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*Bing bing*

Round 1, Fight!

...altho the Mini woudn't run Crysis too well, and at an estimated 720,000,000, the R600 might have... what? 2-3 many times the transistor count?.. hopefully the GDDR3 version will be available for a bit after the March GDDR4 rev and push its price down. Either'll be fast as all hell... wonder how fast Folding@Home would run on it?

...which reminds me, apparently DX10 games otherwise nearing completion (or patching to -10, like Flight Simulator X) have been pushed back a bit, as the 8800 has been the only production DX10 card and NV still hasn't released a Vista driver for it (the 8800 breaks the unified driver model). No hardware to develop on = delays.

And I'm pretty sure the majority of gamers would fall into that "non-targeted consumer" category.  Unless of course the price for that card is less than an Xbox 360, Live, and a couple games.  And I would buy those instead of an overpriced gfx card. Unless you're a hardware-driven one-man 3D graphics-rendering powerhouse, I don't think such high prices are even worth it.  Oh yay, you get to see more shiny and more frames per second?

[EDIT]Har.  I was very whiny in this post.  Apologies.

Last edited by ABigSmall (2007-01-01 3:48 am)

And yes, if I do care, all I'll do is comment about those who don't care.  Smooth plan indeed.

Certainly, Mr. Moderator.

I've been perusing the leaked R600 specs and have been comparing them to those of the Xenos.  But with my lack of technical knowledge in the GPU field I can't deduce a thing.  Are the two similar, just that the R600 is capable of DX10?

Impressive. Though it is overpriced in the fact that it's only for pretty graphics, it most certainly isn't overpriced in terms of what it takes to make the thing.

Does anyone think we will see these new next generation GPUs for the Mac at next weeks Macworld? (a.k.a A R600 or 8800 or similar card.)

? Aside from most apps scaling poorly to even 4 cores (if they're multithreaded at all), comments on/ answers to some preceding posts on hold for time reasons... a little news C&P called for, tho.

AMD's R600 to suffer another delay

THE FIRST AMD/ATI graphics chip just cannot enter the world without much screaming and wriggling.

In fact, it's looking more like Nvidia is going to be to the market first with an 80 nanometre version of the G80 graphics chip, rather than ATI's 720 million transistor monster.

The last revision of the prototype chip - upon which a certain "pre-review" is based - also suffers from problems which are serious enough to get another re-spin, sources tell me. This re-spin puts a hold on the launch for another couple of weeks, and now R600 is looking like an early March launch, probably the week before SnowBIT in Hangover. However, AMD/ATI is making severe changes to the whole line up and we can say that this launch, when it happens, will be very, very shocking for the 3D industry.

I am not talking about pseudo-penismarks here.

We learned about the performance and feature characteristics and they're looking pretty impressive in more than one way, although you can expect that Dr. Spinola's engine is getting into defensive mode, saying people "don't understand what the R600 is".

However, engineer teams are working around the clock to make this launch as good as possible.

One small note on the tech demos. Prepare for your mandibles to drop, because Adrienne* should look like a high-school attempt at 3D graphics compared to ATI's thing. µ

Adrienne is NV's tech demo babe.

Not sure if this is good or bad. Want one, can't really afford it, want it to be great but the sooner it's out, the sooner the price can start dropping and the closer midrange versions get... argh. Que Sarah Sarah, I guess. (Maybe bite the bullet and be ready for DX10.1? A monster can give two years good service).

(My mandibles... what, all 4 of them?! )

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36673

ABigSmall wrote:

I've been perusing the leaked R600 specs and have been comparing them to those of the Xenos.  But with my lack of technical knowledge in the GPU field I can't deduce a thing.  Are the two similar, just that the R600 is capable of DX10?

Booksley wrote:

Isn't the Xenos GPU DX9.5 (you get the idea, it's not possible to do everything in DX10) and R600 DX10?

