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1. Introduction

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2. Features

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Connect 3D X850XT PE - 02 - Features

Main Features
GPU	Radeon X850 XT PE - R480
Memory Brand/Model	Samsung K4J5532Q-GC16 (1.6ns)
Memory Type	256 MB 256-bit GDDR3
Engine Clock Speed	540MHz
Memory Clock Speed	590MHz
Memory Bandwidth	35.8 GB/sec
Pixel Pipelines	16
Vertex Pipelines	6
Fill rate	8.6 Giga pixels /sec
DX Support	9.0
OpenGL Support	1.5
Output	VGA / DVI-I / D-Sub
Bus	AGP 4X/8X
Processing technology	0.13 micron

As we mentioned earlier, Connect3D's X850 XT Platinum Edition is based on ATi's latest chipset, the R480. The R480 is not very different from the previous high end R430. It is also built using the 0.13 micron low-k fabrication process and still features 16 Pixel Pipelines and 6 parallel Vertex engines.

However, the GPU clock ticks at 540MHz (20MHz more than the X800 XT PE) while the memory clock's speed is set at 590MHz, thus reaching 1.18GHz effective frequency against 1.08MHz for the X800 XT PE.

Basically, that's all the difference you will get compared to an AGP X800 XT PE. As a result of the slightly higher clock speeds, the X850 XT PE offers increased fill rate and memory bandwidth which will in turn produce "slightly" increased performance.

Here's a table showing the differences between the X800 XT PE and the new X850 XT and XT PE:

	X800 XT PE	X850 XT	X850 XT PE
Core(MHz)	520	520	540
Memory(MHz)	560(1120)	540(1080)	590(1180)

 

X800=X850 Architecture

3Dc

To understand what 3Dc does, we need to quickly run through a brief discussion on normal maps.

You can think of a normal as an arrow pointing outwards from a surface at a 90 degree angle in order to quickly access its angle difference from different points of lighting.

First, a model with an extremely high polygon count is created (i.e 15,000 polygons) and then one with less (1,000 polygons) and that is the one that we'll eventually keep. Running a simple program calculates the differences between the two models and stores it as a normal map texture. Before rendering the final model in the game, the normal map texture is applied on the low polygon model and pixel shader instructions are used to compute real time lighting.

A quick example of Normal Mapping (not 3Dc!)

Normal mapping is greatly used in some of the most successful game titles of our days, like Far Cry, Half Life 2 and Doom 3. However, the problem with Normal mapping is the great limitation on the texture size due to the lack of compression.

To get a peek at what would happen if none of the textures were compressed in a recent game, try Doom 3 and set the details to Ultra High. As suggested by Id Software, Doom3's publisher, the Ultra High detail level requires a graphics card with 512Mb RAM. In case you're not really into the graphics card market, there is no card with 512Mb RAM, yet.

Such is the case with normal mapping. The current texture compression algorithms, DXTC and S3TC, are inapplicable on normal mapping textures as they produce block artifacts, so programmers usually avoid using them.

3Dc is the solution to this problem with an algorithm that splits up the texture into blocks. Then compressing each block, it is able to achieve up to 4:1 compression.

When using 3Dc you can get much better quality textures with the same performance from your card.

The bad thing about 3Dc is that we'll have to wait until the game developers incorporate it into their engines or release a patch that takes advantage of it. Ubisoft was supposed to be the first to include 3Dc support into their much awaited Far Cry patch 1.3. However, as we found out, there is no actual difference in the game despite the addition of the console command "EnableCompressedMaps".

 

SMARTSHADER™ HD

• Full hardware acceleration of 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
• Up to 1,536 instructions and 16 textures per
  rendering pass
• 32 temporary and constant registers
• Facing register for two-sided lighting
• 128-bit, 64-bit & 32-bit per pixel floating point
  color formats
  - Multiple Render Target (MRT) support
  • Complete feature set supported in OpenGL®
  via extensions

SMOOTHVISION™ HD
• 2x/4x/6x Anti-Aliasing modes
Sparse multi-sample algorithm with
gamma correction, programmable
sample patterns, and centroid sampling
Lossless Color Compression (up to 6:1)
at all resolutions, including widescreen
HDTV resolutions
Temporal Anti-Aliasing
2x/4x/8x/16x Anisotropic Filtering modes
- Up to 128-tap texture filtering per
AA sample
- Adaptive anisotropic filtering algorithm
with bilinear (performance) and trilinear
(quality) options

HYPER Z™ HD
• 3-level Hierarchical Z-Buffer with Early Z Test
• Lossless Z-Buffer Compression (up to 48:1)
• Fast Z-Buffer Clear
• Z cache optimized for real-time shadow rendering
• Optimized for performance at high display
resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions

VIDEOSHADER™ HD
• Seamless integration of pixel shaders and video in
real time
• FULLSTREAM™ video de-blocking technology for
Real, DivX, WMV9 and WMV10 formats
• VIDEOSOAP™ noise removal filtering for captured
video
• MPEG1/2/4 decode and encode acceleration
DXVA support
Hardware Motion Compensation, iDCT, DCT and
color space conversion
• All-format DTV/HDTV decoding
• Adaptive Per-Pixel De-Interlacing and Frame Rate
Conversion (temporal filtering)

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3. A closer look

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4. Test System

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5. 3DMark05

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6. 3DMark 2003

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Connect 3D X850XT PE - 06 - 3DMark 2003

3D Mark is a widely used and accepted benchmark that stresses the DirectX performance of a VGA card. A very strong point of 3DMark is that it's VGA card measuring is does not require any CPU power. So the resulting fps are a good reference a VGA card's rendering performance. For testing the performance of each card we used the 4 game benchmarks 3DMark has.

