ATI R350 rumors from Ace's

[lifeguard1999]

The R350 puts out 70 Watts of heat???
They may go to watercooling???

Holy cow!!!

Link

I think that ATI will not go with water cooling, but may use heatpipe technology as they have already done on one version of the 9700 Pro. Also, I think that both ATI and NVidia need to back off a bit. It seems that both the FX and R350 will be taking up at least 1 PCI slot for simple cooling. If NVidia needs that with the FX on a 130 nm chip, what do you think ATI will need on its 150 nm R350?

 

[CurtCold]

I think they will have to find a way around water cooling, I think alot of end users wouldn't like water running through there system. A good heat pipe will probably be the cure.

 

[CJP]

Something I was wondering. If the fx and the 350 use similar DDR 2 memory and the fx is 128 bit while the 350 is 256 bit, will this give ati a big advantage?

 

[lifeguard1999]

The 9700 Pro already has one big advantage over the FX, and that is that it has a higher memory bandwidth (16GB/sec for the FX and 19.8GB/sec for the 9700 Pro). That could mean that in high memory bandwidth situations (4X AA for example), that the 9700 Pro is faster than the FX. Of course, that would give the R350 an advantage as well whether or not it uses DDRII.

But::

At some point you reach diminishing returns. The game has to be able to use that bandwidth. So if the R350 does use a 256-bit memory interface and DDRII its bandwidth may be 39.6 GB/sec. If a game is only using 30 GB/sec at 4x AA and 1600x1200, then the rest of the interface is wasted.

BTW: What is the bandwith needed for 4x AA @ 1600 x 1200? I tried to do the calculations, but did not trust the answer I got.

 

[Lonyo]

I think that no company in their right mind would go watercooling. It's a consumers nightmare, even more to go wrong with the PC. The chance a customer would mess up would increase and it could result in an expensive outlay for ATi, or lack of future customers because peopel don't want to take the risk with water in their PC.

 

[Orbius]

Theres no advantage to DDRII except for the speed of it. Supposedly regular DDR is approaching DDRII speeds so DDRII is not a big deal. A 256-bit bus is a big deal however.

 

[Kazuo]

No one else finds it funny about the 70W- no one will have a power supply to support the thing! Unless it takes like 2 or 3 drive plugs on it I fear something that's gonna be putting out as much heat as my Athlon.
Sounds like Intel is going about it the right way- wait until the stuff is out there to dissipate the heat before clocking up to high heaven. I know that's bad business, but it makes sense from a standpoint of usability.
So let me finish with... 70W!?!?! What the hell are they thinking!?

 

[BFG10K]

I just don't see that water cooling being part of the standard design. It's too clumsy for the average person to use.

At some point you reach diminishing returns.

There is no such thing as too much memory bandwidth, just like there is no such thing as too much CPU speed.

The game has to be able to use that bandwidth.

If you have excess bandwidth you can always crank up the resolution, anisotropic filtering, FSAA and any other graphic options you feel you'd like. Also some parts of the game will be more demanding than others.

BTW: What is the bandwith needed for 4x AA @ 1600 x 1200?

You can't really calculate this since you don't know what kind of rendering operations are being performed during the render process. But for simplicity's sake, assuming that 4x FSAA requires 4 times as much bandwith and assuming 32 bit colour:

4 x 1600 x 1200 x (32 + 32) = 491520000 bits = ~60 MB. And assuming a minimum target of 60 FPS you need 3600 MB/sec bandwidth minimum to achieve this, or roughly 3.5 GB/sec.

This is of course a very conservative estimate as it doesn't factor in multi-pass rendering, pixel/vertex shading or advanced filtering effects such as anisotropic filtering. In fact the calculation I've made is pretty much only the storage space required for the final image (plus FSAA) so in reality the memory requirements will be much higher.

 

[norder69]

I agree with BFG10K, the majorty of the PC community can't accept water cooling. Imagine the cost of buying the card and paying for a water cooling kit as well ... just doesn't add up.

 

[sandorski]

Originally posted by: Kazuo
No one else finds it funny about the 70W- no one will have a power supply to support the thing! Unless it takes like 2 or 3 drive plugs on it I fear something that's gonna be putting out as much heat as my Athlon.
Sounds like Intel is going about it the right way- wait until the stuff is out there to dissipate the heat before clocking up to high heaven. I know that's bad business, but it makes sense from a standpoint of usability.
So let me finish with... 70W!?!?! What the hell are they thinking!?

Welcome to the future, these things(cpus/gpus) will continue to consume more power, although one day they will plateau. This is assuming that current technologies are not replaced sometime in the future, which they will.

BTW, P4s dissipate as much heat as Athlons, they just do it more efficiently.

 

[Lonyo]

As the technology gets smaller though, the heat produced also gets smaller, mebbe we need to slow development of the complexity, but make the processes smaller quicker.

 

[lifeguard1999]

Hexus.net also talks about the R350 watercooling:

Hercules + R350 + WaterCooling?
Posted on Saturday, January 4, 2003 by David

Hercules are developing a high end R350 product. This will be based purely at the high end overclockers, the product will be water cooled and be a complete solution - they are in talks with a few manufacturers which we have talked with and the brief is for a "performance block" over a block which is based around looks. This is interesting - the partner which develops a product which performs best will be going to the Hercules plants in France to work with them even closer.

Link

BFG10K:
I understand what you say about simply cranking up the resolution to eat up the extra memory bandwidth. However, I still disagree. After all, not many people have 2048x1536 monitors. This makes it difficult to simply say "crank up the resolution". 1600x1200 is the practical limit ... for now. (And yes, I do have 9 Mpixel monitor - but most people do not.)

I also calculated a memory bandwidth answer similar to yours, which is why I figured I must have made a mistake somewhere.

 

[Orbius]

Its not going to be anything more than a niche product. Hercules obviously has an axe to grind with Nvidia since they got screwed over by them, so ATi probably gave the nod to the water-cooling idea.
If marketed the right way the water cooling thing can be turned into a plus.
Theres always about 5% of tekkies willing to pay whatever the price for the latest and greatest, for those people watercooling is a plus not a negative I think.

 

[BFG10K]

I understand what you say about simply cranking up the resolution to eat up the extra memory bandwidth.

Not just resolution, but FSAA, anisotropic filtering, advanced pixel/vertex shading effects etc. All can be increased if you feel a card has "too much" power (which there's really no such thing).

And don't forget more stressful conditions in games such as more demanding maps and more players, and the obviously increased demands that future games will have.

I also calculated a memory bandwidth answer similar to yours,

The calculation isn't really bandwidth, it's more storage. Like I said before you can't really calculate rendering bandwidth unless you know exactly what you're actually rendering and how you're rendering it.

which is why I figured I must have made a mistake somewhere.

Why do you feel you've made a mistake if your answer is similar to mine?

 

[CJP]

So if I had a system where the cpu was the bottleneck would a powerful card not be wasted? Could I run games at a resolution that my cpu could handle but crank up the gpu dependant elements like fsaa and af to make use of the unused bandwidth on the card?

 

[zephyrprime]

DDRII is not a big deal. A 256-bit bus is a big deal however.

Current ddr is approaching the speeds of ddr2 but ddr2 will always be fundamentally better than ddr1. Why? Because DDR2 is the same thing as DDR except it's quad pumped (plus a few other little thing). After DDR2 gets going, it will be blow ddr1 away.