Sapphire Radeon X1800XL

Game Play Summary:

In general, things were pretty evenly matched between the reference clocked GeForce 7800 GT and the Sapphire Radeon X1800XL. In Day of Defeat: Source, we found that the Sapphire Radeon X1800XL was ever so slightly faster than the reference clocked GeForce 7800 GT. It was not much more than a single frame per second in it though so you would be hard pushed to notice the difference.

We tried to enable High Quality Anisotropic Filtering and 2xAA, but both came with too much of a performance hit. With a little bit more memory bandwidth, it will be possible to apply 2xAA in this title, but with a standard clocked Radeon X1800XL, you are not going to find anything higher than 1600x1200 0xAA 8xAF with full HDR rendering completely hitch free. Both the XFX and BFGTech 7800 GT's come with higher-than-reference clocks and were notably faster than the Sapphire X1800XL in Day of Defeat: Source.

In Battlefield 2, we were greeted with the same problem where the Sapphire Radeon X1800XL was almost fast enough to run with 2xAA applied if it wasn't for a little bit of hitching. We saw a very small average frame rate drop from 1600x1200 0xAA 8xAF to 1600x1200 2xAA 8xAF, but the minimum frame rate suffered a much larger deficit. We believe that when we're a few driver revisions down the line, you may well be able to enable 2xAA on the Sapphire Radeon X1800XL in this title.

Again, the XFX and BFGTech cards were the fastest, with the XFX being the smoothest of the two at 1600x1200 2xTSS AA 8xAF and maximum in-game details. We found that the upgrade to 2GB of memory really helped the performance in this title and we were now able to turn up the details to their maximum settings in the game's graphic setting control panel.

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory was a very strong game for the Radeon X1800XL, where it not only saw of the competition from the reference-clocked GeForce 7800 GT, it was also faster than the XFX 7800 GT Extreme too. We found that we were able to enable soft shadows and High Quality Anisotropic Filtering, putting the Sapphire Radeon X1800XL in a league of its own as far as immersive game play goes.

Both the BFGTech and reference GeForce 7800 GT's had to run with medium-resolution shadows, as opposed to the high shadow resolution that we were able to utilise with the XFX GeForce 7800 GT Extreme and Sapphire Radeon X1800XL. There was no contest at all in this title, in all honesty. If you're a big Chaos Theory fan, you won't be disappointed with the performance delivered by Sapphire's X1800XL.

F.E.A.R. looks to be another title where the Radeon X1800XL will be strong if the single player demo is anything to go by. We found that the Sapphire was the smoothest performing video card in this title - the XFX 7800 GT Extreme managed a higher average frame rate but when we plotted a frame rate over time graph of the F.E.A.R run throughs for both the Sapphire and XFX cards, we found that the Sapphire X1800XL had less deviation from the average frame rate, while the performance on all three NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT's was an up and down affair from time to time.

In Rome: Total War, we had to force High-Quality driver settings on the three GeForce 7800 GT's after rather harsh texture shimmering that made the game rather ugly to watch. We found that the high quality driver setting fixed the shimmering and we were still able to maintain a smooth and pleasurable experience on the GeForce 7800 GT, even if it required a little bit of driver fiddling. The XFX 7800 GT was the smoothest of the bunch, but in all honesty, all four video cards delivered very a very similar experience in this title.

We tried to enable both Adaptive Anti-Aliasing and High Quality Anisotropic Filtering in Rome: Total War on the Sapphire Radeon X1800XL. However, we found that the performance drop was too great in both instances, with the frame rate dropping in to the low teens and averaging around the 30 frames per second mark. It wasn't playable at all in our view.

Finally, Need For Speed: Underground 2 was a dead heat between the Sapphire X1800XL and reference-clocked GeForce 7800 GT, with the BFGTech and XFX GT's being ever-so-slightly faster than the X1800XL and reference 7800 GT. We believe that some of this was related to CPU limitations that can plague the engine at times.

Pricing & Availability:

After searching around the UK shops, it seems that Scan have the best deal on the Sapphire X1800XL at the moment, priced at £307.85. It's also in stock at Ebuyer for £316.08 and Overclockers UK for £321.89. We have to take things in to perspective here, because we've compared the Sapphire Radeon X1800XL to a range of products that are inside the same MSRP range as the Radeon X1800XL, yet the current street price is closer to the price of a base line GeForce 7800 GTX like AOpen's, which is available and priced at £328.94.

