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Here it comes, from the reviews i've read, preformance increase isn't massive, more like the back and forth from the 9800P and the 5900. No real clear winner, except that the X800 needs less room, is quieter, and and dosn't need 2 Power connectors, nor a monster rig.

Reviews are

Toms Hardware.com http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/20040504/index.html

Anandtech.com http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=2044

ArsTechnica has a short writeup and links to more reviews as well.

More reviews.

Beyond3D.com http://www.beyond3d.com/reviews/ati/r420_x800/

HardOCP http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NjEx

Hardware Analysis http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/article/1710/

Extream Tech http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1 ... 627,00.asp

And Hot Hardware http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle. ... =517&cid=2

Evolution, not Revolution is key word with the X800.

Neither is overly greater than the other, unless where AA and AF are involved. Overall, both are winners.

Shinova wrote:Neither is overly greater than the other, unless where AA and AF are involved.

Thats all that matters these days; its not like you'll get slowdown without jacking the AA and AF up...

I'm quite surprised that both are so close in performance. NV40 seems to have the faster core architecture and next-gen shaders while R420 has the clockspeed and anisotropic filtering performance advantage (incidentally, many reviewers seem to be making a huge deal about the AF performance, which is strange considering it is both a performance hog and gives a hardly noticeable improvement compared to AA).

I think the choices are going to come down to what works best at what price point. GeForce 6800Pro looks interesting, as does the X800Pro, but the real interesting stuff is going to be the cards < $200. We don't yet have a clear picture of what either side is planning, but if nVidia or ATI could manage to get a 12-pipe, 256-bit memory solution down to < $200, then that would be a huge boon for gamers everywhere.

Don't forget, that in high end cards, the major differance to buyers will be, "Do I need to move the PCI card to make room for the Geforce, buy a new PSU, bring a cooler that looks like a room fan into my PC, or just buy something reguler?"

I agree that Nvidias journey to the Dark Side of huge unwieldy cards continues unabated; however, I've noticed bizarre performance issues with Nvidia cards, ironically on games like UT2k4 that're supposed to be 'Nvidia Kewl'. Even my lowest card (a 9600xt) handily outperforms my bosses 5800 at Ut2k4, and runs it even better in linux for some wierd reason. I haven't been impressed by my experiences with the FX series, and I think Nvidia have to make a big change.

The Kernel wrote:I'm quite surprised that both are so close in performance. NV40 seems to have the faster core architecture and next-gen shaders while R420 has the clockspeed and anisotropic filtering performance advantage (incidentally, many reviewers seem to be making a huge deal about the AF performance, which is strange considering it is both a performance hog and gives a hardly noticeable improvement compared to AA).

Hey, I like AF! I keep it on at all times on my puny R8500LE (which gets 4X for 'free', IIRC).

phongn wrote: Hey, I like AF! I keep it on at all times on my puny R8500LE (which gets 4X for 'free', IIRC).

To each his own. In my experience AF has had very little impact over Trilinear Filtering and I prefer to leave it off while leaving on 4x AA at 1280x1024 and below. At 1600x1200, I really don't see any visable improvement from either AF or AA.

Think of it this way, there's a reason why Xbox games don't see much AA or AF. Sure they are capable of doing it at a reasonable performance level, but the developers realize that even at a low resolution, there's a lot more they can do with that 20% of resources that AA/AF sucks up.

The Kernel wrote:Think of it this way, there's a reason why Xbox games don't see much AA or AF. Sure they are capable of doing it at a reasonable performance level, but the developers realize that even at a low resolution, there's a lot more they can do with that 20% of resources that AA/AF sucks up.

I dunno, I can usually see the texture blurring at greater distances in bilinear/trilinear filtering and it tends to annoy me. I like AA as well, but my puny R8500LE can't really handle it.

Stark wrote:I agree that Nvidias journey to the Dark Side of huge unwieldy cards continues unabated; however, I've noticed bizarre performance issues with Nvidia cards, ironically on games like UT2k4 that're supposed to be 'Nvidia Kewl'. Even my lowest card (a 9600xt) handily outperforms my bosses 5800 at Ut2k4, and runs it even better in linux for some wierd reason. I haven't been impressed by my experiences with the FX series, and I think Nvidia have to make a big change.

Uh, I thought UT2K4 on Linux required Nvidia...


And on Linux, you can kill a lot more processes to free system resources, and the nVidia drivers are rumoured to be better on Linux.