First Review Benchmarks Of ATI X1800XT & Pro

It seems like HardwareAnalysis.com has been kept out of the loop by ATI regarding the upcoming R520 product launch. Therefore they seem to have managed to workaround this handicap and can now present the first benchmark scores. Keep in mind that ATI couldn't bring R520 to market as planned. 6 months have passed for Nvidia to take back market lead and apparently ATI could also not annihilate the leak power or design problems that keep them from launching a 24 pixel pipeline card like Nvidia did with the GeForce 7800GTX. What bothers me is that ATI still thinks they can charge customers fully introductiory prices on the R520 cards. Nvidia 7800GTX and GT prices already dropped to bearable levels. Once again R520 seems a fine piece of hardware and if it had 24pp I would definitely prefer it over Nvidia but its just a 16 pipeliner...

Our conclusion is a mixed bag really. The benchmarks were run on release candidate drivers for the Radeon X1800 Pro and XT, hence performance is not likely to change much before launch. On the other hand ATI has been able to wring extra performance from their drivers in the past, so we’d expect them to be able to pull that off here as well. Overall it looks like the Radeon X1800 XT is good match for the GeForce 7800GTX, although in most games the GTX clearly takes the lead. The Radeon X1800 Pro is slightly slower than the GeForce 7800 GT, although not by much. Considering the fact that we’ve used a top-of-the-line AMD Athlon FX57 processor, with 1GB of OCZ DDR400 memory on the popular Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard your mileage may vary, we honestly don’t know how these cards will do in a lower spec-ed system. With more pipelines, 24 vs. 16, the GeForce 7800 GT and GTX should have the advantage here.