3Dmark03 also includes sound and CPU tests as well as some other feature tests.

- Game Test 1 - Wings of Fury (DX7)
This test is a combat flight simulator written for older hardware (DirectX 7). Particles are used a lot in this test - smoke and vapor trails, flak and gunfire, and explosions are produced using point sprites and quads.

- Game Test 2 - Battle of Proxycon (DX8)
This test is a simulation of first person shooter game types. 1.1 and 1.4 Vertex shaders are widely used since all character models are skinned using vertex shaders.This makes this test a good vertex shader comparison for VGA cards.

- Game Test 3 - Trolls' Lair (DX8)
This test should be the favorite of all RPG lovers. It is a cut scene of a female warrior facing two malicious trolls. Again the same vertex and pixel processing is used as in game test 2.

- Game Test 4 - Mother Nature (DX9)
Mother nature represents the level of effects and realism that are possible using 2.0 vertex and pixel shaders, plus some other features that DirectX 9 offers.

The game tests here show the power of the X850XT. The framerate never dropped below 30fps, not even for a second in GT4 which contains the most demanding scene of this quartet of tests.

- 3DMark Official score

If you test your machine with 3DMark, you can post the results at 3DMark' online result browser. For more information visit futuremark.com.

The X850XT obviously had no problems reaching 12.000 3dmarks, leaving the X700 and 6600GT more than 5000 3dmarks behind.

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7. Aquamark3 / 3DMark 2001

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8. Codecreatures

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CodeCreatures is a synthetic 3D benchmark that is a good reference for VGA performance comparison. This is a high-end 3D benchmark that also requires DirectX 8 hardware, making a good tool for measuring the potential of DirectX 8 game performance.

The Codecreatures benchmark is written with Microsoft's DirectX 8.1 API and incorporates the use of Vertex and PixelShaders popular on next generation 3D accelerators.

The benchmark plays a photo-realistic nature scene and calculates the performance of the graphics adapter by measuring the fps that it can display at 1024x768, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 resolutions.

 

 

-Codecreatures number

The codecreatures number is the resulting score of the total benchmarking process and is basically the geometric mean of the three framerates multiplied by 100.

Once again, the X850 from Connect3d edged out the lower class X700pro and 6600GT by at least 2200 in codecreatures.

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9. Half life 2

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10. Doom 3

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11. Far Cry

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Connect 3D X850XT PE - 11 - Far Cry

You are Jack Carver running your own boat charter business in beautiful Micronesia. With a past best left behind you, you'll be focusing on your present assignment: escorting an ambitious journalist named Valerie Cortez to the Island of Cabatu. It seems like a piece of cake, but you'll soon learn: paradise can be hell.

Farcry is an awesome First Person Shooter (FPS) based on a last generation 3D engine named as CryEngine. Real-time editing, bump-mapping, static lights, network system, integrated physics system, shaders, shadows and a dynamic music system are just some of the state of-the-art features that the CryEngine offers.

A great advantage and strong point of the CryEngine is its physics system which supports character inverse kinematics, vehicles, rigid bodies, liquid, rag doll, cloth and body effects. All physics seem to be very realistic and you never get bored when facing enemies, since character models have multiple animations that blend in believable ways.

With an integrated shader system and a massive terrain which maximizes the view distance to 2km, these features make Farcry a perfect action game and also a referable benchmark to speak of.

- Benchmark Settings

For this game we recorded a custom demo from the start of the Rebellion stage. We chose an indoor scene in order to avoid getting the "CPU bound" effect. This will result in slightly higher results since it is also less GPU intensive, but we can't afford being stuck at 40-50 fps because of our CPU.

The latest patch (1.3) was used for our tests which updates the game's graphics engine to use the 3.0 Shader model. This option is only supported for the 6800 series.

The resolutions we ran the demo under, are as follows: 800x600,1024x768, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200. The first test was committed with Anti Aliasing (AA) and Anisotropic Filtering (AF) features off. In the second test, we leveled up AA to 4x and AF to 8x. All tests were taken with Jack's flashlight on, to increase the game's demands from the graphics cards and with ai_update_interval set to zero so that the results is subjective.

Far Cry is no longer a holdback for cards like this. At the highest resolution we got 74fps unlike the 6600GT and X700pro which dropped their performance to around 30fps.

Increasing the quality of the game with AF and AA, the X850 XT PE is still able to deliver an average of 60fps at 1600x1200. However, in order to get gameplay performance, 1280x1024 is the best option.

