PowerColor Radeon X1950 PRO 256MB video card review
As we saw last week in our review of ASUS' Radeon X1950 PRO board, ATI's latest RV570-based product is the new king of the hill at its price point, and by quite a substantial margin at that.
However, to add to the interest in the various Radeon X1950 PRO-based boards available from AIB partners, ATI are now allowing said partners far more freedom with regard to both clock speeds and cooling solutions - With coolers in particular, AIBs can now choose to buy their boards from ATI either with the reference cooler or without, allowing them to choose their own custom solution.
While ASUS sat down and designed their own cooler from scratch for the EAX1950PRO, today we take a look at PowerColor's take on this SKU which goes down a different route, and also chooses different core and memory clock speeds to boot. So, read on to see how this particular Radeon X1950 PRO compares to the competition.
RV570 architecture
RV570 is the first desktop GPU to be manufactured using the 80 nanometre process, and this core is designed specifically as a replacement for ATI's previous, R580 based, Radeon X1900 GT. As a result, its architecture is broadly similar to that seen on the aforementioned part, meaning that it features eight vertex shaders and twelve pixel pipelines, each of which contains a single texturing unit and three pixel shader units, giving it a total of thirty-six. Alongside this, the core features twelve ROPs, and its Ultra Threaded Despatch Processor can handle 384 threads in flight at any one time, compared to 512 on high-end R580-based boards.
ATI's reference core clock speed for the Radeon X1950 PRO is 575MHz, with 256MB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 690MHz on a 256-bit memory bus. The inclusion of video in capabilities is optional for this particular SKU, but HDCP support is featured and mandatory for AIB partners.
You can see the entire feature set of the Radeon X1950 PRO below.
- Ultra Threaded Shader Engine
- Support of DirectX9 Programmable Vertex and Pixel Shaders
- VS3.0 Vertex Shader functionality
- 1280 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
- HDR Blending on FP16, Int10 and Custom Formats
- 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