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...anyway, the 4890 cometh, with pics.

ATI Radeon 4890 shows its face

DailyTech has been able to "acquire" an ATI Radeon HD 4890 video card from one of our sources. Although we don't disclose names in order to protect our sources, we are able to say that the card arrived from Taiwan.

The Radeon HD 4890 features the RV790 core, which we are able to confirm runs at a core clock of 850MHz. We have heard that it is capable of more, but that will be up to individual board partners. The chip is not just an overclocked RV770, as there are a few tweaks and modifications that we are still investigating.

The card also features 1GB of memory via eight GDDR5 chips from Qimonda, which declared insolvency in January. The reference card we have is set to 3900 MHz effective, and we expect most of ATI's board partners to do the same. This provides 124.8 GB/s of bandwidth.

Samsung could emerge as a source for GDDR5 chips if Qimonda is forced to halt production. It recently announced 50nm production of GDDR5 chips, which it claimed was capable of 7 Gb/s.

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=14616

It gets worse. NV... when does it end? "That's dishonest... low." [/Gyro Captain]

IF YOU THOUGHT Nvidia's spectacularly successful strategy in renaming the G92 to the GTS250, then seeding reviewers with ringers was low, you will love what it is doing with the 275. Yes, the company can go lower.

The official specs are 240 'cores', and clocks are at 633/1404/1134MHz for GPU, processor and memory respectively. Yawn. GDDR3 of course, no GDDR5 now or until the GT300 cores, the GT200 can't do it, but that is old news. Things are going to suck for NV on a die area board layers, and therefore cost for the rest of the year.

So, what is the sleazy part? Where to begin, where to begin. The first one is that there is no GT275 card or ASIC, in fact, as of CeBIT, Nvidia partners didn't know it existed, mainly because it didn't. This 'planned' card wasn't planned, and is what you call a reaction. Take a sticker, slap it on an existing card, and blow different fuses.

We hear there will be only 5,000 or so made, just enough to seed the tame press and put a few on Newegg. Cards in this price range normally have initial shipments more than 10 times that, and go on from there. When you don't have something to counter a competitor, make something up, lose money on each, and claim the high ground, just not in the ethical sense of the word.

Can it get worse? Sure it can, since there is no 275 ASIC, NV is telling OEMs that they can make it from either a 280 or 260 board. One costs much more and performs better, so guess what everyone is going to use? That isn't necessarily bad, but how NV is seeding reviewers is. They are only going to be giving out a very special run of ONLY 280 based parts.

Quite special 280 based parts at that. Reviewers beware, what you are getting is not what you can buy, if you consider the 275 to be a real part to begin with. In any case, NV is seeding ringers, and claiming they are what the OEMs are going to make. Again. This is clearly not the case, but multiple reviewers told me they were specifically told by NV that the cards are not going to be 280 based. AIBs say otherwise, and documentation we have seen backs up the AIBs.
..

If you think the hardware review industry is cynical and gamed, you are right.µ

260-based production boards, 280-based review samples. Nice. I wonder which will OC better...

Buy it if you like it, but take review results with a grain of salt, especially anything over stock clocks.

I am thinking more along the line of a 4670 for the time being, upgrade from a 4550.

Booksley wrote:

Bat wrote:

I've got my hands full consoling Books about getting an OC'ed 4870 shortly before the 4890 comes out.

Also we should verify which OS is under discussion.

They're going to be unveiling the 4890 in April, and I wanted my computer built in a week rather than several months

...which has now flown by, and oh, poor Books...

Architecturally, the RV790 graphics processor is identical to RV770. The vital specs haven’t changed one bit. It’s still a 55 nm component, though transistor count is up just slightly to approximately 959 million transistors (from 956 million). The GPU is still made up of 800 stream processors, 40 texture units, and 16 ROPs. It still sports a 1 GB GDDR5 frame buffer on a 256-bit memory bus, too.

Where it differs most is clock speed—on its core and memory bus. Stock Radeon HD 4870s employed a 750 MHz engine and quad data rate memory running at 900 MHz. This new offering cruises at 850 MHz with 975 MHz GDDR5 memory.
..