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12. Thief 3

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Connect 3D X850XT PE - 12 - Thief 3

Instead of Deus Ex from now on we’ll be testing our cards using Thief 3. It’s based on the same engine but it’s much less GPU intensive and playable by more VGA cards than Deus.

The game makes severe use of Pixel Shader 1.1 instructions, the bloom effect and stencil shadows to achieve a wonderful result in your screen.

In the game you play the part of Master Thief Garrett who is back to rule out any evil forces using his unique stealth abilities. Deadly Shadows shows what stealth gameplay is all about. This game really gives you the feel of sneaking around and holding your breath when stuck in a sticky situation.

Since there is no official benchmark for the game, we’ll do our tests using a GPU intensive scene from the tutorial-level which we believe that represents the average fps you’ll get when playing the game.

 

 

 

Thief 3 is an excellent challenge for the X850 XT. All lower class cards failed to provide stable perfomance with this benchmark when selecting full details from the settings menu. The Connect3D card still had trouble producing enough frames per second but at least it came up with 40fps at 1280x1024 which is the most appropriate resolution with this card in order to enjoy the game.

Enabling 4x Multisampling and 8x Anisotropic filtering makes the game unplayable at high resolutions with the majority of the cards. This is also the case with the X850XT PE from Connect3d. The best resolution seems to be 1024x768.

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13. Colin McRae 05

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14. Ground Control II

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Connect 3D X850XT PE - 14 - Ground Control II

Ground Control 2 is an action-oriented game of tactics and warfare. As Captain Jacob Angelus of the Northern Star Alliance, you will command squads of infantry, artillery, and airpower against the might of the Empire of Terra. Base building and resource-collecting are replaced with unit control and combat tactics where your knowledge of the battlefield maneuvers will make the difference in your fight against a ruthless enemy. Position your troops on hilltops for better aim or inside buildings and forests for protection as you’ll need to use every inch of terrain to your advantage. Call in air strikes or assault pods to bring the battle behind enemy lines. Send out scouts to locate the enemy and use spotters for your artillery with the 360° free-roaming camera. Experience the total immersion of futuristic warfare as you lead your forces to victory!

 

For our benchmarks, we used the highest possible settings on the first mission of the single player game and moved around the camera to get an average framerate using fraps.

Ground Control II offers really impressive graphics without requiring much GPU power. Click on the picture above to view a screenshot from the game. Check out these excellent water effects!

You can see from the chart that the X850XT encourages you to try out the game with Anisotropic Filtering and Anti Aliasing enabled as the fps we got were a high under all resolutions.

Setting AA to 4x and AF to 8x, the perfornance drop is quite big. However, the Connect3D card still holds its place and provides more than 30fps even under 1600x1200.

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15. Overclocking

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Connect 3D X850 XT PE- 15 - Overclocking

No matter your graphics card, there comes a time in your computer's life when it can no longer cope with the latest technology the ever so popular games use. This is one of the main reasons for overclocking your graphics card. Gamers are always looking forward for a little extra boost in terms of framerate. Even though most of the times the boost is far from noticeable, overclocking remains the last resort when you can't afford to buy a brand new VGA card.

Increasing the memory clock too much, produces the so-called "artifacts".

The default clock speeds of the Connect3D X800XT PE are 540MHz for the core and 590MHz for the memory. The memory clock was already set high so we didn't expect it to increase too much.

The highest stable settings we could achieve

To our suprize, we couldn't overclock the memory at all, not even by 5MHz without losing the card's stability. So using ATITool 0.0.23 (which is the first version to support the new X850 cards), we only succeeded in overclocking the card's core up to 560MHz and 590MHz (1.18GHz) respectively.

Let's see the performance boost we got from these extra 20MHz.

The difference in the games is not noticeable. As a result, it is not advisable to clock the Connect3D's X850XT PE any higher than it is already.

One more thing about the fan system on the X850 XT, the fan's speed is set by the card's BIOS on boot at 4% of its maximum value. We tried setting the fan to 100% in case the card could clock a bit higher.

However, the fan when running at full speed is incredibly noisy and annoying so we switched it back.

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16. Conclusion

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Connect 3D X850XT PE - 16 - Conclusion

The performance of the Connect3D X850XT PE is no doubt, excellent. The X850XT PE is rightfully the new flagship of ATi. It had no problems achieving great framerates in both benchmark applications and games, even with Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering on. On the other hand, the card has no new exciting features to add to the graphics card market.

Right now, the Connect3D X850 XT PE costs around US$600. The cost compared to the US$500 you'd normally have to pay for an X800 XT PE (AGP version) seems too much as there is no real difference in performance between them to justify the cost. Maybe the plain X850 XT is better value for your money but still, the Platinum Edition version is the fastest product ATi has to offer and that tends to add a little to the card's price on the market.

Overclocking the X850 XT PE proved to be pointless. None of the benchmarks we ran showed any actual in-game difference as the card's clocks were already set at the highest level possible. The extra 20MHz we got on the core clock only increased the benchmark results by 1 to 3 fps.

 

Pros:
-Excellent performance with most of the game tests.
-Reasonably quiet fan operation.

Cons:
-Very expensive
-No software bundle

Performance:
Value for money:
Overclocking:
Bundle: