visiontek 9800 xt

Review/Design: Allan "Zardon" Campbell

Introduction

The 9800 series, we all know just how successful it's been, and how all the die hard gamers have parted with large amounts of money to play the newest and the most bad ass games at the highest resolutions with FSAA and aniso at all the top detail settings.

Unfortunately I missed the last time we had a 9800 XT around the end of September as I was in Munich but my colleague Stuart Davidson did a very indepth analysis over here.

The 9800 XT is ATI's current jewel in the crown and Visiontek have released their Xtasy 9800 XT. So is it any good? Lets have a look.....

SPECIFICATIONS:

Process .15 micron
Engine Clock Speed 412+ Mhz
Rendering Pipelines 8
Full precision PS2.0 FPU’s 8
Peak Pixel Fill Rate 3.3+ Gpixels/sec
Peak Vertex Throughput 412M+ Triangles/sec
Maximum Floating-Point Precision 128-bit
Textures Applied per Pass 16
Geometry Pipelines 4
Memory Clock Speed 365+ Mhz DDR
Peak Memory Bandwidth 23.3+ GB/sec
Bandwidth Compression Ratio 8.8:1
RAMDAC 400Mhz
AA Sampler per Second 19.8+ Gsamples/sec
Maximum Texels Filtered per Pixel 768+ Texels/Pixel

KEY FEATURES:

DirectX 9.0 YES
Vertex Shaders 2.0
Pixel Shaders 2.0
Higher Order Surfaces Truform 2
Environmental Bump Maps Yes
3D Textures Yes
Anisotropic Filtering Up to 16x
Anti Aliasing Up to 6x
FSAA Gamma Correction Yes
Video Gamma Correction Yes
Multi Display Management Software Hydravision 2
High Dimension Floating-Point Texture Yes
Displacement Mapping Yes Yes
Multiple Rendering Targets Yes
Centroid Sampling Yes

VISIONTEK, previously one of Nvidia's most valuable retail partners, signed an agreement with ATI Technologies last year to bring products based on their Radeon series of graphics chips to North American markets. Nvidia had previously "shifted" support to BFG Technologies from Visiontek.

Visiontek was reorganised to operate as a division within the Hartford Computer Group, which acquired it along with the XTASY brand.


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