We usually love the ”not the very high-end and expensive one“ chip inside a high-end family. Usually this kind of chip – like Radeon X800 XL, GeForce 6800 GT, GeForce 7800 GT and now Radeon X1800 XL – provides a very high performance for a better price, providing a far better cost/benefit ratio. Sometimes the performance difference between this kind of chip and the most high-end one is not big enough to justify the relatively big price difference between them.

This new chip from ATI is a really good competitor to NVIDIA’s GeForce 7800 GT and our benchmarking results were quite interesting.

On 3DMark03, which simulates DirectX 9.0 (Shader 2.0) games, GeForce 7800 GT was between 4.69% and 12.34% faster than Radeon X1800 XL without any image quality enhancements enabled. When we enabled anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, Radeon X1800 XL was 3.62% faster than GeForce 7800 GT at 1024x768 and 5.96% faster at 1280x1024, and achieving the same results at 1600x1200.

On 3DMark05, which simulates Direct X 9.0c (Shader 3.0) games, both cards achieved the same performance level on all resolutions. However, when we enabled anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, Radeon X1800 XL was between 5.28% and 12.25% faster than GeForce 7800 GT.

On Far Cry, Radeon X1800 XL was between 4.34% and 13.99% faster than GeForce 7800 GT.

So, it seems that Radeon X1800 XL is faster than GeForce 7800 GT when image quality enhancements are enabled. And we doubt that someone that go for a video card above USD 400 will not enable them.

Doom 3, however, continues to be ATI’s Achilles’ Heel. On this game GeForce 7800 GT was between 8.29% and 22.48% faster than Radeon X1800 XL. So if you are going to primarily play Doom 3 or any other OpenGL game, we’d suggest you to buy GeForce 7800 GT.

As for the price, Radeon X1800 XL is listed at USD 449 and GeForce 7800 GT can be found around USD 400. The problem, however, is that even though Radeon X1800 XL was theoretically released yesterday, so far we couldn’t find it for sale at on-line stores. Also, you should keep in mind that its price tag is a suggestion and probably we will find cards from ATI partners (the usual suspects: Sapphire, GeCube, Gigabyte, ASUS and HIS, just to name a few) being sold for less.