Probably from Salland Automatiseringen. They took the Sapphire HD2900XT of their site though after some phonecalls from AMD and Sapphire. But they said that all people who pre-ordered the HD2900XT will not have to worry. All pre-orders will remain in their computers and they had some more good news, but they couldn't tell people about it yet (NDA).

HL2 EP2 coupon?

I don't claim that it is a rosy picture for AMD. No doubt, it would have helped their margins tremendously to launch earlier if they could have done it at a reasonable level of performance/reliability/availability. However, just because they can't quite match the 8800 GTX after six months doesn't mean everything is a failure. If the 512MB XT can be equal to or outperform a 640MB GTS, probably have an edge in DX10 games, and sell for a similar price point (noting that it does have 128MB RAM less in comparison, which would reduce RAM cost in comparison), then that is better than nothing.

Considering that ALUs don't consume much of the die anyway, the picture's even more puzzling. So, ahem, D3D10 "done right" :lol: may well cost 400M transistors :lol: :lol:

There was a time when R600 was thought to be 500/550M transistors (at least by me...) so the whole damn thing is just a mystery.

I do expect lots of RAM - but I've been saying that for years practically and, well, RAM doesn't take that much space...

Jawed

Space, no - but it can drive the transistor count up pretty hard.

Salland, the dutch e-tailer showing up yesterday.

Thanks! I'm glad I'm not the only one slightly baffled by some of this.

ERK

Hrm. If these benchmarks are true, AMD would be wise to release a REALLY uber midrange card. They'll lose the top-end but will get a good reputation in the section that really counts.

From the benchmarks shown so far, isn't the 512MB XT as fast or faster than the 640MB 8800 GTS, and don't most people believe that the XT will be stronger in DX10 games? From a positioning standpoint, I don't think that the stock 640MB GTS would be in a very good position against the XT, since it has in some cases lower performance and it also has higher RAM costs with extra 128MB RAM on board. Of course, it's nice to have six months with no competition in that segment, but clearly something needs to happen now for the GTS, be it lower prices/reduced margins, and/or performance improvement (pushing clock speeds higher, etc).

On a side note, releasing an 8800 Ultra won't do anything to give the 640MB 8800 GTS more favorable footing against the XT. The only way to do that would be through performance and/or price improvements for the 640MB 8800 GTS (which is not hard to imagine, given that prices are already starting to come down to below $400, and given that higher clocked 640MB GTS in some cases comes very close to the performance of a stock GTX).

It's doom and gloom before the second can make a move in their defence? What I see is a monkey zoo having the last laugh before their was ever a first. Let's dare not qustion the evidence and instead danm it law? :roll:

So, next week, are we expecting to hear about the next version of 3DMk? Will there be any further reason to hold it back?

Jawed

Who are you directing this unintelligible statement at? Are you drunk man? :D

I could use a beer actully.:shock:

R650:wink: :lol:

You know what, now I'm really puzzled as to why AMD held back the launch date of the 512MB XT model. Clearly, there must have been something holding them back other than "family launch". What happened, Hector go on a long vacation or something? :D

That chip is far from being DX10 complaint (no integer support for example..) and also it does not carry the weight of compression techniques being used on modern GPUs that does not have an embedded frame buffer, so you can't just compare them on that basis.
Moreover we still know nothing about R600 architecture..and I can't wait to find out more about it!

You're going to need (almost) the whole memory controller, all of the ROPs including their requirements for DX10 (FP-Texture filtering, FP-Alpha-Blending, Compression etc.), INT-functions, massive amount of Registers (if you don't want to cripple your chip - DX10 requires 4.096 of them at any one time, though not necessarily all of them in hardware), and the whole lot of things i just plainly forgot.


Just take a look at the TC of the smaller G8x-Chips: You'll get 2 Shader-Quads with DX10 for the transistor-price of about 6 Quads DX9-Style. :)

Sound Card,

While I think it's never a good idea to take one source as gospel, Dailythech has shown to be fairly reliable in the past with their pre-release information. Since you are skeptical (which is not a bad thing by any measure), what do you suggest happed here?

1) They just made up the numbers. To me that seems unlikely - they are not the kind of site that would trade a short-term hits spike for a long term credibility gap.
2) They did the test to the best of their ability but something was wrong: Card, drivers, system in general, etc. This would be just reporting and if the numbers are off, oh well - they told us what they saw. Still, it would be in their best interests to make sure that doesn't happen because their credibility will be damaged.
3) The numbers are accurate.
4) Alternative explanation.

One does have to wonder what it means for Xenos's actual performance if these benchmarks are real. Afterall it should be a no brainer that the XT is A LOT faster than Xenos.

Well one thing which in my eyes is lowering their reliability is the claim that XTX would be released at the same time as XT, while someone who actually attented the tech day at Tunis said that there won't be XTX, also their clocks for the XT are wrong.
And I still wonder how changing CPU from QX6700 to QX6800 suddenly doubled their Oblivion scores :D

Changing the setting and the area where you benchmark in Oblivion can have huge effect on your scores.

Agreed but what else did you expect given the current info? All we have is a history of delays and broken promises and now underwhelming performance. What other reaction should a rational person have? Yes, DT's numbers are far below expectations given the technical specs but it's all we have. If you have some good reason for people to be optimistic I'd love to hear it.

Maybe the fact that it might actually ship on May 2nd, if VR-Zone is actually correct in the launch date being pushed forward? Forcing to the reseller to push out the "official" ship date to well beyond the actual launch date could be just to obscure when the retailer will actually be allowed to ship said card since it wasn't supposed to be even available for pre-order.

A rather light slap on the wrist IMO for breaking NDA on ship/release date.

I'm still waiting for high IQ comparisons, and "real" reviews before declaring R600 a total disappointment.

People also seem to think that one bad product immediately puts a company out of business. I guess few remember when ATI was a top Video Card maker pre-1997 with their 2D cards. Failed misearably with virtually all their 3D cards until R300, and yet still managed to survive.

And apparently Matrox is still finding a way to survive by focusing on their niche market.

It's possible that ATI will cease to be a serious contender for the high end crown year to year as they have been since the R300, yet that will hardly doom the company to oblivion. After all, AMD mainly purchased ATI for their MB chipsets and integrated graphics. Worst case is that ATI will be relegated to the mid-range, low-end, integrated chipset, MB chipsets and stream computing and completely abandon the high end.

However, I currently don't see any indications that AMD/ATI will abandon the high end completely.

That said, if Nvidia will get off their arses and make a solid Vista 64 driver, I may still be getting an 8800 GTX if R600's features don't sufficiently impress me.

Regards,
SB

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2969
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2974

You be the judge.

Jawed

Jawed, I swear I am not trying to be difficult, but what exactly am I looking for?