HardOCP made a review on the ATI Radeon X800 XL 512MB PCIe graphics card. Improving the gaming experience is what every gamer wants. We want to be able to run a game with the highest in-game quality settings at the highest resolutions with the highest Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering quality. In order to accomplish this, we need video cards that are capable of rendering those games for us. While one aspect of a video card's performance are things such as the architecture, core and memory frequencies, and feature support, there is another aspect that can affect performance as well. The actual size of local video card memory, known as the framebuffer, has a large bearing on performance.

ATI Radeon X800 XL 512MB PCI-E Review

The Radeon X800 XL was announced back on December 1 of 2004. The Radeon X800 XL was a new product that aligned with the Radeon X800 series of video cards as a sort of refresh for that line. The Radeon X800 XL was designed using the superior 110nm manufacturing processes to create a product that is not only faster, but it can also be produced at a lower cost. The Radeon X800 XL is unique in that it has 16 fully functioning pixel-pipelines and 6 vertex units, which is the same as the X800/X850 XT and XT PE. The Radeon X800 XL operates at 400MHz core frequency and has 256MB of GDDR3 running at 1GHz.

Up until now, ATI has had a maximum framebuffer memory size on their video cards of 256MB. Their current fastest video card, the Radeon X850 XT PE, uses 256MB of GDDR3. ATI is now introducing a new product that has 512MB of GDDR3, which is the Radeon X800 XL 512MB video card. This video card has exactly the same features as the X800 XL 256MB video card, the only difference is an addition of 256MB of local video card memory to equal 512MB total. The core frequency and the memory frequency are the same between the two cards, 400MHz for the VPU and 1GHz for the memory. Theoretically, this should allow the video card not to take large performance hits at high resolutions with AA enabled in games that are feeding more than 256MB of data through the framebuffer.

The ATI Radeon X800 XL 512MB is going for $499 right now. A 256MB Radeon X800 XL has an MSRP of $299. This is a $200 difference for more RAM that has little effect in any current games. Even the GeForce 6800 GT costs less than the 512MB Radeon X800 XL. So while we compared the Radeon X800 XL 512MB to the 6800 GT in this review, price wise it is more comparable to the 6800 Ultra or the X850 XT.

When it's all said and done, the 512MB Radeon X800 XL video card is not a good value. For $200 less you can pick up a Radeon X800 XL 256MB video card that pulls in some impressive performance compared to a GeForce 6800 GT. The only benefit in our testing was Half-Life 2 and it just isn't worth paying $200 more for one game to raise the AA setting by one quality setting. Who knows what the future has in store. In the future, 512MB video cards will show a performance advantage. But today is not that day.