ATI RADEON X800 XT & X600 XT PCI-E Performance

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The Firing Squad have thrown up their Performance Comparison of ATI's all new Radeon X800 XT and X600 XT PCI-E garphics cards! Here's a snip.

With today?s launch of Intel?s 915 and 925 family of chipsets, PCI Express finally makes its debut on the PC. In case you didn?t know, PCI Express is Intel?s next generation bus that?s been designed to replace today?s PCI and AGP devices. On the graphics side, PCI Express can deliver up to twice the bandwidth of AGP 8X when fully configured, ushering in the capability to perform a wide variety of applications beyond just gaming.

Of course, since we tend to focus on games around here, we wouldn?t be doing our job if we didn?t discuss the ramifications of PCI Express for gamers. Not only does the new interface provide more bandwidth than AGP, it also opens up new possibilities for game developers, for instance collision detection and physics calculations can be offloaded to the GPU. In fact, in a post on Beyond3D, Dany Lapage (Lead Programmer on Splinter Cell 3) mentioned scenarios that weren?t possible before on the PC, summing up the benefits of PCI-E by saying ?All of this can be done on the CPU but people are going to start looking at the GPU to do other things than just graphics. All of this because of PCI-E?

In preparation for PCI Express?s debut, ATI has been busy preparing a top-to-bottom family of native PCI Express solutions. ATI feels this gives them a distinctive advantage in both performance and cost over NVIDIA, and based on our talks with board partners who have seen PCI Express hardware from both companies, this is true. Here?s a look at ATI?s AGP and PCI Express parts for this summer:

ATI RADEON X800 XT & X600 XT PCI-E Performance