In order to get those elevated frequencies, ATI had to do some work to the GPU’s core. In short, the RV770 consistently had issues clocking beyond a certain point—a fact that was evident in many of our System Builder Marathon overclocking attempts, which generally fell short at the same frequency range.

The company’s engineers went in looking for slow electrical paths and re-wired them in such a way that they wouldn’t inhibit faster frequencies. Physically, the GPU is fractions of a millimeter larger due to additional capacitors that clean up power to the chip. [..]
..

Overclocking

The principal benefit from moving from HD 4870 to HD 4890 would, in our minds, be overclocking headroom. Stock-to-stock, you’re looking at a 100 MHz frequency increase. However, right out of the gate, ATI’s board partners will be shipping juiced models running a 50 MHz-faster core clock. According to AMD, the new GPU layout should be capable of going even faster than that.

The driver’s Overdrive sub-routine now offers a maximum frequency of 1 GHz, suggesting ATI is fairly comfortable with its enthusiast customers running at that speed. Rather than push our card that high and run the risk of misrepresenting performance with a hand-picked sample, however, we ran our HIS Radeon HD 4890 Turbo sample at its stock 900/975 MHz speeds and compared it to the reference clocks ATI is officially launching.

850 stock core, 900 stock on, say, a 4890 Toxic ... OCeable to 1,000 even thru CCC, plus significantly faster GDDR5 chips; and it still comes with 2x6-pin PCIe connectors. Oh, the Canadienity. :handtoforeheadmax: At least you're spared further strain on your 430w Antec.

  http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/rad … ,2262.html

::lets moths out of wallet, checks couch for change::

User, make sure you check out the Stalker: CS Ultra Quality soft shadows in the DX10.1 section.

Booksley wrote:

Right now, the price is too high... in Canada!.

You pay an extra $80 and you get 5-10% more performance... not worth it, especially considering that you could put that $80 into a better 24" monitor

Canadia counts? ...and most are characterizing gains as closer to 30% on beta drivers. And what was the extra price/perf ratio on your Toxic vs. a std. 4870 1GB? You didn't get an OCed unit just to get an edge, didja?

It's also just day one, and over 50,000 have shipped already. Rebates are coming, and price competition...

DailyTech wrote:

All of this enables higher clock speeds. While the Radeon 4870 has a core clock of 750MHz, the Radeon 4890 runs its core clock at 850MHz. The standard GDDR5 runs at 3.9GHz effective, and provides 124.8 GB/s of bandwidth. Several ATI graphics board partners will be launching models with core clocks running at over 1GHz using improved cooling solutions.
..

DailyTech has performed a few basic tests of the Radeon 4890, and our results show a 10%-25% performance improvement, depending on the game. The drivers in the box will work best for now, until the Catalyst 9.4 drivers are released later this month.

How much gain on launch drivers, DT? Books is having reading troubles.

We have received word that there are over 50,000 Radeon HD 4890 cards already in the market. Several retailers have already sold cards to anxious fans ahead of today's launch date. The cards themselves should sell for no more than $250 at stock speeds, although we expect prices to drop slightly in a month's time. Some partners have also said that mail-in rebates for $20 will be available.

AMD recently tried to lower prices on its Radeon 4870 and 4850 cards, but its board partners believe that the performance of the Radeon 4870 is too good to lower prices further. The 1GB version of the Radeon 4870 is now selling for around the $180 mark, although it may be available for less with a mail-in rebate partly subsidized by AMD.
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Further out, ATI will be launching its first DirectX 11 parts in late summer. Some consumers may be tempted to wait for the next generation of cards with an all new architecture, but they will launch at higher prices. If you're looking for a high performance single chip video card, the Radeon 4890 may be your best bet for the next five months.

UPDATE: ATI has confirmed that the original information we received was incorrect, and the RV790 does indeed have 959 million transistors.

THG further said

(Update 2: ATI says it is shooting for prices, with rebates, around $220. That's still a little higher than we'd like to see, but certainly more aggressive than the $260 we were initially expecting. As of launch, however, prices on seven models of the HD 4890 start at $249 with instant rebates).

Lots more headroom in the 4890. Without that cap ring, the 4870 kind of brickwalls regardless of cooling. 850 is conservative. 1GHz+ factory cards, now...

The standard clock speed of the Radeon HD 4890 is a modest 13% higher than the 4870, so we're not surprised to see overall performance only about 8–10% higher, depending on the game. That kind of performance boost makes it hard to justify the 25% higher price, but the better idle power usage and lower operating temperatures are definitely a nice perk.

In general, we think ATI was too conservative with this part. Instead of giving a lot of headroom for board vendors to offer substantially overclocked cards, it should have made the default clock speed 900–925MHz, which would have made it a better competitor to the GTX 275.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2 … 304,00.asp

Maybe even from Sapphire. Ironic, innit?

Last edited by Bat (2009-04-02 8:39 pm)

Gaming the news.

Last week, NVIDIA launched its new GeForce GTX 275 video card to compete against the ATI Radeon HD 4890. The launch was originally targeted for April 14, and our sources indicated that there were only around 5,000 units available on launch day.

However, one of our sources emailed us some links last night to e-tailers Newegg and Mwave to prove North American availability of the GeForce GTX 275.

Another email DailyTech received claimed that NVIDIA has "shipped 10s of thousands of chips to our board partners. Our board partners are in mass production and they have already started to make these available through retail and e-tail channels."

"Timing of course, depends on the region. But clearly, the floodgates are open," the source elaborated.

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=14779

Wouldn't be surprised if NV or 'friends' sent them.

Of course Newegg got a few, that was expected. No higher profile. If they're not getting any... Mwave, well known. 10s of thousands of chips? Sure; it's not a new chip. Same 55nm GT200b as in 260s. Floodgates? Mass production.. of 275s? That sounds like... um, spin. Yeah, that's it. We'll see.

Anyhoo the price/perf is about equal.

DX11 approacheth.

THE INQUIRER IS running an internal contest for the shortest article of the day. I respectfully submit:

Nvidia's GT300 is set to tape out in June.

I think I win. [Unless I decide to wiffle on here for hours about something that may or may not be related to graphics cards. Or Nvidia. Like, how about that kid who found a packet of Ecstasy pills in his copy of Grand Theft Auto? Now that's a story..! Ed.]  µ

Nvidia GT300 tapeout soon

And ATi's giving 40nm a try.

WE'VE JUST FOUND the specs for ATI's Radeon HD 4770, complete with the world's very first 40nm desktop chip, the RV740.

Flashing its best bits for all to see over on VR-Zone, AMD's new card seems aimed to kill its Nvidia 9800GT rival in performance dollar for dollar.

Just looking at the specs it would seem the HD 4770 is not just faster than the 9800GT, but its suggested retail price of 99$ (probably as low as $90 E-tail) will have Nvidia panting after a frantic run for punters' money.

The 9800GT is currently priced between $119 and $139, but we bet the Green Goblin does a bit of price adjustment when the 4770 hits shelves.

Take a look at the slides culled from PC Pop and decide for yourselves. µ

ATI's Radeon HD 4770 slides leaked

Japanese website PC Pop managed to acquire a batch of slides pertaining to the upcoming ATI Radeon HD 4770, complete with the first 40nm desktop chip

You have to admit: there's something sweet about leaked images, whether they're stills from an upcoming movie or the hardware specs of an upcoming graphics card. In this case, PC Pop scored the latter, acquiring six slides showcasing the upcoming ATI Radeon HD 4770.

