3D Quality Tests
All video cards these days have some form of Antialiasing and ansiotropic filtering, but some can do some interesting 'optimizations' to improve performance while lowering the quality of the displayed image. So what kind of quality does the ATi card give, have they improved anything in the current generation from the x800xl cards?
First looking at the ansiotropic filtering image tests, we see that there weren't really any improvement in the quality of trilinear filtering. The x1800XL card might be slightly sharper, but that is a very small difference if there is any at all. Moving to 16X ansiotropic filtering the AX800XL looks to be ever so slightly sharper in the upper right corner, but like the previous result the difference is insignificant.
Moving on to the anti-aliasing, what are the differences? Like the ansiotropic filtering tests, there really aren't any. The one interesting point is that in this test the bottom right corner shows better ansiotropic filtering on the x1800XL than the AX800XL, with a slightly more detailed image being drawn at this angle. Lets see if there is any difference in the video quality of this card.
Video Quality (In/Out)
Quite a few cards are beginning to come with a video in component to them. This Gigabyte card is one of those cards, which thanks to the Rage Theater chip makes quality a decent proposition. So what kind of quality do we get from this card? We will be using a clip from a claymation movie "Chicken Run" as it shows great detail and variety of color. For our tests we have a reference image ripped directly from the DVD, an image from another Rage Theater chip based card, the Asus AX800XL, and an image from a Rage Theater 200 based card, the AIW 9000Pro. So lets see the results.
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Reference Image
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Radeon AX800XL
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AIW 9000Pro
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Gigabyte x1800XL
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Looking at these pictures shows us what differences? Looking at the top right of the picture we see the x800 card seems to get the background color slightly off, with most of the background detail being somewhat blurry. The x1800 is closer to the reference image than the other Rage Theater based card, which means Gigabyte must have done some slight tweaking to achieve this. Facial detail is good on the x1800, but is too blurry compared to the reference image, and especially compared to the AIW 9000. Moving to the text portion of the test image, we see that the Rage Theater based cards smooth the text quite a bit, which some may like. The AIW 9000, goes the other way, sharpening the detail of the text. Overall the Gigabyte x1800XL does better than a similarly equipped card, but worse than the actual image, and far worse than the image from a Rage Theater 200 based card.
What about the TV-Out quality, this is something that is controlled by the actual video card, so is there a difference between these different cards? Has ATi improved its image quality here? Lets use the same video with the Rage Theater 200 based AIW 9600 being the base capture card.
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Reference Image
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Radeon AX800XL
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Matrox Parhelia
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Gigabyte x1800XL
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Albatron GeForce 6200TC
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We can see quite a difference between the four test cards. Starting from the left to right, we see the AX800XL and basically all ATi cards prior to it has some serious quality issues. Looking from the top right we see the image is very blurry, and the image has been cut down in width somewhat. The text also suffers from this same blurriness making the image appear worse. Moving to the Matrox card we an image that is even better than the reference image, with the clarity being spot on and the text appearing crisper. Next is our review card, the Gigabyte x1800XL. The image of this card is markedly better than that of the AX800XL, as the image is almost as crisp and clear as the reference image. Text is slightly blurrier than the reference image, but again immensly better than the AX800XL. Lastly the only nVidia card we had as a comparison, the 6200. This card has a blurrier image than the x1800XL but not by that much. Text quality is poor, but better than the AX800XL, but no where near the x1800XL. Overall the Gigabyte card does very well here, only slightly worse than the reference image, which is a very nice improvement over previous ATi cards.
2D Quality
As with any video card, the vast majority of your time spent with it will be in the form of a 2D display, whether you are browsing the web, reading e-mail or anything else, the quality of the 2D display of a video card is vital. These days most manufacturers have gotten the hang of providing good quality text/image quality from the video card. Lets see how this card does when its compared to the Matrox Parhelia, which is still one of the very best 2D quality video cards I've used, and the AX800XL from Asus. The test will consist of regular 10 point text with both black text on a white background, and white text on a black background, there also will be an image that provides quite a variation in color. The monitor used is a 21" Dell Trinitron based monitor, yes it is still a CRT. So lets see the results.
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Matrox Parhelia |
Asus AX800XL |
Gigabyte x1800XL |
| Black Text: |
8 |
7.5 |
7 |
| White Text: |
8 |
7.5 |
8.5 |
| Image: |
8 |
7 |
7.5 |
| Score: |
8 |
7.25 |
7.5 |
The Gigabyte x1800XL we see a image that was overall very close to the Parhelia. The Black text test was lighter in density while looking less crisp. The white text image was actually better than the Parhelia, with the whites looking cleaner and crisper. The image test provided a slightly washed out image, but nothing too bad. Looking at the AX800XL we see that compared to the Matrox Parhelia it was somewhat brighter in all three tests, with this washing out the color slightly in the image test, but still making it better than most of the rest of the cards we have tested. Text was still good but the higher brightness, which most likely could be changed somewhat, caused the text to be a bit harder to read. The Gigabyte card gets a slight nod ahead of the Asus card, with the better white text on black giving it the lead. Both of these cards, and most ATi based cards it seems, have very good 2D quality, just slightly below the Matrox Parhelia, in my book anyway.
Overclocking
Now lets look at the performance portion of this review, first by looking at the overclocking ability of our sample. Obviously your results may vary, but this is an indication of what we were able to get. So how high did it overclock?
We see that the overclock was rather disappointing, as only the core increased by about 10% to 558MHz, while the memory would not let you overclock it at all. This was rather sad as the memory is rated at 700MHz instead of the 495MHz it was running at. While the heatsink was using thermal paste on the GPU, it might have been the fact that it is a single slot cooler that hampered our overclocking or simply the fact that the part we received wasn't that overclockable. As a side note, the only program that would overclock our card at the time was the built-in ATi Overdrive software.
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