Introduction

Powercolor was kind enough to provide the test sample. Thank you.

About a month ago, ATI launched its new flagship model, the Radeon X1950 XTX. Along with it, other cores were launched too – among them was the X1650 Pro. While it is nice to feast our eyes by admiring the performance of the X1950, most of us are looking for most “bang per buck”. Will the X1650 be just that?

Features

Radeon® X1650 Graphics Technology - GPU Specifications
Features

• Dual-link DVI
• Twelve pixel shader processors
• Five vertex shader processors
• 128-bit 4-channel DDR/DDR2/GDDR3 memory interface
• Native PCI Express x16 bus interface
• AGP 8x configurations also supported with AGP-PCI-E external bridge chip
• Dynamic Voltage Control

Ring Bus Memory Controller

• 256-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

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 128 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
• 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

The card and bundle

The card arrived at the office packaged in a Powercolor-standard size white box. The box art, which you can see above, will be used on all retail cards.


The red card comes with a medium-sized black heatsink, which should do a good job of keeping the card cool. Unfortunately, even though the heatsink stretches over the memory in size, it does not cool it, as there is no thermal interface material (pad/paste) between the chips and the heatsink.

At stock, the core runs at 600 MHz, the memory at 700 MHz (1400MHz effectively). As you may have noticed, the card's pipeline count is identical to that of the X1600 XT (12 PS units, 4 ROPs). The memory communicates with the core over a 128-bit interface.

In terms of size, the card is about comparable to the X800GT, and so it should be no problem installing the card in any enclosure. I am also glad to see that the card has two DVI connectors as well as a VIVO connector.

The Radeon X1650 PRO gets all its juice through the PCI-Express slot, no additional power connector is necessary.


The bundle consists of:

• Powercolor Radeon X1650 PRO
• Driver CD
• Cyberlink DVD solution CD
• Quick installation guide
• DVI to VGA adapter
• VIVO cabling