Albatron FX 5700U and Sapphire RADEON 9600XT

While ATI is dominating the performance dogfight in the high end of the graphics market, the battle is heating up in the more profitable mid range. ATI has had a small but comfortable lead with its RADEON 9600 PRO, slipping in a little faster than NVIDIA’s GeForce FX 5600.

While both NVIDIA and ATI announced new mid-range cards almost two months ago, it has taken a while for them to filter through to the market -- longer than the month or so lag time that has become commonplace. The reason for this is an interesting one. The NV3x and R3xx generation of cards were made at a central location and then passed on to card manufacturers for rebadging and fancy heatsinking. This still happens at the high end, with cards appearing from the factories of PC Partner (ATI) and Flextronics (NVIDIA). However the mid range cards are now being made by the card manufacturers themselves, so delays have come from design and manufacturing, not just chip delivery schedules.

Changing back to a multitude of manufacturers is a great thing. It allows for weird tangential design changes (like the raft of heavily modified GeForce4 Ti4200 cards that appeared last year) and pumping up of specs. It means differences between products that go further than the colour of the sticker on the heatsink. And now that variety is returning to the market makers will start focusing more on getting maximum performance from their cards.

Diamond generation
ATI’s RADEON 9600XT is the Canadian giant’s salvo in this battle. It is the second generation of ATI’s 0.13 micron chip, differing through the use of new Low-K Dielectric material called ‘Black Diamond’. Architecturally it is identical to the other RADEON 9600 series chips, but the Low-K material allows for higher clock speeds to be reached, and hence higher performance. The chip now includes a thermocouple as well, which ties in with ATI’s OVERDRIVE overclocking utility to allow for automatic speed boosting.

NVIDIA has made more changes with the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra. This is the first chip to come out of IBM’s state of the art fabrication plant in East Fishkill, New York, and is based upon a 0.13 micron process (NVIDIA has been happily crowing that IBM are so good the first silicon will go into production). We suspected that the FX 5700 Ultra was to be the first Low-K GPU from NVIDIA, but subsequent reports from Digitimes indicated that this was not the case as IBM had been experiencing problems with the SiLK Low-K Dielectric they use.

Architecturally NVIDIA has done a couple of things to the GeForce FX 5600 core to improve it. These changes were essentially the same as those done to drag the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra’s sucky performance up to vaguely respectable with the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra. This has involved swapping the integer pixel shaders for floating point units, antialiasing tweaks and the addition of NVIDIA’s Ultrashadow technology for improving shadow buffer performance. Finally NVIDIA has paired the GPU with DDR2 memory, which was pre-emptively used to poor effect on the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra.

We have looked at examples of both of these cards. From Sapphire we have a RADEON 9600XT and from Albatron we have a GeForce FX 5700 Ultra. Sapphire’s 9600XT card looks a lot like the previous generation cards, largely because Sapphire is the retail arm of ATI’s super manufacturer PC Partner. It has two main physical advantages over the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra, it doesn’t need additional power and it comes with Half-Life 2. Or at least it comes with a voucher redeemable for Half-Life 2 once it actually ends up being released. These vouchers deserve special mention, as once you scratch away the silver bit covering your registration code you cannot return the video card (the fact you can read the code through the protective silver without scratching it is a little worrying though).

Albatron’s FX5700U is a big chunky card, light years from the cut down simplicity of the Sapphire. It uses a full size PCB, looking remarkably like a GeForce FX 5800 Ultra without a copper-based destroyer of worlds strapped to it. Instead it uses Albatron’s Wise fan II cooling solution. Of the three fans mounted on the heatsink, only two spin under normal circumstances, the third kicks in if one of the others fails or if the card starts getting to the ultra toasty stage. The cooler covers not only the GPU but also the heat pumping DDR-2 Micro BGA memory chips, and the card has a Molex connection for external powering.

 

Testing
We tested these cards using our Athlon 64 testbench, and for comparison we have included results for the RADEON 9600 PRO and GeForce FX 5600 (unfortunately we did not have a GeForce FX 5600 Ultra on hand). The RADEON cards have been tested with version 3.9 CATALYST drivers and the NVIDIA cards use Forceware 52.16 drivers.

In the standard Aquamark 3 tests the RADEON 9600XT won at all resolutions, although it was only beating the 5700 Ultra by the slimmest of margins. Both cards were a touch faster than the 9600 PRO and smacked the crippled 5600 around the Labs. This is testimony to the improvements that NVIDIA has made to the core, and these results show that NVIDIA is now a strong contender for the mid-range dollar.

We have also included the results for Aquamark 3’s pixel shader performance test. ATI’s main advantage with the current generation of hardware has been superior shader performance, so this is a number of great importance. It shows the RADEON 9600XT still having a 15 percent speed advantage in pixel shader operations, and this is still the one chink in the FX 5700’s armour when running DirectX 9 games.

Unreal Tournament 2003 showed a more mixed picture. It has always been less stressful on NVIDIA’s cards than other benchmarks, thanks to the sparing use of pixel shaders, but the results showed where the advantage of DDR 2 came in. While both cards delivered eminently playable framerates at 1,024 x 768 and 1,280 x 1,024, the RADEON 9600XT won those tests by a decent margin. However at 1,600 x 1,200 both cards were pushing the memory bandwidth boundaries, and seeing as both cards had 128-bit memory busses, DDR-2 gave the 5700 Ultra a little advantage and helped it to just scrape past the 9600XT in the performance race.

Decisions, decisions
There is little to separate these two cards, which delivered pretty astonishing performance for the price. Both have full DirectX 9 support, although ATI’s shaders are widely acknowledged as being the better offering, something backed up by the shader benchmark numbers.

Assuming Half-Life 2 is actually released sometime during this generation of graphics cards, the hundred dollars of brand new alien killing science simulator is a clincher that would normally make buying a RADEON 9600XT a no-brainer. However, Half-Life 2 is in a release date void, with no official announcements forthcoming (the best guesstimate we can make, based purely on the rumours we are hearing, is March/April 2004 -- but just look at Team Fortress 2 for Valve’s track record).

Given the up-in-the-air status of Half-Life 2, the decision is much harder. Both cards delivered great performance for a very similar amount of cash output. The 5700 Ultra snuck ahead when the memory bandwidth was stressed, and the RADEON 9600XT did it when pixel shaders were used. Either card is great value for money, and these cards should spark a big revival in this segment of the market, much like the Ti4200 did a year ago.