The Card

Once I saw this box, one word came to mind – bling. I mean, if this box was nicely polished up, with lights shining on it, it would definitely be an eye catcher… um, let's just get back on topic.

OK, this card has an awesome box – well done Powercolor! I mean, packaging is probably the last thing you care about (I'm a performance junkie), but I was so taken aback by the box that I just had to write about it… one thing that I would recommend, to further improve the looks, is a window at the back, revealing the card.

The box also features useful info for “newbies” wanting to build a Crossfire system: it has a nice table which tells you what is in the box, and what you still need to get.

Some might like the look; some might not – in my opinion, simplicity at its best. All this talk is worthless without pictures, judge for yourself:


The inside is rather dull, a plain white box, but most of us are used to that:


Now the card:

The card is very similar to the X1800XL – the fan is bigger though. 2 DVI outputs are more than welcome. In case you still need analog VGA conversion dongles are included.

Accessories

What you see above is:

• Manual
• Driver CD
• Cyberlink DVD player
• S-Video Cable
• 2 DVI Dongles
• HDTV Cable
• Composite cable
• Vivo Cable
• Power cable

A size comparison – the X1800GTO to the X800GT:

Specifications

Directly from Powercolor.

Features

• 321 million transistors on 90nm fabrication process
• Ultra-threaded architecture with fast dynamic branching
• Up to sixteen pixel shader processors
• Eight vertex shader processors
• 256-bit 8-channel GDDR3/GDDR4 memory interface
• Native PCI Express x16 bus interface
• Two dual-link DVI outputs

Ring Bus Memory Controller

• 512-bit internal ring bus for memory reads
• Programmable intelligent arbitration logic
• Fully associative texture, color, and Z/stencil cache designs
• Hierarchical Z-buffer with Early Z test
• Lossless Z Compression (up to 48:1)
• Fast Z-Buffer Clear
• Z/stencil cache optimized for real-time shadow rendering
• Optimized for performance at high display resolutions, including wide screen HDTV resolutions

Ultra-Threaded Shader Engine

• Support for Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 programmable vertex and pixel shaders in hardware
• Full speed 128-bit floating point processing for all shader operations
• Up to 512 simultaneous pixel threads
• Dedicated branch execution units for high performance dynamic branching and flow control
• Dedicated texture address units for improved efficiency
• 3Dc+ texture compression
• High quality 4:1 compression for normal maps and two-channel data formats
• High quality 2:1 compression for luminance maps and single-channel data formats
• Multiple Render Target (MRT) support
• Render to vertex buffer support
• Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL® 2.0

Advanced Image Quality Features

• 64-bit floating point HDR rendering supported throughout the pipeline
• Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing
• 32-bit integer HDR (10:10:10:2) format supported throughout the pipeline
• Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing
• 2x/4x/6x Anti-Aliasing modes
• Multi-sample algorithm with gamma correction, programmable sparse sample patterns, and centroid sampling
• New Adaptive Anti-Aliasing feature with Performance and Quality modes
• Temporal Anti-Aliasing mode
• Lossless Color Compression (up to 6:1) at all resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions
• 2x/4x/8x/16x Anisotropic Filtering modes
• Up to 128-tap texture filtering
• Adaptive algorithm with Performance and Quality options
• High resolution texture support (up to 4k x 4k)

Avivo™ Video and Display Platform

• High performance programmable video processor
• Accelerated MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264 decoding and transcoding
• DXVA support
• De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
• Motion compensation, IDCT, DCT and color space conversion
• Vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
• 3:2 pulldown (frame rate conversion)
• Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
• HDR tone mapping acceleration
• Maps any input format to 10 bit per channel output
• Flexible display support
• Dual integrated dual-link DVI transmitters
• DVI 1.0 compliant / HDMI interoperable and HDCP ready*
• Dual integrated 10 bit per channel 400 MHz DACs
• 16 bit per channel floating point HDR and 10 bit per channel DVI output
• Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion (10 bits per color)
• Complete, independent color controls and video overlays for each display
• High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all outputs
• Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
• Xilleon™ TV encoder for high quality analog output
• YPrPb component output for direct drive of HDTV displays
• Spatial/temporal dithering enables 10-bit color quality on 8-bit and 6-bit displays
• Fast, glitch-free mode switching
• VGA mode support on all outputs
• Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions and refresh rates
• Compatible with ATI TV/Video encoder products, including Theater 550
  * This feature is supported by the asic and can be specified by PC manufacturers for its add-in-boards. This feature is not typically enabled on stand alone cards.

CrossFire™

• Multi-GPU technology
• Four modes of operation:
• Alternate Frame Rendering (maximum performance)
• Supertiling (optimal load-balancing)
• Scissor (compatibility)
• Super AA 8x/10x/12x/14x (maximum image quality)