Rage3D ATI Radeon X1950 Pro Crossfire Review Rage3D ATI Radeon X1950 Pro Crossfire Review
Times have changed however and these days highly desirable Pro has been replaced with silly acronyms like XTX, XT, and GT. Pro, at least with ATI, has been relegated to the throne of less performance and fanboy mockery. We’ve been seeing it on X1300 and X1600 value and mainstream cards lately, but no respectable gamer not wanting a good spit covering would brag about having one of those cards. We haven’t seen a Pro part with respectable performance since the X800 Pro a few years ago in fact, and even owning one of those wouldn’t have guaranteed you a dry evening.
With the X1950 Pro we’ve been reintroduced to the Pro acronym tagged onto a unique graphics card that uses a unique graphics core that introduces some much appreciated advancements in ATI’s ongoing struggle against arch rival NVIDIA. Whether or not the X1950 Pro raises “Pro” back to the respectable perch it once held is something we aim to find out in this review.
The X1950 Pro is built using the RV570 graphics core which features 256MB of GDDR3 memory, 36 pixel shaders, 8 vertex shaders, and 12 ROPs. To those of you paying attention these specs will look familiar; they are the same as featured with ATI’s X1900 GT graphics card. The RV570 is no chopped down R580 like the X1900 GT uses though, no core that couldn’t quite cut it; the RV570 was designed and built for the X1950 Pro and the mainstream performance segment with purpose and intent.
So even though the X1900GT is still around, and even though it’s recently undergone a somewhat “wtf?!” spec change, it’s not long for this world and its position in ATI’s product ladder will be usurped by the X1950 Pro soon. Here’s what that ladder currently looks like:
| ATI's Lineup | ||
| Market Segment | Product | MSRP ($US) |
| Enthusiast | X1950 XTX X1950 Crossfire |
$449 |
| X1900 XT 256MB | $259 | |
| Performance | X1950 Pro | $199 |
| X1900 GT | $195 | |
| Mainstream | X1650 Pro | $99 |
| X1300 XT | $89 | |
| Value | X1300 Pro | $79 |
| X1300 256MB | $59 | |
| X1300 64bit | $49 | |
We’ll take a closer look at the thing on the next page.
The choice of competeing cards for this review was fairly straight forward. NVIDIA's 7900 GS which comes in between $199-$249 is ATI's main target competition for the X1950 Pro, and with a new MSRP of $195 ATI's own X1900 GT also makes a fair comparison point. We're using the "old" X1900 GT however so keep that in mind. The "new" X1900 GT with the different core and memory clock speeds, the one you will probably find in retail now, performs slightly different.
We've also throw in an ATI X1950 XTX and BFG 7900 GTX OC for comparison points against X1950 Pro Crossfire. Two X1950 Pro cards will set you back about the same as one X1950 XTX or one 7900 GTX so we feel that comparison is legitimate.
Here are more details about our test system and methods:Games Benchmarks (click for settings)
Image Quality Settings
| Test Systems | NVIDIA | ATI |
| Motherboard ( chipset ) |
Foxconn C51XEM2AA (NForce 590 SLI) |
MSI K9A Platinum (ATI RD580/SB600) |
| CPU | AMD Athlon FX-62 @ 2.8GHz | |
| Graphics Card | NVIDIA 7900 GS |
ATI Radeon X1950 Pro x2 |
| Driver Version | Forceware 91.47 WHQL | ATI 8.291 Beta |
| Memory ( Timings ) |
2GB (2x1024MB) SuperTalent PC2-6400 DDR2 @ 800MHZ ( 4-4-3-8 2T) |
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| Hard Disk | Western Digital Caviar WD2500KS SE16 250GB | |
| Sound | Onboard | |
| Network | Onboard | |
| PSU | PC Power & Cooling 1KW Turbo-Cool Quad-SLI | |
| OS | Windows XP Pro SP2, DX9c (August 2006) | |
| Card Specifications | ATI X1950 Pro | HIS X1900 GT | NVIDIA 7900 GS | ATI X1950 XTX | BFG 7900 GTX OC |
| Core | RV570 | R580 | G71 | R580+ | G71 |
| Silicon Process | 80nm | 90nm | 90nm | 90nm | 90nm |
| Transistor Count (millions) |
330 | 384 | 278 | 384 | 278 |
| Core Speed MHz | 575 | 575 | 450 | 650 | 670 |
| Memory Speed MHz (Effective) |
690 (1.38GHz) |
600 (1.2GHz) |
660 (1.32GHz) |
1,000 (2.0GHz) |
820 (1.64GHz) |
| Memory Size | 256 MB | 256 MB | 256 MB | 512 MB | 512 MB |
| Bus Standard | PEG x16 | PEG x16 | PEG 16x | PEG x16 | PEG 16x |
| Bus Width | 256bit | 256bit | 256bit | 256bit | 256bit |
| ROPs | 12 | 12 | 16 | 16 | 16 |
| Pixel Shaders | 36 | 36 | 20 | 48 | 24 |
| Vertex Shaders | 8 | 8 | 7 | 8 | 8 |
| Peak Memory Bandwidth (GB/s) |
44.2 | 38.4 | 42.2 | 64.0 | 51.2 |
| Pixel Fillrate (million pixels/sec) |
6,900 | 6,900 | 7,200 | 10,400 | 10,720 |
| Texel Fillrate (million texels/sec) |
6,900 | 6,900 | 9,000 | 10,400 | 16,080 |
| API Compliancy | DX 9.0c | DX 9.0c | DX 9.0c | DX 9.0c | DX 9.0c |
The Windows XP desktop was set to 1280x960 with a 32bit color depth and 85Hz refresh rate for all tests. Refresh rate locks for 3D graphics modes, as supported by both NVIDIA and ATI graphics control panels, was not enabled. V-Sync was forced off via the graphics card control panel as well. For the NVIDIA cards image quality was set to "High Quality" in order to reduce texture shimmer. We feel enabling this setting makes for a more legitimate comparison when comparing NVIDIA cards to ATI cards.
Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropy were applied in the game engine where the options existed. For games that did not support those options natively, the graphics card control panel was used.
Custom batch files were used when possible for automated benchmarking, which are available upon request. When manual benchmarking was necessary Fraps was used.
Benchmarking was done with Windows set to the "Adjust for best performance" profile and all unnecessary Windows services and hardware devices were disabled. The latest drivers for each necessary hardware component were installed prior to testing and kept consistent throughout.
Sound and networking interfaces were enabled for all tests.
Windows XP was installed fresh on two seperate but identical hard-drives prior to testing (one for the ATI system, one for the NVIDIA system).
The first thing you’ll likely notice about the X1950 Pro is the cooler. That’s understandable considering that it’s almost the entire length and width of the card. It's about the same size as the X1950 XTX cooler but thankfully it’s only single-slot. Compared to the tiny little cooler on the 7900 GS though the X1950 Pro cooler is still a monster.
 X1950 Pro top |
 X1950 Pro back |
 X1950 XTX vs X1950 Pro |
 7900 GS vs X1950 Pro |
The cooler is built of essentially two pieces (discounting the fan); a large copper heatsink and a plastic shroud that helps direct airflow over an array of copper fins. The heatsink is a single-piece of copper with the cooling fins soldered to the surface that are formed into tunnels. These tunnels are arrayed around a smallish, quiet fan that sits at the back end of the cooler. The fan pushes air through the copper tunnels and out through an opening in the shroud on the top-left edge of the card. Air doesn’t exhaust out the back of the case like it does with ATI’s X1950 XTX cooler, but it doesn’t get directed down onto the motherboard either. Frankly, the card doesn’t get hot enough to make that a big concern anyway. It peaked at 72°C using ATITool's 3D View, with the default dynamic fan control setting the fan speed to 45% (default 33%). It wasn't loud at all, even spun up like this. At 100% fan speed it obviously got louder, but even then the noise level is somewhat manageable. Temperatures at that fan speed leveled out at 64°C, for the curious.
The cooler also picks up heat from the memory modules and even heat from a few of the voltage regulators near the end of the PCB, which is a nice touch and should help overclocking a bit.
 Cooler exhaust |
 heatsink |
 heatsink tunnels |
 heatsink base |
The PCB is long. In fact it’s the same length as the X1950 XTX and X1900 GT and quite a bit longer than NVIDIA’s 7900 GS. Considering the low price of the card that makes you wonder a bit about how much of a profit ATI is making on these things.
Underneath the cooler are the Samsung GDDR3 memory modules that make up the 256MB of frame-buffer space on the X1950 Pro. The modules are model K4J55323QG-BC14 which are rated for 1.4ns (700MHz, or 1.4GHz effective).
Sitting at the center of the card is the new RV570 GPU measuring about 16.7mm by 13.8mm and weighing in at 330 million transistors.
 X1950 Pro layout |
 Samsung GDDR3 memory |
 RV570 core |
This new core is rather unique in a couple different ways. The first is the fact that it’s the first ATI graphics core to be built on TSMC’s 80nm “half-node” manufacturing process. All of ATI’s previous chips were built using TSMC’s more common 90nm process. The smaller size lets TSMC put more of them on a wafer, thus reducing manufacturing costs (which in an ideal world would get passed on to the end consumer) and should allow for slightly faster speeds compared to the 90nm process.
