ATI’s Radeon X1900 Video Card Series Part II

Taking A Closer Look:

In our last review we took a look at how ATI’s new X1900XTX and X1900XT video cards stacked up against Nvidia’s 7800GTX 512MB, as well as the previous generation X1800 series. We noted that in most of our tests we were being limited by CPU speed so for part two of this review we’ve stepped up to an AMD Athlon 64 4800+ dual core CPU. This model is 200MHz faster and has an extra 1MB of cache than the 3700+ used in our previous tests. We feel the data from our previous benchmarking suits the greater majority of our followers, but a good number of our readers overclock or have these high end processors. Today we take some of the CPU bottleneck out of our benchmarking and let the GPU’s scream. We also get a chance to look at how well ATI and Nvidia support dual core CPU’s.

Since we covered the architecture changes last time, let’s get straight to the numbers. The cards remain the same, but we’ve changed things up a little this time and will only have results from the 512MB cards. These were really the only results that were being held back by the CPU. All SLI results will be in Green, while CrossFire results are in Red. Single card results will always be in the standard blue. We’ve also split up the dual video card and single card scores in most of the games as this tends to jumble the graphs.

Sit back and get ready to look at what a pair of $1900 nVidia 7800GTX 512’s and the $1200 ATI X1900XT CrossFire cards can do in today’s games.