R300 & RV250 up at Anandtech!!!

[NOX]

Any ATI employees reading these threads mush be smilling right now.

(Yes, I know, NV30. But right now it's ATI's show!)

 

[VFAA]

When is the NV30 due?

 

[Insane3D]

Originally posted by: VFAA
When is the NV30 due?

I believe early 2003....

 

[VFAA]

Originally posted by: Insane3D

Originally posted by: VFAA
When is the NV30 due?

I believe early 2003....

Hmmmm than the ATI will definitely have an advantage over Nvidia for a while.
Unless, of course, Nvidia will release GeForce4 Ti4800 & Ti5000 GPUs to compete.

I'm waiting for the moment when ATI, Matrox & Nvidia would combine forces to produce the ultimate video card .

 

[ShadowDJ]

Originally posted by: VFAA

Originally posted by: Insane3D

Originally posted by: VFAA
When is the NV30 due?

I believe early 2003....

Hmmmm than the ATI will definitely have an advantage over Nvidia for a while.
Unless, of course, Nvidia will release GeForce4 Ti4800 & Ti5000 GPUs to compete.

I'm waiting for the moment when ATI, Matrox & Nvidia would combine forces to produce the ultimate video card .

HERE HERE!

Congrats ATi! K!CKA$$ !

 

[Zugzwang152]

Originally posted by: VFAA

I'm waiting for the moment when ATI, Matrox & Nvidia would combine forces to produce the ultimate video card .

wow that card would be darn expensive to cover all their costs

 

[Degenerate]

Just noticed this..... all i can say is nothing.

 

[rawhyde]

Quote

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by: Insane3D
I believe early 2003....
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Actually, I believe Ananad said he expected it in November of 2002. Somewhere towards the end of the article... here it is:

"The 0.13-micron chip [NV30] has been delayed a bit and the current word is that a November release can be expected, with boards shipping shortly thereafter. The folks over at ATI are banking on NV30 being a 2003 part, so that the Radeon 9700 can close out this year with a bang."

ATI can hope and bank all they want, but you can bet your a$$ that NVIDIA will do everything in their power to get the boards out prior to the holiday season. My bet is NV30 released in early November, boards on the streets by the end of the month.

NV35 should be coming in April or May of 2003.

 

[CrazySaint]

Who in their right mind would pay $400 for a card that lacked triple-head support and highend 2D??!!

 

[BFG10K]

Well, I'll state for the record that I'm officially impressed with the specs and the real world performance of such an early card. It looks like the R300 has true anisotropic filtering now which pleases me greatly and it's significantly faster than a Ti4600 as well, especially at high resolutions.

The only thing that concerns me is the fact that it only has 1 texture unit per pipe when most games are using two. The other thing that concerns me is the rebuilt drivers for just the 9700 and the abandoned unified driver model. I know ATi's drivers are much better than they were before but I do still have issues with them, issues that I don't have with nVidia's drivers.

So when these cards appear on the shelves I'm pretty much sold assuming no cheating is revealed, no major driver problems are revealed and assuming that nVidia doesn't counter the cards in some way such as with new drivers and/or new products.

 

[GTaudiophile]

Good job, competition! Goog job, ATi! Unlike many here, I applaud you. It's been a rough few years, but you held on. You made mistakes, learned some lessons, and made improvements. You're hardware is great, and your software is rapidly becoming top-notch with Catalyst. Congratulations on becoming the new king of graphics.

As for me, I think the Q4 Radeon 9500 has my name on it.

 

[Adul]

Originally posted by: BFG10K
Well, I'll state for the record that I'm officially impressed with the specs and the real world performance of such an early card. It looks like the R300 has true anisotropic filtering now which pleases me greatly and it's significantly faster than a Ti4600 as well, especially at high resolutions.

The only thing that concerns me is the fact that it only has 1 texture unit per pipe when most games are using two. The other thing that concerns me is the rebuilt drivers for just the 9700 and the abandoned unified driver model. I know ATi's drivers are much better than they were before but I do still have issues with them, issues that I don't have with nVidia's drivers.

So when these cards appear on the shelves I'm pretty much sold assuming no cheating is revealed, no major driver problems are revealed and assuming that nVidia doesn't counter the cards in some way such as with new drivers and/or new products.

I think you must be confusing the radeon 9000 with the 9700.

from anand's article.

You?ll notice in the table above that the new Pixel Shader specification calls for a maximum of 16 texture inputs. This translates into the ability to apply 16 textures per pass, up from 6 on the GeForce4 and Radeon 8500.

 

[Dulanic]

I wish they had something to compete with the 4200, my GF1 needs a upgrade bad... tho it still runs everything in 1024x768x32 nicely. Id love one of these cards, but a gamer on a budget like me cant really afford that much for a card. Think ill grab a 4200 next week... if it lasts half as long as my GF1 has, itll be well worth it. Paid $300 for my GF1 DDR when it first came out... and Im using it what 3 years later?

 

[Linux23]

does anyone have any towels.

i just crapped myself.


and just think, when ATI improves on the drivers a little bit down the road, most people may be able to get a 10-20% boost in performance.


looks like my AIW Radeon has met it doom.

 

[Analog]

cool.

