Hi,

im new here but here goes. Me and my freinds play a few games such as Cod2 and Planetside, and various others. But me and a certain freind are in debate about which card to get. He has the 256mb ASUS Radeon X1600XT PCI-E (the one with the grill) and i was thinking of getting a 512mb ASUS Radeon X1900XT PCI-E. The price range between these two cards is roughly £130 - £140. My freind is saying that these two cads dont give out much more FPS (frames per second) when it comes to the games that we play, but slightly enhacned performance. Id like to ask if this is true or not. And if so / not - what difference there actually is between the 2 cards.

And also if i were to get the 512mb ASUS Radeion X1900XT card, what other components such as RAM and socket 939 MOBO (as i have already got a AMD 65bit 4000+ cpu) would i need for the card to run smoothly withought overheating / making alot of noise. I have already read on a reveiw to get the Arctic cooling VGA silencer Accelero X2.

Or another thaught was could i run 2 256mb ASUS Radeon X1600XT PCI-E cards at once and have a better outcome than one 512mb ASUS Radeion X1900XT card?? If not, what would be the difference?

Thanks for reading this and any help / advice would be appreciated.ÂÂ!

Hi Edmeister, welcome to itsallPC

It would be a major mistake to think the Radeon X1600 and X1900 are even comparable. There are some interesting results when an X1600 XT is in CrossFire though. Let me first lay out the difference between the three solutions. These are reference specifications; I'm not going to go into the difference between various models that don't follow the reference as there's not a significant difference in their performance anyway

• Radeon X1600 XT
  RV530 Core has 12 Pixel Pipelines, 5 Vertex Pipelines and 12 Texture Units. The Core runs at 590 MHz while the memory runs at 690 MHz (1380 MHz DDR) and has a 128-bit interface. The standard model is equipped with 256 MB of GDDR3.
• Radeon X1900 XT
  The R580 Core has 48 Pixel Pipelines, 10 Vertex Pipelines and 16 Texture Units. The Core runs at 625 MHz while the memory runs at 725 MHz (1450 MHz DDR) and has a 256-bit interface. The standard model is equipped with 512 MB of GDDR3.

Comparatively, here is the peak theoretical performance


Graphics Card

Radeon X1600 XT

Radeon X1600 XT CrossFire

Radeon X1900 XT

Pixel Fillrate

7.08 Gigapixels/s

14.16 Gigapixels/s

30 Gigatexels/s

Texel Fillrate

7.08 Gigatexels/s

14.16 Gigatexels/s

10 Gigapixels/s

Memory Bandwidth

22.08 GB/s

44.16 GB/s

46.4 GB/s

Transformation Rate

738 Million Verticies/s

1473 Million Verticies/s

1250 Million Verticies/s


What do these specifications mean?

Pixel Fillrate is the graphics card's ability to handle colour and texture operations. This is especially important when it comes to modern Pixel Shader based games, where a lot of special effects are processed. Cards with lower Pixel Fillrates are not able to process high resolution textures or handle as many special effects like paralax mapping, shadowing etc.

The Texel Fillrate is probably the least important, as it represents the raw output of the graphics card. A higher Texel Fillrate generally means a better frame rate at a higher resolution. There are no mid to high end cards on the market today that are Texel Fillrate bound, so it is not a concern.

Memory bandwidth is the speed at which the RAM on the card can be read and written too. Higher bandwidths mean faster access to textures and other buffers allowing the card more time to handle more data in a timely manner. Low bandwidth cards tend to have to choose between lower resolutions or lower filtering quality.

Transformation rate deals with the graphics card's ability to handle large geometric objects. Cards with insufficient transformation rates experience slow downs when larger numbers of objects are on screen.

The X1600 XT is less than half the performance of the X1900 XT on all the fronts that matter. When in CrossFire though, a pair the X1600 XT overtake the X1900 XT in Transformation Rate and Texel Fillrate, but still lag behind in Pixel Fillrate. This should mean that while the X1900 XT will still be faster in new games, the X1600 XT CrossFire will be faster in older games or at lower resolutions, where the Pixel Fillrate bottleneck is not so much of an issue.

This makes benchmarking very misleading. For a start, the X1600 XT is not so well rounded and will experience more slow-downs when things get complicated. It also means that when testing the X1600 XT at settings which it will run well, the X1900 XT will not be able to really pull ahead; it will be like a caged tiger. The X1600 XT will often appear quite similar in performance to the X1900 XT, maybe even faster, but make no mistake; the X1900 XT will always get better results. There will never be an instance when the X1600 XT CrossFire can do things the X1900 XT can't, but there will be times the X1900 XT can do things the X1600 XT CrossFire can't.

The fact of the matter is, frame rate is meaningless. To enjoy a game, you increase or descrease detail settings until the game is smooth or at least playable. Whether this is a matter of misunderstanding, or perhaps interpretative benchmark reading I don't know, but the equation is simple:

X1600 XT + Normal Detail Settings = Playable Frame Rate
X1900 XT + Normal Detail Settings = High Frame Rate...so what? it still looks the same
X1900 XT + High Detail Settings = Still High Frame Rate...starting to see the point now
X1900 XT + Maximum Detail Settings = Playable Frame Rate...and that's why it costs so much more

With games like Call of Duty 2 it's not so obvious, but trust me, the game will look visually better on an X1900 XT when you crank it up. PlanetSide, I don't know.

The moral of the story is, if you’re looking at a X1900 XT, don’t let someone with a X1600 XT convince you to sink to their level

ok thanks 8)