SAPPHIRE RADEON X1950 XT
256MB GDDR3 AVIVO REVIEW

"Review of the Sapphire Radeon x1950 XT which uses the R580 Core which is made by ATI. The Sapphire Radeon x1950 XT is compared to the Connect3D Radeon x1950 Pro, Sapphire Radeon x1800 GTO, Sapphire Radeon x800 GTO and Sapphire Radeon x1650 Pro. We have selected a mixture of benchmarks including 3dmark 2005, 3dmark 2006, ATI Double Cross, PowerVR Fable, Rightmark, Shadermark, Doom III, Prey and Quake 4. The Sapphire Radeon X1950 XT brings forth the dawn of a new technological day where games are no longer chained to the limits of the PC hardware!"

"Stimulating the minds passion for adventure and adrenaline the Sapphire Radeon X1950 XT brings forth the dawn of a new technological day where games are no longer chained to the limited capabilities of PC hardware! Tomorrow’s evolving in-game demands for feature rich environments bursting with explosive effects grip the imagination in ways before thought impossible, but now find themselves a reality with hardware features such as: the industry acclaimed X1950 GPU, 256MB of onboard memory, and increased performance via CrossFire support. When you couple impressive hardware advancements with next generation software support for Windows Vista 3D environment, Direct X and OpenGL the journey to a graphically enhanced tomorrow is accelerated with the tools of tomorrow made available today by Sapphire and the Sapphire Radeon X1950 XT."

FEATURES

384 million transistors on 90nm fabrication process
48 pixel shader processors
8 vertex shader processors
256-bit 8-channel GDDR3 memory interface
Native PCI Express x16 bus interface

RING BUS MEMORY CONTROLLER

Up to 512-bit internal ring bus for memory reads
Fully associative texture, color, and Z/stencil cache designs
Hierarchical Z-buffer with Early Z test
Lossless Z Compression (up to 48:1)
Fast Z-Buffer Clear
Optimized for performance at high display resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions

ULTRA-THREADED SHADER ENGINE

Support for Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 programmable vertex and pixel shaders in hardware
Full speed 128-bit floating point processing for all shader operations
Up to 512 simultaneous pixel threads
Dedicated branch execution units for high performance dynamic branching and flow control
Dedicated texture address units for improved efficiency
3Dc+ texture compression o High quality 4:1 compression for normal maps and two-channel data formats
High quality 2:1 compression for luminance maps and single-channel data formats
Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL 2.0

ADVANCED IMAGE QUALITY FEATURES

64-bit floating point HDR rendering supported throughout the pipeline
Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing
32-bit integer HDR (10:10:10:2) format supported throughout the pipeline
Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing
2x/4x/6x Anti-Aliasing modes
Multi-sample algorithm with gamma correction, programmable sparse sample patterns, and centroid sampling
New Adaptive Anti-Aliasing feature with Performance and Quality modes
Temporal Anti-Aliasing mode
Lossless Color Compression (up to 6:1) at all resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions
2x/4x/8x/16x Anisotropic Filtering modes
Up to 128-tap texture filtering
Adaptive algorithm with Performance and Quality options
High resolution texture support (up to 4k x 4k)

AVIVO VIDEO AND DISPLAY PLATFORM

High performance programmable video processor
Accelerated Mpeg-2, Mpeg-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264 decoding and transcoding
DXVA support
De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
Motion compensation, IDCT, DCT and color space conversion
Vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
3:2 pulldown (frame rate conversion)
Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
HDR tone mapping acceleration
Maps any input format to 10 bit per channel output
Flexible display support
Dual integrated dual-link DVI transmitters
DVI 1.0 compliant / HDMI interoperable and HDCP ready*
Dual integrated 10 bit per channel 400 MHz DACs
16 bit per channel floating point HDR and 10 bit per channel DVI output
Complete, independent color controls and video overlays for each display
High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all outputs
Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
Xilleon TV encoder for high quality analog output
YPrPb component output for direct drive of HDTV displays
Spatial/temporal dithering enables 10-bit color quality on 8-bit and 6-bit displays
Fast, glitch-free mode switching
VGA mode support on all outputs
Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions and refresh rates
Compatible with ATI TV/Video encoder products, including Theater 550

CROSSFIRE

Multi-GPU technology
Four modes of operation:
Alternate Frame Rendering (maximum performance)
Supertiling (optimal load-balancing)
Scissor (compatibility)
Super AA 8x/10x/12x/14x (maximum image quality)

SAPPHIRE RADEON X1950 XT

PAGE 1 - SAPPHIRE RADEON X1950 XT INTRODUCTION

PAGE 2 - VIDEO CARD COMPARISON, SYSTEM INFORMATION AND 3DMARK 2005

PAGE 3 - 3DMARK 2006, ATI DOUBLE CROSS, RIGHTMARK AND SHADERMARK

PAGE 4 - DOOM III, PREY, QUAKE 4 AND THE FINAL RESULT

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