Deeper with the Radeon X1900 Series - Part 2
PCI Express x16 graphics cardsChipset X1900 512 MB, 256 bit
Undoubtedly, this is an interesting year for 3D graphics. From the software side, we're beginning to see games making full use of hardware capabilities. Games are not only using larger, more detailed textures but also providing us with much more detail by creatively using shaders. Even games not traditionally associated with cutting edge graphics technology is getting on the bandwagon. UFO Aftershock, which basically is a turn based strategy, is relying on normal mapping to add detail that would have been too expensive to put in polygons. DirectX 9 is now a mature technology, though many could argue that it's still as 'fractured' as DirectX 8 was. But DirectX 9 was literally quite successful in getting 3D graphics moving ahead. High dynamic range rendering, flow control and conditional operations for shaders, and floating point processing is a far cry than water effects, bloom and environment bump mapping largely used by DirectX 8 games.
On the hardware front, both vendors have released their latest generation of graphics card, supporting SM 3.0 - on the high end, ATI with the Radeon X1800 and X1900 and NVIDIA with the GeForce 7800 and 7900 series. These cards are just in time for the latest batch of games, providing us with fairly high enough frame rates for comfortable gameplay at 1024 x 768, with 4x AA and 16x AF enabled. If you can stomach it, you might be able to play at 1280 x 960 or 1280 x 1024. However, if you care enough to look under the hood, you'll no doubt will come to the conclusion that both cards are in different stages of architectural development. The Radeon X1900 is a quite new approach to 3D graphics, focusing more on shaders than textures. It also come equipped with forward looking features that should maximize its performance when working with shaders. On the other hand, the relatively unchanged GeForce 7900 is pretty much the farthest NVIDIA can extend the G70 architecture. While that may seem bad, it's not. It is proof just how forward looking the design of the NV 40 was. It's still the faster card when dealing with mostly texture dependent games and it could rely on the brute force of its many pipelines (and what's inside those pipelines) to push shaders.
Both the Radeon X1900 and GeForce 7800 / 7900 is good and fast, but they're both far from perfect. Each is powerful where the other is not. So, it was aptly said that the battle between these cards are similar to the old DirectX 8 feud between the vendors - namely with the Radeon 8500 and the GeForce 3 / 3 Titanium. The GeForce 3 Titanium was also an extension of the GeForce 3 design. Hell, even the GeForce 4 was. NVIDIA took the basic GeForce 3, tweaking it bit by bit, both in design and fabrication. The result was the blinding success of all three generations, but in the end if you look at it, all three generations didn't bring anything new to 3D graphics beyond the GeForce 3 spec. That was not the case with Radeon 8500. It slightly push forward with a more advanced specification, the 'fractured' DirectX 8.1. But most people will remember it as the first card to show just how much anisotropic filtering can improve image quality. Even with a 'broken' implementation that only worked in with bilinear filtering, the Radeon 8500 (and later the 9000 and 9200) provided a taste of 3D graphics beyond trilinear filtering. The Radeon 8500 is also known as the first card to focus on 32 bit color at the expense of 16 bit color performance. That's the good points. For users anywhere, the Radeon 8500 is a nightmare with its plethora of driver bugs, incompatibilities and promises unfulfilled (remember VIDEOSHADER on the Radeon 8500?). Not to mention some dubious rendering practices. Those of you who once had to live with these cards know what we mean.
It is about this time that ATI made some bold move and started to 'clean house'. Driver development was the primary focus those days, but they also realized that they need something revolutionary for their next generation part. The result is R300 and the rest is history. Meanwhile, NVIDIA was lulled into a false sense of security by the success they achieved, both on the PC and console markets. By the time the Radeon 9700 was launched, they knew they're in trouble. One could blame bad design decisions or fabrication problems, but the truth remains. The NV30 was no match for the R300. The following months was not a pretty sight and mark some dubious bugs and 'optimizations' from the one time leader of consumer 3D graphics. In the end, the sobering truth made both companies a little wiser, as did reviewers and gamers alike. We're now more 'picky' about optimizations and image quality in general.
Back to the present, as we said before, the best from both vendors is still to come. But let's look at what's available here and now, and not some 6 or 9 months down the road. As promised, today we're going to take a look at the 'other' features of the Radeon X1900 - adaptive antialiasing and high dynamic range (HDR) rendering.
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