New Graphics King? ATI Released Radeon X800 XT for Power Mac G5

The other shoe dropped yesterday in the graphics card race with ATI's release of its Radeon X800 XT Mac Edition. It is ATI's answer to the Nvidia 6800 series (Ultra and GT) graphics cards released in November which drive Apple's new 30" Cinema Display and have offered the fastest graphics available for the Mac, at least until now.

According to ATI's specs, the X800 has 256MB of GDDR3 RAM, dual 400 MHz DACs, 6 parallel vertex processing engines and 16 parallel pixel pipelines, all similar to the NV6800 cards. The major differences are that the X800 has one dual DVI port and one Apple ADC port while the NV6800 has two dual DVI ports and can therefore drive two 30" Cinema Displays simultaneously. The ATI X800 is much smaller and thinner, using only the 8x AGP slot, while the NV6800's use two slots, the AGP slot and cover a PCIX slot as well. We have reviewed the NV6800 Ultra in our dual 2.5GHz Power Mac G5 driving a 30" Cinema Display.

Rob-ART Morgan's Bare Feats yesterday posted a comparo using Unreal Tournament 2004, Halo, Quake III Arena and Motion that shows the ATI X800 to be faster at a certain resolution than the NV6800 Ultra in the 3D games, especially Halo with 4X FSAA enabled, but slower in Motion. Bare Feats also has a chart that says that the X800 has 475MHz core (or engine) clock speed vs 400MHz for the NV6800 Ultra and that may account for some of the difference.

The ATI X800 sells for $499 while the NV6800 Ultra sells for $599 and the NV6800 GT sells for $499. If you do not have two 30" Cinema Displays, have an older Cinema Display with an ADC connector or mainly play 3D games, the ATI X800 appears to be the better value. We plan to run our own tests in the near future. [Bill Fox]