X800 Video Card Wednesday? [Now Available]

X800 Video Card Wednesday?


Tuesday January 04, 2005 09:11 PM EST
Posted by Mudbug

According to one source, the ATI X800 video card could be debuted for the Mac as early as January 5th. The X800 was apparently shown as a demo at the Digital Life Expo in New York in a Power Mac G5. It will be capable of driving ONE 30" display, because there is one ADC port and one Dual-link DVI port. Additionally, the card will only take up ONE slot (its own AGP 8x slot), unlike the 6800 Ultra and GT.

At the time of the demo, nothing was known about the pricing or availability.

See http://www.macworld.com/news/2004/10/14/ati/index.php for more information about the demo mentioned in the story.

I thought it was supposed to be a pci-x card...

I thought it was supposed to be a pci-x card...

Naw. Not if they were already demoing it in existing G5's. The PC version has both PCI-Express (which is I think what you meant. PCI-X != PCI-Express) and AGP-8x versions. Eventually we will see PCI-Express, this story more about the retail card than anything, so you can't debut a retail card that supports an architecture that doesn't even exist on the platform yet.

XT?

I don't keep up with these things... how does this X800 compare with other top boards, in terms of game performance? Does it beat nVidia's best?

OK, I'll cancel my order for a 9800.

Not that I actually got around to ordering it in the first place :rolleyes:

XT?

That much is unknown. We'll see tomorrow, should my sources and my interpretation of their cryptic remarks be correct.

I don't keep up with these things... how does this X800 compare with other top boards, in terms of game performance? Does it beat nVidia's best?

Now THAT's an interesting question. I don't have hard facts for you, but from the spattering of stats that I've seen, the 6800 Ultra appears to be slightly faster than the X800 XT at some tasks, but a lot of people prefer the X800 anyways mainly because it is a better engineered card. ATI gets better performance by making their technology better, whereas nVidia appears to just keep on cranking up the clock, and therefore the heat (thus the fact that their cards have taken up 2 slots since the high-end FX line).

I believe nVidia does better with OpenGL games, whereas ATI's cards were better tuned to DirectX games on the PC side. However, I don't know if they do any tuning to the drivers when they port these things to the Mac in order to make it all a more even playing field (since there is no such thing as DirectX on the mac).

If there will be PM updates I am sure we'll see the X800 .. otherwise the whole beta project seems useless .. though I am sure more people are waiting for Quadros and FireGLs ..