950 PRO is able to outperform its main opponent from NVIDIA, the GeForce 7900GS, and is also able to hold a slight performance advantage over the Radeon X1900 GT.

Serious Sam 2 shows what we have seen happen with previous titles. The new ATI GPU is able to outdo the 7900 GS and leaves it trailing by quite a large distance. The X1950 PRO is also able to pull ahead of the X1900 GT. Going over to Half-Life 2, a game which historically works better with ATI-based cards, the X1950 PRO is yet again able to perform better than the NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GS.

Even though the results are very similar, in Call of Duty 2 the X1950 PRO is able to perform better than the NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GS.

In F.E.A.R., the X1950 PRO has results that are similar to Call of Duty 2. In most of the benchmarks run, the X1950 PRO is able to have more FPS than the 7900 GS, however, with Soft Shadows enabled the 7900 GS begins to hold a light advantage.

One of the most innovative features of the new RV570 GPU is the radical changes ATI has made in its approach to handling Crossfire. ATI has done away with the external cable, and in the process have also dropped the Master Card. This brings up the possibility of using any X1950 PRO cards as masters or slaves. In order to interface between the two cards, ATI has opted for a solution that uses two connectors that look very similar to those used for NVIDIA’s SLI.

ATI has decided to take the compositing engine off of the card and place it onto the GPU. Although this method will ultimately drive up costs, it will also come with a lot of pros that make the approach much more attractive than an external dongle. ATI has stated that these connections will be able to support resolutions up to 2560x2048.

All future GPUs from ATI will be based on this new approach to Crossfire. The “new” Crossfire will most likely be much more attractive to consumers simply because there will no longer be any additional cables added to the mess of wires already outside of PCs. Internal connectors are much more neat and desirable.

ATI has reasoned that they chose to use two connectors because they are necessary to ensure high communication bandwidth between the two video cards. A single connector has bandwidth equal to one SLI connector used by NVIDIA, therefore dual connectors should theoretically double the bandwidth between the two GPUs. A second explanation of using two connectors might be the theoretical possibility that ATI will use the dual connectors to introduce Crossfire approaches that use more than two video cards. Quad-Crossfire anyone?

Presently, it is not clear how ATI will supply consumers with the two Crossfire connectors. They might supply customers with a bridge when they buy a video card. In fact, it is likely that with every Radeon X1950 PRO video card one connector will be included. Another road that ATI can take is to have motherboard manufacturers supply the connectors when consumers purchase a new motherboard.

We tried to implement Crossfire without a bridge, and then with only one bridge connected, however, in both cases the ATI Catalyst Control Center did not allow us to work under Crossfire mode.

For this new approach to Crossfire, we will be benchmarking and analyzing its scalability. We will be comparing the new approach against the older generation of Crossfire, which will be using two X1950XTX video cards.

The test configuration:

In Call of Duty 2, we see an unusual scene for the X1950 PRO Crossfire configuration. As the resolution is increased, with 4x aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering enabled, the X1950 PRO Crossfire system begins to suffer in terms of performance. We believe the reason behind the low performance is that the configuration begins to face a bottleneck when the resolutions get raised. The Radeon X1950XTX Crossfire configuration, on the other hand, which has two cards that each have 512 Mbytes of video memory, does not display the same behavior.

In other titles, the Radeon X1950 PRO has scalability that for the most part is quite high. At times, however, there is still a bottleneck at higher resolutions.

The X1950 PRO performs very well in these tests. In some cases, performance scaling goes as far as 96% when going from one card to two. The only game that shows scalability decreasing is X3 Reunion at 2048x1536.

From the results we obtained, it turns out that the X1950 PRO 256 Mbytes performed better than its NVIDIA counterpart the GeForce 7900GS in all tests, Doom 3 and F.E.A.R. with soft shadows enabled being the only exceptions. Taking into account that both cards are available on the market for the same retail price of $200, with slight price variations between manufacturers, the Radeon X1950 PRO is the more preferable buy of the two cards.

The new video architecture that ATI introduced with the X1950 PRO comes with some improvements over previous generations of ATI cards. The card’s cooling system only taking up one slot allows for more space to be cleared in addition for more silent PC operation. In addition, moving all Crossfire logic management into the card itself has allowed ATI to do away with some of the major flaws of Crossfire technology. It is good to know that ATI no longer limits us to having to use a particular Master card when setting up a Crossfire system.

A problem that we are currently seeing with the X1950 PRO is that vendors seem to be selling the cards quite above the suggested retail price. This problem is most likely due to a shortage of parts. Availability on the market is also limited. Hopefully ATI will solve this problem soon before it becomes too much of a major issue.