Close. It's been some time since I boned up on Xenos in detail, but it's a custom chip, the best ATI could do at the time, IIRC even before the DX10 featureset was finalized. It has 48 unified shader units that uses an API sometimes characterized as 'Shader Model 3.0+'; more than DX9.0c's SM3.0, yet short of DX10's full SM4.0. That does a number of things like procedural effects, creating geometry & instancing on the fly, substantially better than Xenos. However, Xenos does do things like multisample FSAA essentially without a perf hit up to 720p or so thanks to its 10MB of embedded' smart' DRAM... still, next-gen chips like R600 are so much more powerful that even with a reasonable perf hit, it will blow R500 Xenos, let alone RSX/G71 completely out of the water for both framerates and features, with user-selectable options (type and amount of FSAA, angle-independent anisotropic filtering and more), as it should at the price. The gap between next-gen consoles' graphics and new PC graphics has closed at a record pace- even video playback is now better on the PC.

Sorry for taking so long on these Qs.

Edit: Sorry, missed you, macmenace.

macmenace wrote:

Does anyone think we will see these new next generation GPUs for the Mac at next weeks Macworld? (a.k.a A R600 or 8800 or similar card.)

The 8800 is just out, the R600 is a ways off. Apple in front of the grfx curve... not since Jan. '01 & the GF3. So... I doubt it. Existing cards are plenty fast and can use every OpenGL trick Apple supports.

So... no. Sorry.

Last edited by Bat (2007-01-07 7:01 am)

There is some hope, tho, from another quarter. I'm starting a thread about it, tho, so you'll probably have seen it by the time you read this.

The latest AMD ATI roadmaps reveal details of more DirectX 10 graphics cards

DailyTech has just finished its briefing on the upcoming AMD ATI Radeon launches.  The company has three major launches over the next few months: codenamed R600, R610 and R630.

The R600, ATI's ultra-high-end Radeon X1950 successor, has a production date scheduled for February 2007.  The card will launch at or around the Cebit 2007 convention in mid-March.  Shipments will follow shortly after.

Our latest roadmaps indicate R600 will support unified shaders and GDDR4 or GDDR3 memory.  GDDR3 versions of the card running revision "A12" silicon appear to be making rounds in the blogsphere, and select press can even take a sneak peak  of the card under embargo here at CES.  The final silicon for R600 will be "A13."

A GDDR4 version of the card will be the flagship launch product. Clock frequencies on any R600 card have not been set officially yet, and will not appear on marketing material until just a few weeks before the launch.

The company has also added the R610 and R630 GPUs to the roadmap.  In the past, ATI has used lower number codenames to denote entry-level products.  We would suspect R610 would be the entry-level R600 cutdown, and R630 would be the mid-range chipset.  The Radeon roadmap puts both of these products on the shelf before June 2007.

All R600-series GPUs from ATI are compatible with DirectX 10.

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=5630

macmenace wrote:

Bat wrote:

Edit: Sorry, missed you, macmenace.

macmenace wrote:

Does anyone think we will see these new next generation GPUs for the Mac at next weeks Macworld? (a.k.a A R600 or 8800 or similar card.)

The 8800 is just out, the R600 is a ways off. Apple in front of the grfx curve... not since Jan. '01 & the GF3. So... I doubt it. Existing cards are plenty fast and can use every OpenGL trick Apple supports.

So... no. Sorry.

Awe, one can still dream. Thanks.

Yeah theres dreams but the moment Apple decided to put a shared VRAM chip in a computer, something had died. Laptops also all with X1600s is depressing. We should be seeing X1300/1600s in the low end crap and something decent in the high end. Heck nVidia has some nice high end boards that could be dropped in as well as ATI.

Even the towers need updates. Yeah the 7800s are getting old but I can gurantee that if they were made an option for midrange, people would buy them. Just limiting cards like this fuels the flashing community more.

Bat wrote:

(Water-cooled R600... eat your heart out, Levi. )

Five GPM (gallon per minute) flow rate, 3 120mm fans on the radiator, custom water blocks...my heart is just fine.















Ok yeah the 5GPM number I pulled out of my ass but ya get the point...

Open systems > Closed systems