[3dcgi]

Originally Posted by SugarCoat

have any proof of that? As far as i understand the card will simply be treated as if it has dedicated pixel and vertex by the program, however the card on the hardware level also needs to designate a number to control what percent of the pipes are doing work for pixel/vertex shaders. Point being the user isnt going to notice a damn bit of difference, but its going to make for a complex job in creation of the core itself. Counter productive in these times if you will.

Without WGF2.0 having unified shaders is going to be a completely worthless and cosmetic feature otherwise both companies would of embraced it long before. nVidia has fought it more then anyone saying programmable is more efficient. Hopefully you agree. If not explain.

Xenos will be the proof as Xbox 360 is based off of DX9, not DX10, WGF2.0 or whatever Microsoft chooses to call it at the moment. Even with DX10 the program doesn't need to know if the hardware is unified or not. There is no need for the hardware to designate a percentage of ALUs as being for vertex or pixel processing. The point of unifiying the hardware is to avoid these designations. See Dave's article here at Beyond3D for more details.

The reason a unified architecture hasn't been done before can probably be explained by many reasons. First and foremost it's complicated to implement. Second as Nvidia says there may be advantages to customing vertex ALUs vs. pixel ALUs.

[SugarCoat]

Originally Posted by 3dcgi

Xenos will be the proof as Xbox 360 is based off of DX9, not DX10, WGF2.0 or whatever Microsoft chooses to call it at the moment. Even with DX10 the program doesn't need to know if the hardware is unified or not. There is no need for the hardware to designate a percentage of ALUs as being for vertex or pixel processing. The point of unifiying the hardware is to avoid these designations. See Dave's article here at Beyond3D for more details.

The reason a unified architecture hasn't been done before can probably be explained by many reasons. First and foremost it's complicated to implement. Second as Nvidia says there may be advantages to customing vertex ALUs vs. pixel ALUs.

Actually the Xbox360 is going to be using a totally custom form of Windows Vista and a completely custom form of DirectX. You'd be making a mistake comparing DirectX 9 for computers to it. I only say this because you seem to be trying to make the connection that the Xbox360 is going to be running something very similiar to a computer. This is false. Using them in the same sentence or paragraph should not be done.

Xbox360 and especially Xenos....alot different then computer parts. And currently, no one knows how Unified Shaders will react, since the Xenos will be the first core to use them, and its not even a good reprisentation in comparison to a computer graphics processing core.

[Arty]

Originally Posted by neliz

but then again, with vr-zone claiming a 3% yield and he's claiming something between 5% and 10%.. I wonder which of the two bad's I have to choose.

Neither.

[Bob]

Well, I guess I was assuming that the derivatives used for texturing were linearly-interpolated across the triangle, and doing quad-based derivative calculation would be reserved for when one needs derivatives of other things calculated within the pixel shader.

The problem with that method is that it doesn't work too well for dependent texture reads (including just tweaking texture coordinates in the shader).

However, if you don't have fragment programs capabilities, you can do away with dependent texture reads, and thus can compute derivatives for texturing analytically. I think 3DLabs had taken that route in the past.

But the texture cache in question has to be so ridiculously tiny for this to make any difference that I doubt this added texture cache would be significant

That depends entirely on the rasterization order and the orientation of the shared edge. Just imagine you have a screen covering quad, split into two triangles. Unless you have an unreasonably large cache (on the order of several MBs), or if you rasterize the diagonal first, the diagonal will get cache misses twice. It's not too hard to find tons of cases where you get two misses, for small caches or different rasterization orders.

As before, tiny triangles are likely limited upstream of the fragment program, so packing them up for fragment processing will not gain you much (if anything).

[Bob]

The division (1/w) would be performed once per sample and reused for all attribute computation.

Why do you think this is not already the case? With fragment programs, the driver can freely do the division once, and then store the result for subsequent interpolations. Besides, you now need to store 4 things: attribute values at each vertex, and the 1/z computation. If you have a reciprocal unit that's otherwise already idle most of the time, might as well save the storage space (so that you can run more threads) and recompute 1/z when needed.