According to the provided specs, the Radeon HD 4770 (RV470) will run faster than Nvidia's 9800GT, and one slide even announces its $99 price point, lower than the 9800GT's current price tag ranging from $119 to $139. A head-to-head slide reveals that the Radeon HD 4770 features 40nm processing; the 9800GT uses 65nm and 55nm processing. Additionally, the Radeon HD 4770 provides GDDR5 memory, 960 GLOPs of processing power, 12.0 GFLOPS per watt, and 9.7 GFLOPS per dollar. Nvidia's 9800GT isn't quiet as spectacular, using GDDR3 memory and offering 504 GFLOPs of processing power; users also get 4.8 GFLOPs per watt and 5.1 GFLOPs per dollar. To rub Nvidia's face even more into the dirt, AMD's new card supports DirectX 10.1; the 9800GT supports DirectX 10.

Is there a big difference between DirectX 10 and 10.1? A chart provided by AMD shows an improvement, using the PC game STALKER: Clear Sky as a benchmark. Set at 1920x1200 during the day, the game's DirectX 10.1 patch cranks up the frames per second to almost 40. That's not exactly fluid, however it's slightly better than 36 frames per second supplied by DirectX 10. By turning on the sunshafts, DirectX 10.1 still performs better than DirectX 10 without shafts, cranking out around 38 frames per second; DirectX 10 is only capable of 35 frames per second with sunshafts activated.

Outside the DirectX performance, the ATI Radeon HD 4770 features 826 million transistors; the 4670 uses 514 million and the 4850 uses 956 million. Clocking at 750 MHz, the 4770 also features 640 stream processors, a memory clock of 800 MHz using a 128-bit memory bus, a frame buffer size of 512 MB, and consumes 80 watts of power. While the card clocks at the same speed and uses the same memory bus as the 4670, it offers better performance using GDDR5, however it's still not quite as speedy as the 4850. With a compute performance of 1.0 TFLOPs, the 4850 coughs up a core clock of 625 MHz, but provides 800 stream processors, GDDR3 memory using a 256-bit bus, and a memory clock of 1000 MHz to make up the difference.

40nm, $99 MSRP, faster than a 9800GT; May. Makes me wish I had a Crossfire board, and wonder how it OCs- I only need to feed ~2MPixels, and have a backside chip cooler to further aid cooling a cool part. I suspect the VRMs/other power circuits are the main clockspeed bottleneck. Not many fewer gates than the 4870/4890. Could wish for more mem bandwidth, but it is an upper low-range part, with a price to match. Low wattage.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/AMD-AT … ,7547.html

Last edited by Bat (2009-04-22 2:20 am)

...and it looks good.

The chip was meant to come out last December, but like we said, TSMC glitches bit and leakage became the overriding problem. Luckily, ATI actually seems to have followed the DFM rules rather than believing arrogance without a coherent QA program can bend the laws of physics. That is why the HD 4770 is the first 40nm GPU on sale.

It is not a high-end part though, it slots between the 4670 and the 4850, closer to the latter than the former in performance, and will undoubtedly kill the more expensive to make 4830. On the Nvidia side, it sits on top of the vanilla 9800 (or is it the GT239XXX this week?), meaning margins in Santa Clara should shrink a bit in Q1.

The raw specs are a 750MHz core clock, 640 shaders, 32 texture units and 512M of 800MHz GDDR5 on a 128-bit bus. As far as silicon is concerned, the chip is built on the much criticised TSMC 40nm process, and packs 826 million transistors into 134mm2. Power consumption is a little high for a new process at 80W, but that exactly splits the difference between the 4670 and the 4850.

In terms of performance, it is a hair below the 4850 in most regards, beating it in raw compute and pixel fill tests, but losing in texture capacity. Basically, depending on what you are looking for, one card or the other might be better.

That brings us to the ultimate question, price. The HD 4770 will retail for $109 with a $10 rebate, meaning an official sub-$100 price. Given the performance, and the lack of real competition, it should have this segment of the market almost all to itself. µ

Bears thinking about. Wish I had a Crossfire board... wonder if any AIB plans on a 2-chip version at the price? It has a low-end cooler- it must run cool. Wonder how it OCs? Reviews awaited.

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/new … 0-40nm-gpu

Yep, but maybe later Apple will. Though I doubt it unless as a special BTO option.

NVidia is releasing the GTX285 for Macs in June, apparently. This is the first Mac video card they've had available for public sale... ever?