 

[GTaudiophile]

I especially like how Kyle over at HardOCP concluded his preview of the Radeon 9700:


All in all, the Radeon 9700 is absolutely the best gaming card that money can buy and ATi has committed to start shipping cards in 30 days. They have earned their moment in the spotlight and deserve kudos from the gaming community. Speaking with Dave Orton, the COO of ATi, he seemed more excited about the next product after this so he could push their R300 core into the mainstream. It just keeps getting better and better and there really is no end in sight. The Radeon 9700 is the dawn of a new era in gaming, and a very welcomed one at that.

 

[ElFenix]

Originally posted by: GTaudiophile
I especially like how Kyle over at HardOCP concluded his preview of the Radeon 9700:


All in all, the Radeon 9700 is absolutely the best gaming card that money can buy and ATi has committed to start shipping cards in 30 days. They have earned their moment in the spotlight and deserve kudos from the gaming community. Speaking with Dave Orton, the COO of ATi, he seemed more excited about the next product after this so he could push their R300 core into the mainstream. It just keeps getting better and better and there really is no end in sight. The Radeon 9700 is the dawn of a new era in gaming, and a very welcomed one at that.

looks like they'll have something to answer nv30 with. probably won't be real long after nv30 is out since it seems like they're most likely waiting on .13

 

[BFG10K]

I think you must be confusing the radeon 9000 with the 9700.

In what respect? Texture units?

Both Tom and Anand have said it's one texture unit per pipeline. 16 textures per pass can be done with loopback and doesn't necessarily need a 8 x 2 configuration.

 

[Adul]

where ? i must be blond but can you point that out please.

 

[GTaudiophile]

Didn't Anand say that the Radeon 9500 will be built on a .13mu design and will basically be a stripped-down version of the 9700? Didn't Anand also say that ATi will have the 9500 ready in Q4 to fit the $200-300 price point? If that's all true, my guess is they'd have a .13mu version of the 9700 ready not too long after the 9500 becomes available. We'll probably see a .13mu, tweaked version of 9700 as an ATi Spring refresh part. I guess ATi's .13mu design process is going as planned at this point.

*GTa <-- Posting from Copenhagen, Denmark.

 

[FishTankX]

&Iacute;f i'm not wrong, BFG10K, this statment from anand seems to contradict your notion that they don't haev 2 texture units per pipeline.

""The R300?s 8-rendering pipelines will give it a significant advantage in fill rate over anything currently available, also contributing to the R300?s performance lead over the competition.""

I believe if it didn't have 2 texture units per pipeline it would do poorly in SSSE and wouldn't be able to field it's 50% lead that it had...
But i'm also intrested in you pointing out sources. If so, this is a major disapointment. I thought 16 TMU's was a DX9 requirement!!

 

[FishTankX]

Okay, BFG10K's right. It's only 1 TMU per pipeline.

But the logic is pretty simple. That many TMU's (2 per pipeline, 8 pipes) would have an insane amount of die space (perhaps you might be looking at 140 million transitors, entirely impractical) and the memory bandwidth required to feed them (Memory bandwidth is essential at high resolutions, where the Radeon9700 should excel) just isn't there, even with 310MHZ 256 bit DDR. Besides, you wouldn't gain that much with the extra TMU's anyways, so it seems that it's more logical to just expand the pixel pipelines with better precision and make sure it can do two clocks per pass than to try and shoot for 16 TMU's in the design. (Ugh.... remember the Parhelia and it's 4 pixel pipelines with 4 TMU's each? Incredible!).

Thus, it isn't really right to bash the Radeon9700 as the bottleneck is likely memory bandwidth rather than fillrate. (remember the Geforce2 and how overclocking the core would yield less than 2% gains, regardless of the amount of speed increase?)

Thanks BFG10K for the good information. But I don't think it matters in the long run as memory bandwidth seems to be the limiting factor in the resolutions and situations you play at.

Have you ever seen a fillrate limited game?! Hah. I don't think so. At resolutions where excessive fillrate is neccecscary memory bandwidth almost always seems to be the limiting factor...

FishtankX out.

 

[BFG10K]

where ? i must be blond but can you point that out please.

Right here Adul:

? 8 pixel rendering pipelines, 1 texture unit per pipeline, can do 16 textures per pass

"The R300?s 8-rendering pipelines will give it a significant advantage in fill rate over anything currently available, also contributing to the R300?s performance lead over the competition."

Fillrate can be measured in both pixels and texels. In terms of pixel fillrate the 9700 does destroy anything out there with its 8 pipelines.

If so, this is a major disapointment. I thought 16 TMU's was a DX9 requirement!!

16 texures per pass is the requirement, not 16 TMUs. Vendors are free to implement that as they please.

Thus, it isn't really right to bash the Radeon9700 as the bottleneck is likely memory bandwidth rather than fillrate.

Despite the excellent framerates I'm still wondering about games utilising heavy multipass rendering. In those situations the Ti4600 can potentially match the R300's performance and Tom hinted that the multipass 3DMark scores were quite close between the two cards.

 

[Adul]

thanks bfg10k

 

[FishTankX]

Well, BFG10K, I would believe that they would have enough room for 2 TMU's on each pipe instead of 1 on the next refresh. Anyways, in any situation, if you had a multipass situation strenous enough to reach below 60FPS in a game, I would assume memory bandwidth would be ahuge limiting factor so I really doubt the Ti4600 could ever beat the R300 in any multipass test in high resolutions... memory bandiwdth is just too much of a limiting factor for multipass rendering, is it not?