Sapphire Radeon X1650 PRO video card review

When we took a look at PowerColor's Radeon X1650 PRO part almost exactly a month ago, we were pretty impressed with what we saw - "If the Radeon X1650 PRO ships on time, and if it retails at the price promised by PowerColor, it's looking like the graphics board to buy for its particular price range." we said at the time.

Now, a month later, we've had another Radeon X1650 PRO board pay a visit to the Elite Bastards review dungeon, this time from the good people at that ATI AIB giant, Sapphire.  This means we can that we can take a look at this part with a new set of drivers (thanks to the provision of a modified version of CATALYST 6.8 which supports this boards), with retail boards available on store shelves and pricing set in stone.  I'm pretty sure that ATI's new competition for NVIDIA's GeForce 7600 GS needs little further by way of an introduction, so let's get cracking with a look at the board!

Radeon X1650 architecture

Seeing as we've already discussed the architecture on show here in our PowerColor Radeon X1650 PRO review, I hope you can forgive a little cut and pasting here.  Architecturally, the Radeon X1650 is identical to its forebear, the Radeon X1600, which in itself shares many of its design traits with the high-end Radeon X1900 (and X1950) R580-based parts you may already be more familiar with - Indeed, the Radeon X1600 was the precursor in many senses to the later release of the Radeon X1900.  You can find our in-depth look at the technology and architecture behind R580 here.

So, this means that our Radeon X1650 board on test today features three shader units per pixel (or fragment) pipeline, of which there are four pipelines on both RV530 and RV535.  This gives us a grand total of four fragment pipelines (or one quad of pipelines), four texturing units and twelve pixel shader units, coupled with five vertex shader units and four ROPs.

The only difference between the Radeon X1600 XT and its direct replacement, the X1650 PRO, is a miniscule boost to both the core and memory clock speeds of the board.  From the X1600 XTs speeds of 590MHz core and 690MHz memory, the X1650 PRO gains just 10MHz in both disciplines, giving us final clocks of 600MHz core and 700MHz for memory.  Not enough to make any real difference to performance, but worth mentioning nonetheless.

You can see the entire feature set of the Radeon X1650 PRO below.

• Ultra Threaded Shader Engine
  • Support of DirectX9 Programmable Vertex and Pixel Shaders
  • VS3.0 Vertex Shader functionality
    • 1024 Instructions (Unlimited with flow control)
    • Single Cycle Trigonometric Operations (SIN & COS)
  • PS3.0 Pixel Shaders
    • Ultra Thread Pixel Shader Engine
    • Fast Dynamic Branching
    • Single Precision 128-bit Floating Point (FP32) Processing
    • 16 textures per rendering pass
    • 32 temporary and constant registers per pixel
    • Facing register for two-sided lighting
    • Multiple render target support
    • Shadow volume rendering acceleration
    • 128-bit, 64-bit & 32-bit per pixel floating point colour formats
• Advanced Image Quality Features
  • HDR Blending on FP16, Int10 and Custom Formats
    • All Blending modes work with all Anti-Aliasing Modes
  • 3Dc+ Normal Map Compression
    • High quality 4:1 Normal Map Compression
    • Two Channel & Single Channel format support
  • 2x/4x/6x Multi-Sampling full scene Anti-Aliasing modes, adaptive algorithm with programmable sample patterns and colour buffer compression
  • Adaptive Anti-Aliasing for Transparent Surfaces
  • Temporal Anti-Aliasing
  • Lossless Color Compression (up to 6:1) at all resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions
  • High Quality, Angle Invariant, Anisotropic Filter Mode
  • 2x/4x/8x/16x Anisotropic Filtering modes
  • 4Kx4X texture Support
• Memory Controller
  • Internal Ring Bus Architecture (RV530)
  • Programmable Arbitration Logic
  • Fully Associative Caches
  • 3-level, Floating Point, Hierarchical Z-Buffer with early Z test
  • Lossless Z-Buffer compression (up to 48:1)
  • Fast Z-Buffer Clear
  • Z Cache Optimisations for shadow rendering
  • Optimized for performance at high display resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions
• AVIVO
  • Dual 10-bit Display Pipelines
  • Dual Integrated Dual Link TMDS Transmitters, Dual 400MHz RAMDACS, Xilleon Derived TV Output.
  • Hardware Accelerated H.264 Decode




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