Thread: The Sapphire Radeon X800 Pro

Today's high end games demand more and more from graphics cards, with both the two main chip producers, ATI and Nvidia, forever raising the bar in terms of sheer performance and features, leading to a bewildering choice of cards for your red-hot gaming system.

Sapphire's latest top-end card (for this month at any rate) is the 256MB Radeon X800 Pro, based on ATI's latest GPU; the R420. Built on a 0.13 micron, "low-k" core, the R420 has a thumping 160 million transistors, 45 million more than the previous Radeon 9800XT core.



But thanks to the low-k technology, the core uses less power than the 9800XT and as a result runs a little cooler. The heat and power reduction is aided by the use of DDR3 memory which uses less power and generates less heat than the DDR2 memory on the 9800XT.

There's nothing really radical in the new core compared with the previous R3xx architecture. ATI has concentrated on optimising and improving what was already there; more vertex shaders, more and improved pixel shaders and an improved memory controller. On the features side there are a couple of new ideas; Temporal Antialiasing and something ATI calls 3Dc.