The most notable thing that separates the RV570 from other cores though, at least other ATI cores, is that the Crossfire compositing engine is now part of the chip itself. With older generations of Crossfire the compositing engine was a separate chip hanging off the end of the PCB. This required ATI to offer two separate SKUs, one with the compositing chip that was sold as a Crossfire Master Card, the other without the compositing engine that was sold as a standard SKU. This type of Crossfire generally required users to connect the two cards using a very annoying external dongle (think three headed anaconda in an early stage of rigor mortis and you’ll have a good idea about the dongle).
In some cases, generally with the lower performance parts, no dongle and no master card are required. Instead data was sent over the PCI-Express bus in what’s generally referred to as “software” Crossfire. Performance and scaling suffered significantly however.
Instead of an external dongle or relying on the PCI-Express bus, beginning with the X1950 Pro ATI now uses internal Crossfire (ATI calls it native Crossfire) which looks and functions very similar to NVIDIA’s two year old SLI bridge.
The most obvious difference between ATI’s Crossfire bridge and NVIDIA’s SLI bridge is that ATI uses two of them as opposed to just one for NVIDIA’s SLI. Each of ATI’s bridges is 12-bits wide for 24-bits total, enough to support displays with resolutions as high as 2560x2048 at 60Hz. The X1950 Pro doesn’t support resolutions that high, but future cards may so ATI is hedging their bets here.
 The Crossfire bridge with an unmarked SLI bridge from a Foxconn motherboard |
 The Crossfire bridge is shorter and wider than the SLI bridge |
 Both Crossfire links connecting a pair of X1950 Pros |
 The Crossfire 'Golden Fingers' located on the top edge of the card |
Here are some performance tests showcasing how well X1950 Pro Crossfire scales compared to the X1900 GT Crossfire (dongle-less) and 7900 GS SLI:
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It’s technically possible to run Crossfire with just one bridge, but because both are required to enable higher resolutions and refresh rates the drivers won’t allow Crossfire if both bridges aren’t detected.
Instead of getting the bridges bundled with your motherboard (common with NVIDIA SLI), ATI is including one in each X1950 Pro box. Buy two X1950 Pro cards and you have the two bridges needed to operate Crossfire. ATI is doing this so that users already setup with a Crossfire motherboard don’t have to go and buy the bridges separately. They’re also flexible so they can be used on just about any motherboard no matter if your PEG slots are two or four slots apart.
That damn external dongle was spawned from Hell, I swear. I’m glad to see that its days are numbered.
We got pretty good overclocks out of the RV570 using Catalyst Control Center's Overdrive tool. We actually pegged the tool out at 627 core speed and 797 memory speed, but settled on 627c and 790m for our final overclocked results which were stable and artifact free. That's about 52MHz over the stock core speed and 100MHz over the stock memory speed, which is nothing to sneeze at.
Performance results using F.E.A.R. are below:
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[ No AA / No AF ]
[ 4x AA / 16x AF ]
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Just $199 for the X1950 Pro is a pretty sweet deal. Compared to the 7900 GS it’s definitely faster and scales just as well in Crossfire with the new internal bridges. It’s also very quiet, certainly no louder than the 7900 GS cooler, and it doesn’t get very hot. It’s quite a bit longer though, which I guess might cause some problems if you plan on cramming it inside a really small case or something, but overall the length is nothing to really worry about.
It’s hard to find anything negative to say about it really, though if there’s one thing it’s the same thing I usually say about new ATI products; Availability. ATI has said that this would be a hard launch and it’s true that the X1950 Pro is already showing up on shelves, but right now the prices are way higher than what they should be. Taking a quick look around I see some retailers trying to sell them for as much as $300 which is just ridiculous considering you can get an X1900 XT with 512MB for that price. You’d be wise to wait for wider availability of the cards, which should reduce prices to more reasonable levels, before buying.
The one thing that has made me, personally, very happy about the X1950 Pro is the introduction of the internal Crossfire bridges. Along with a much higher level of user friendliness, more importantly performance using the internal bridges is up too. Crossfire scaling is much higher than “software” Crossfire, obviously, and from what I can tell it’s also a bit higher than the external dongle too. Scaling even seems to be on par with NVIDIA’s SLI in most cases too. Yeah there are two of them, but who cares; there could be 50 of them covering every inch of the board for all I care. I’m just happy that that cursed external dongle is on the way out. You can’t truly appreciate how much I hate that thing until you have to work with it for hours on end day in and day out benchmarking videocards. I hope we never see anything like that again from anyone.
With the evolutionary advancements made with Crossfire, the successful move to an 80nm manufacturing process, and the low low asking price, I think that the X1950 Pro represents a inconspicuous but significant step forward for ATI.
For those of you on a tight budget, I don’t think there’s a better graphics card out there right now.
