Ladies and Gentlemen,
a very warm welcome to the second part of our ATI R600 test. As already mentioned in the first part of this article, we tested the R600 on Ultra-HD 2560×1600 against its rivals, the nVidia GeForce 8800GTX, nVidias 7950GX2 and ATI’s in-house competiton, a pair of X1950 XTX CrossFire boards. As standard LCDs and CRTs do not produce this resolution, we had to go and get a 30-inch Dell 3007WFP LCD monitor, whose native resolution actually is 2560×1600.
However, you might remember from our ATI R600 Test Part 1, that we are working on the R600 side with drivers, that are not capable of much; merely they only get the card to work while complying with the certification requirements. This early stage ran us into several problems, as ATI’s driver either did not want to work at all, or we had to fight irregular and surprisingly regular (Half-Life 2: Lost Coast quit after exactly 20 seconds) system crashes.
Also it is important to know, that with a mammoth resolution of 2560×1600 the bottleneck of system performance usually completely shifts towards the graphics card - this resolution requires more than twice the power of 1600×1200 (1,9 megapixels vs. 4 megapixels; and dont forget real time). The more load is on the graphics card, the better driver optimizations work. So take our benchmarks with a grain of salt so far; the R600 is going to get some additional horsepower in the form of coding soon.
Important Notice
We had some unsual development of heat on our Intel QX6700 (180 °F) which obviously caused the CPU to throttle down. We are investigating this issue right now and if we find this had no impact on the GPU test earlier, we publish the full scores. We are holding them back until we are sure the performance was not biased by this. It’s not gonna take long.