r250/r300?

[Alex]

can i expect these any time soon? i was extremely disappointed after reading the tech reviews latest roundup with the 8500 with 128mb ram performing so damn poorly

 

[Auric]

R300 will be available with DirectX 9. So, no time soon

I hope the R250 is available soon but I gather from that recent ATI interview that it will be released at the same time. That's what they did with with 7500 (also a revamp of previous core) did they not?

 

[jcmkk]

From what I've heard, ATI will be bringing out the R250 when nVidia finally releases the Ti4200.

 

[Aragorn992]

Just for reference, the R250 will be at speeds of about 350/350 and a match for the Gf4. The R300 is going to be about twice as powerful as the current Radeon 8500. According to ATi anyway.

 

[bunnyfubbles]

You also have to realize that the GeForce 4 was one of the worst kept secrets... ATI might just be doing a good job not to let much leak. I heard that R250 based boards would be available sometime in mid-spring, just like the Ti 4200. But I wouldn't be surprised if they did release the R250 with the R300...

 

[AGodspeed]

The beefed up Radeon 8500 (R250) won't be out until summer, late summer at that.

The RV250 is supposedly a crippled Radeon 8500, coming with just two pipelines and two texture units. I don't know if it will have pixel or vertex shaders, who knows...

R300 won't be out before NV30 most likely, and it sure won't be out before DX9 is launched. Isn't DX9 scheduled for next year anyway?

 

[Blurry]

The RV250 is supposedly a crippled Radeon 8500, coming with just two pipelines and two texture units
Exactly why would ATI rate the core higher than the Radeon 8500 (RV250vsRV200) if the new Radeon 8800 would be a crippled version?
As usual, the higher the number, the better.

 

[AGodspeed]

<< The RV250 is supposedly a crippled Radeon 8500, coming with just two pipelines and two texture units
Exactly why would ATI rate the core higher than the Radeon 8500 (RV250vsRV200) if the new Radeon 8800 would be a crippled version?
As usual, the higher the number, the better. >>

Knowledge is your friend.

 

[Blurry]

Good job on that one GodSpeed. You left me puzzled and confused. But anyway, what about the R250? Isn't it suppose to be better?

 

[BFG10K]

The R250 (8700) is supposed to be out before the end of April and on paper it looks better than a GF4 Ti4600. Of course how it performs in the real world remains to be seen.

 

[AA0]

I'm confused on ATI's future cards.
nvidia cards don't seem to be able to take use of the extra 64 megs of RAM, but many ATI benchmarks show some signifacant improvements. Now I don't know if its a hardware design thing, or just inefficient drivers, but I'm leaning to the drivers side.

The new R250 because of its 128 megs might really show nvidia their stuff. Especially it being so similar to the 8500. I think the drivers really need some efficiency work still, they are fine for stability, but something is seriously wrong with their implementation, theoritical benchmarks show how good they can be.

 

[Alex]

<< The R250 (8700) is supposed to be out before the end of April and on paper it looks better than a GF4 Ti4600. Of course how it performs in the real world remains to be seen. >>



hmmm if the r300 will take so long and with the r250 so soon i think ill stick to the original r200 core for my comp in late august and then save up and upgrade to r300 when it finally comes out...

 

[Rand]

<<
nvidia cards don't seem to be able to take use of the extra 64 megs of RAM, but many ATI benchmarks show some signifacant improvements. Now I don't know if its a hardware design thing, or just inefficient drivers, but I'm leaning to the drivers side.
>>



I'm strongly leaning towards the hardware side rather then driver inefficiencies, doubtless drivers play into it also but I'm of the opinion that the main reason is hardware design.

It seems to stands to reason the R8500 would stand to benefit more from extra DRAM then would the GF3, it has the same pixel and vertex shader count as the GF4, a significantly more memory dependent method of FSAA, and texture compression has been shown to be less efficient in the R200's memory architecture hence it's logical the R8500 would likely stand to see a greater benefit then either the GF3 core from going from
64 > 128MB DRAM.

 

[Alex]

<<

<<
nvidia cards don't seem to be able to take use of the extra 64 megs of RAM, but many ATI benchmarks show some signifacant improvements. Now I don't know if its a hardware design thing, or just inefficient drivers, but I'm leaning to the drivers side.
>>



I'm strongly leaning towards the hardware side rather then driver inefficiencies, doubtless drivers play into it also but I'm of the opinion that the main reason is hardware design.

It seems to stands to reason the R8500 would stand to benefit more from extra DRAM then would the GF3, it has the same pixel and vertex shader count as the GF4, a significantly more memory dependent method of FSAA, and texture compression has been shown to be less efficient in the R200's memory architecture hence it's logical the R8500 would likely stand to see a greater benefit then either the GF3 core from going from
64 > 128MB DRAM. >>



despite the extra memory performance tho, the 8500 is still beaten like it stole something by the gf4's FSAA....

 

[JeremiahTheGreat]

I'm not too impressed by FSAA, it just blurs all the lines (which is what its suppose to do) and likes anti-alias text as well, making it very very unreadable.. Then i thought, why can't they just make the jaggies smaller without making them blurry. Then i found out, it was called increasing the res.. doh.

Anyway, i'm quite sure in the R250, ATI has optimised the memory controller and maybe a few hardware bugs here and there (which are fixed in drivers, but would no doubt give a tiny performance hit) giving a boost in performance over just a simple clock increase.

 

[BFG10K]

nvidia cards don't seem to be able to take use of the extra 64 megs of RAM,

False. The bechmarks don't really show it but there is a benefit from having 128 MB over 64 MB RAM on nVidia's boards.

but many ATI benchmarks show some signifacant improvements.

I'd say it's mainly driver related, namely the deficiencies in ATi's texture upload routines. It's yet another case of ATi's hardware saving their driver developers and it shows just how much the current 64 MB Radeon 8500s are being held back by poor drivers.

 

[EdipisReks]

at least one game, jedi knight 2, takes a HUGE performance hit going from 1024x768 to 1280x1024 on a 64 MB nVidia video card. 128 MB cards don't have this problem. it is documented in [ H ]ardOCP's ti4200 preview.

--jacob