Connect3D X1300Pro 512MB PCI-E Video Card

     The X1000 series of cards from ATI have been out for a little bit now, but the price of the top cards are still over $500.  Connect3D sent us over the entry level X1300Pro card.  This card is not designed to break any benchmark records.  It is designed to give the budget-minded consumer the latest features with some moderate gaming.  This card is has some of the newest features, but won't make you cry when you go to the bank.  Let's take a look at this budget card and see if it's worth our hard-earned money.

Features and Specifications

• Dual-link DVI
• CrossFire Multi-GPU Ready
• Four pixel shader processors
• Two vertex shader processors
• 4-channel memory interface

High Performance Memory Controller

• Fully associative texture, colour, 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 realtime 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
• 3Dc+ texture compression
• Multiple Render Target (MRT) support
• Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL® 2.0

High Dynamic Range (HDR) Rendering

• 64-bit floating point HDR supported throughout the pipeline
• High precision 10:10:10:2 integer format support
• 2x/4x/6x Anti-Aliasing modes
  - Sparse multi-sample algorithm with gamma correction, programmable sample patterns, and centroid sampling
  - New Adaptive Anti-Aliasing modes
  - Temporal Anti-Aliasing mode
  - Lossless Colour 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

Advanced Image Quality Features

• 64-bit floating point HDR supported throughout the pipeline
  - Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing
• 2x/4x/6x Anti-Aliasing modes
  - New Adaptive Anti-Aliasing feature with Performance and Quality modes
  - Temporal Anti-Aliasing mode
  - 2x/4x/8x/16x Anisotropic Filtering modes
• High resolution texture support (up to 4k x 4k)

Avivo™ Video and Display Engine

• High performance programmable video processor
  - Accelerated MPEG-2, DivX, Real, WMV9, and H.264 decoding (including DVD/HD-DVD/Blu-ray playback) (optional soft DVD player & appropriate optical hardware required)
  - Accelerated MPEG-2 compression (encoding & transcoding)
  - DXVA support
  - De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
  - Motion compensation, IDCT, DCT and colour space conversion
  - Directional motion adaptive perpixel de-interlacing
• Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
• Flexible display support
  - Dual integrated 10 bit per channel 400 MHz DACs
  - 16-bit HDR and 10-bit display output
  - Complete, independent colour controls 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
  - Advanced spatial/temporal dithering enables 10-bit colour quality on 8-bit and 6-bit displays
  - Fast, glitch-free mode switching
  - VGA mode support on all outputs

2D DISPLAY MODES
Resolutions, colors and maximum refresh rates (Hz) in 256, 65K or 16.7M colors
MAXIMUM 3D RESOLUTIONS
Monitor Resolution Hz
640x480 200
800x600 200
1024x768 200
1152x864 200
1280x1024 160
1600x1200 120
1920x1080 *(16:9) 120
1920x1200 100
1920x1440 90
2048x1536 85
2560x1600 60

65K colors 2048x1536
16.7M colors 2048x1536
1.07 billion colors 2560x1600

*16:9 aspect ratio monitors are supported on 1920x1080 and 848x480 on Windows® XP, Windows® 2000 and Windows® ME.
The complete list of resolutions depends on the driver version and operating system. NOTE: resolutions are limited by the performance of the attached monitor.

High Definition 3D Performance & Image Quality
Are you ready to enjoy complex, movie quality effects in your games and software applications? Now you can with the world’s most advanced 3D performance technology including: a 90-nanometer process GPU, a new ultra threaded 3D processing architecture, an advanced memory controller and up to 512 MB RAM.

• Play the latest 3D games featuring Shader Model 3.0 for advanced Visual Effects
• Get smooth graphic performance with fast frame rates from a new 3D architecture and a ruthlessly efficient memory controller
• Adjust 3D and video display capabilities with the Catalyst® Control Center for maximum performance

Avivo™ Technology for Video and Display Perfection
Connect your Radeon® X1300 with your home entertainment devices for digital convergence, enhanced with ATI’s revolutionary new Avivo™ video and display technology platform. Avivo™ technology creates vibrant colours, ultra sharp images, true-to-life image reproduction, and the smoothest HD video playback ever offered by ATI.

• Vibrant colors
• Sharp video and photos
• True-to-Life Image Reproduction
• Smooth Video Playback

CrossFire™ : Multiply and Conquer
Designed from the ground up with GPU sharing in mind, the Radeon® X1300 Series
allows you to get incredible gaming performance by adding a Radeon® X1300 Crossfire™ Edition graphics card for ultra fast performance that works with all games, all the time.

• Supertiling for optimized gaming performance
• CrossFire™ boosts image quality

For a complete CrossFire™ solution, the following additional products are required:

• CrossFire™ Ready motherboard
• Compatible Radeon® CrossFire Edition co-processor
• Minimum 500W power supply