R580 Benchmarked!!!
Well, it looks as though Daily Tech wants to end the week with a bang as they have somehow managed to get their hands on an actual X1900XT card from Taiwan and have thrown NDA's to the wind by posting some benchmark results. Looking at the numbers they ran and the numbers provided by ATI it looks as though we have some seriously fast hardware that will displace the GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB as the fastest card on the planet. Perhaps we're just getting greedy, but I would have really liked to see this next-generation core pull further ahead performance wise. Then again, the board was tested with a Beta driver from December so additional performance gains are likely with polished drivers.
Radeon X1900, or R580, is in many ways what the R520 should have been before all the die respins. R580 uses the same memory controller found on R520, with the 512-bit internal ring bus. Externally, the chip can address 256-bits at a time. Our Radeon X1900XT came with 512MB DDR3 running at 1.45GHz, but the X1900XTX version comes with a default memory clock of 1.55GHz. As anticipated, the R580 core features 16 pixel pipelines with 48 pixel shader processors. R580 is produced on a 90nm process. Unfortunately, all X1900 series cards are double width cards; the additional width is needed to properly cool the GPU.