You can buy BFGTech's GeForce 7800 GT OC for a healthy £234.94 at Overclockers UK, while there are two versions of the XFX 7800 GT Extreme available, depending on whether you want the new-look appearance with funky green LED's. The older version is still available and priced at £245.58 on Scan, while the new version is available for an extra thirty five quid.

The Architecture:

From an architectural point of view, there are some things about the architecture that we really like. We love the idea of HDR and Anti-Aliasing at the same time in more games, along with the option to enable Adaptive Anti-Aliasing and High Quality Anisotropic Filtering too. However, we are not quite sure about the performance of FP16 HDR and Anti-Aliasing together. The current games using the FP16 blend technique for HDR are Far Cry, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and Age Of Empires 3, which comes out very soon. We're expecting a patch for Far Cry to be released in the near future, but we've not heard anything about the other two games just yet. The patch for Far Cry should help to answer our initial questions regarding FP16 HDR and Anti-Aliasing at the same time, though.

Many will wonder why it is possible to enable Anti-Aliasing in Day of Defeat: Source when using HDR. The reason is that Valve's implementation is a little different from the others; it is calculated in the pixel shader rather than the rasteriser, meaning that it is slightly less realistic. However, we'd take the slightly less realistic HDR with Anti-Aliasing, because it makes things that little bit easier on the eye - it is also a little less taxing on the hardware too, meaning that you're able to run the game with a higher resolution or with more Anti-Aliasing.

NVIDIA cashed in well on HDR, and we're interested to see how their product line up and marketing strategies will change over the next couple of months. Hopefully, we'll have the chance to have a look at a Radeon X1800XT soon, as it'll be interesting to see how well that performs against products that are already available now.

High Quality Anisotropic Filtering and Adaptive Anti-Aliasing appear to be features that are not strictly suited to new games based on our experiences with the current driver. In order to enable High Quality AF and Adaptive AA, we found that we had to lower the resolution and take a frame rate hit in most situations. With the exception of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory - which allowed us to enable 8x High Quality AF - we found that the two new image quality enhancements were useable in games that are less intensive, like Half-Life 2 and Unreal Tournament 2004. Having said that though, we feel that the efficiency of these new image quality enhancements is likely to improve over the next few driver builds when the memory controller is tweaked to handle the seemingly heavy requirements of them when enabled.

Final Thoughts...

If we disregard the current street prices, the Radeon X1800XL appears to be healthy competition for NVIDIA's GeForce 7800 GT if we were only considering the reference clocked GT. Unfortunately, the reality is that many of NVIDIA's larger board partners ship their cards at higher speeds and are still able to compete with the smaller board partners on price. These cards are faster, it seems, than both the Sapphire and the reference GT.

We can't help but feel that some of ATI's board partners are going to have to up the ante and launch cards that come pre-overclocked or with overclocking software that guarantees a certain clock speed enhancement under the manufacturer's warranty. We hope that HIS will come along with an iTurbo Edition X1800XL that is clocked higher than 500/1000MHz, as its possible that it'll be able to give the overclocked-out-of-the-box BFGTech and XFX 7800 GT's a run for their money. Maybe Sapphire could bring back the Toxic line with an overclocked version of this card? It's early days now, so I guess that anything is possible.

If we take into account the current street price, it'll be a hard choice for you to make if you have your heart set on a X1800XL. Consider that BFGTech's GeForce 7800 GT performs every bit as well in the majority of current games for nearly £75 less. The XFX GeForce 7800 GT Extreme is available for £60 less than Sapphire's X1800XL if you grab the old version of the card, or around £25 less if you grab the newer version. There's only Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory where the XFX falls behind the X1800XL, all other titles are either equal in performance or faster on the XFX 7800 GT Extreme.

Right now, it doesn't make sense to spend around £310 on a video card that offers comparable performance and quality to something available for around £60-75 less. Those who jumped in early and bought GeForce 7800 GT shouldn't be disappointed at the moment. The prices are a long way apart and both camps are working on new driver builds to improve performance. However, there's still a war brewing on the three-dimensional battlefield - we're expecting to see this war to expand on to the streets before long, too.

Things just got interesting...