Connect3D Radeon X1300 Pro 256Mb Review

A Retrospective Review and Benchmarks

• RRP: £118
• Release date: October 5th 2005
• Purchased in November 2024
• Purchase Price: £4

ATi X1300 series RV515 & RV516

The ATI Radeon X1300 series, launched on October 5, 2005, was the budget end of ATI’s Radeon X1000 series of graphics cards.

The X1300 series was built on a 90 nm manufacturing process and featured the RV515 and later RV516 graphics processor.

The family did extend on providing a budget option even when successor series of chips were released.

Key specifications included:

• 4 pixel shaders and 2 vertex shaders (except the XT)
• 4 texture mapping units (TMUs) and 4 render output units (ROPs)
• Core clock speeds ranging from 450 MHz to 600 MHz,
• Support for DirectX 9.0c and Shader Model 3.0
• Memory configurations of 128 MB or 256 MB, with DDR or DDR2 memory types
• Memory bus width of 128-bit for standard models, 64-bit for some variants
• Low power consumption (TDP around 31W for the Pro)

These cards would be competing with the lower-end GeForce 6000 and 7000 Series cards of the time.

The RRP for a new X1300 on release were reportedly $79 for the cheapest HyperMemory edition up to $150 for the X1300 Pro.

In 2006, the X1300XT was released, a more serious contender. It had a lower clock speed but with an increase right up to 12 Pixel Shaders and 5 Vertex Shaders, this with an RRP of $89. I really want to own one but, they don’t seem to show up on eBay often.

The final card in the family was the X1550XT released in 2007 slightly different silicon. This was sold as an ultra-budget option with an RRP of $65.

The Card

This Connect3d version of the X1300 complete with a box and even a driver CD.

Repasting it was an absolute chore, the factory applied paste was stubborn to remove to say the least.

It’s a great card though and has been easy to work with, installation was no huge problem although there was a small issue with the Catalyst Control Centre which just would not install from the latest AMD driver package – I had used DDU in safe-mode to clear the old drivers out but it would just show up no matter how many times I installed the thing.

A search online suggests that windows was loading in its own standard driver before the ATi software had the chance to install itself which did make sense the resolution did not drop to 640 x 480 uninstalled which suggests somethings was lurking, but DDU couldn’t find it.

In the end, I used an earlier version of Catalyst Control Centre, the latest drivers were still insured so no problem there and I wasn’t planning on doing any heavy overclocking anyway – the older version fulfilled its job of letting me poke around and look at features without any issue.

The Test System

Details are as follows:

• CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 955 3.2Ghz Black edition
• 8Gb of 1866Mhz DDR3 Memory (showing as 3.25Gb on 32bit Windows XP and 1600Mhz limited by the platform)
• Windows XP (build 2600, Service Pack 3)
• Kingston SATA 240Gb SSD
• ASRock 960GM-GS3 FX
• The latest supported Catalyst Driver 10.2

Moto Racer 3 (2001)

This game has a 33fps frame cap which isn’t very useful for benchmarking.

At the maximum resolution that my monitor could support (1152 x 864) with everything turned on including the anti-aliasing I could not get the fps value to fall below 33fps at any point over a few laps.

I guess we’re all good here!

Mafia (2002)

This game is capped at 63fps. I recorded a long benchmark run driving around with as much traffic and draw distance as can be added in and things stayed pretty much locked to this cap.

I’ve recorded the results though as something to compare too with future cards – the 1% low figure is still a measure of smoothness.

The resolution was 1280 x 1024 with everything maxed out including 4xAA.

Freelancer (2003)

We spent hours playing this game back in the day, I can’t believe it’s so old now.

Setting everything to full at 1024 x 768 and this card would barely drop below the maximum frame cap of 60fps at any point.

A very good result really but, I guess things did move on fast in the early 2000’s. I used to pay this on an old Geforce2 MX400 so it’s no surprise really that the X1300 Pro doesn’t break a sweat.

FarCry (2004)

FarCry proved to be a bit more of a challenge than the earlier titles, as could be expected.

I found that good Framerates could be found at 1024 x 768 at the Very High Preset so did a run at this with AA on and off.

Pushing down to ‘High’ may be the preference for many but things felt smooth enough at an average 60fps.

Not bad at all.

Doom 3 (2004)

Doom3 is another game with a frame cap but it does have an internal benchmark that can be used which allows for the cap to be exceeded.

I used the High preset at 1024 x 768 and ran the test twice, once with 4x Antialiasing turned on.

The results were a reasonably impressive 47.6fps with no AA, and a round 30fps with it enabled.

When playing through the game at these settings things did get as low as 25fps without the AA and 14 with but, without AA things felt fine really. I played through a good 45 minutes and didn’t feel the need to reduce to medium.

Need for Speed: Most Wanted (2005)

Not a well optimised game as I found in a previous so I went in with a low setting at 800 x 600 only.

The thing is about this game is that you need that high fps to make it playable as input latency seems to find it’s way in even if you’re chugging along at 30fps or so.

I don’t know why this is but, it’s annoying, maybe just me.

Medieval II: Total War (2006)

A hard game to benchmark gameplay for as you will find yourself zooming in and out of any given battle making it impossible to duplicate each run.

Still, the introductions to the historical battles would seem to offer a good alternative to recording frame times in actual gameplay. It is clearly a rendered scene and the transition between introduction and gameplay is seamless.

I tried this out at 1024 x 768 Medium and things ran quite well, disabling AA didn’t have too much effect.

The high preset is out of reach, sadly as the visuals are significantly better.

Interestingly, the Agincourt battle can be won without any input from the player. The French just bounce off of the English lines in waves.

FlatOut 2 (2006)

A much better optimised driving game than Need for Speed, things fly along quite nicely on our X1300 Pro, even with 4 x AA enabled.

It feels faster as well though the driving physics are a little strange admittedly.

Still, fun times can be had with this game and this setup.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Pretty hard to look at, even at medium settings, not a big success but, playable really, if not a smooth experience.

Just Cause (2006)

Limited to 60fps which could be reached on medium settings so I boosted a few settings to get some measurable results for future comparisons.

This does do the card a disservice as it can play this game at 60fps easily at 800 x 600 Medium.

With these higher settings we got:

Not a bad result really.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl (2007)

The game runs great but it seemed to be capped at 60fps, I have the GOG version.

To get a reading I had to play with the settings a little, even at 1024×768 max settings we were hitting the cap consistently.

Changing the render from static lighting to the other two options caused a crash and a message saying that these are not supported.

Introducing some Anti-Aliasing and pushing up some more sliders and I found a more useful measurement which would allow comparison between other video cards.

Overall, this game worked, and looked great. A good result

Crysis (2007)

A tough proposition for many GPU’s, a budget option from two years prior didn’t seem to stand too much of a chance.

Low settings all around then with the following, largely unplayable results:

Assassin’s Creed (2007)

Another tough ask but at low settings 800 x 600 it could sort-of be played.

At Low though it looked very bad, the draw distance was so short it was jarring

Synthetic Benchmarks

Conclusions

The X1300Pro was a pretty solid card in it’s day and performed far better than I would have expected to something marketed as a budget GPU.

It can run early 2000’s games with ease and can give a good account of itself in later titles, albeit at far lower textures and resolutions than would otherwise be ideal.

It would be a decent choice today for someone wanting to play DirectX 7 and 8 titles, it’s very cheap, has very low power requirements and there are a huge number out there to choose from.

In the second part of the article, I’ll get some competing cards for a comparison.

Ash