[Chalnoth]

Originally Posted by 3dcgi

Xenos will be the proof as Xbox 360 is based off of DX9, not DX10, WGF2.0 or whatever Microsoft chooses to call it at the moment.

No, the Xenos is much closer to WGF 2.0 than it is to DX9. It falls short of the proposed WGF 2.0 specs in some places (geometry), and surpasses it in others (MEMEXPORT).

[BrynS]

Gibbo (IIRC, Sales Manager at OcUK) posted some R520 details from a recent meeting with ATI in the OcUK Forums today:

Full post here

...R520 which will be released in Platinum 512MB (9000 on 3D Mark 2005) available end of September but severe allocation issues, the willy waving product as ATI put it, but not easily available. Plus 512MB means a £450+ price area ish, I have pleaded with ATI to release a 256MB version so I hope they listen, but due to yield rates they may stick to 512MB for ultimate high-end as such. Same as G70, 24 pipelines, approx 520MHz core and 1.4GHz memory...

Some of it doesn't seem to gel with the current concensus here, but at this point everything seems up in the air.

Cheers,

BrynS

[trinibwoy]

Sounds pretty close to what that sherman guy is saying. 24 pipes at 500Mhz.

[_xxx_]

Originally Posted by BrynS

Gibbo (IIRC, Sales Manager at OcUK) posted some R520 details from a recent meeting with ATI in the OcUK Forums today:

Full post here

If that should turn out being true:

[Dave Baumann]

I know which bin I would put that one in.

[nutball]

Wasn't he the "G70 is 32 pipes" chap? Or was that another one at OcUK?

[Druga Runda]

well overall not much to be expected

[Geo]

That's the first person to explicitly claim the 32/24 pipe rumor from an ATI source. Hmph.

[trinibwoy]

Originally Posted by nutball

Wasn't he the "G70 is 32 pipes" chap? Or was that another one at OcUK?

Nah I think he was the 22K in 3dmark05 guy

Druga, your pic isn't working.

[trinibwoy]

Originally Posted by geo

That's the first person to explicitly claim the 32/24 pipe rumor from an ATI source. Hmph.

Well geo, you did predict that stuff would start leaking about now

[Dave Baumann]

Given the board vendors don't know 'ought yet...

[Hellbinder]

If they are indeed launching a product in 30 days the board vendors had better know a lot more than 'ought' by now.

[Hellbinder]

btw.. 24 "pipelines" at 520mhz seems like a complete waste of time for 90nm technology.

[trinibwoy]

Originally Posted by DaveBaumann

Given the board vendors don't know 'ought yet...

How long does it take from knowing more than 'ought to getting products on shelves?

[IbaneZ]

Sounds like this Gibbo guy wants to boost the 7800 GTX sales.
Or he actually knows something. Who to believe? A Sales manager or Wavey?

[SugarCoat]

Originally Posted by Hellbinder

btw.. 24 "pipelines" at 520mhz seems like a complete waste of time for 90nm technology.

not unless there were severe leakage and heat issues. However i still think its bogus. First person that gets the actual new name of the card series, gets credit in my book. Publicity wise nothing new is known fact now compared to 6 months ago.

Does it strike anyone else odd hes suggesting ATI contracted GDDR3 700 for all cards?

I was initially hoping for a 500mhz clock but a massively improved work per clock over the current R400 series. So i cant say i'd be shocked but...

One things for certain, every base has been covered one way or another...which sucks. So much confusion.

[neliz]

Gibbo was the first to "have" the 7800gtx.
He said they would be available on launch day and was taking pre-orders for them.
I think He also claimed the r520 could not touch the g70's 9000 3dmarks.. oh well.. at least it's the same guy from the g70 pre-release havok...

[Arun]

Originally Posted by IbaneZ

Or he actually knows something. Who to believe? A Sales manager or Wavey?

If you're still sometimes asking yourself such strange questions, I pity you
All of these rumors make no sense. It's just as laughable as the 300-350M transistor count rumors. It's not because NVIDIA does something one way ATI has to do it the same way, and history certainly proves that in fact, most of the time, they do it differently. Sometimes it doesn't work out for either company, but - amazingly enough - it does work most of the time.
As for the "catastrophic yields, too little too late performance" rumors - think for half a second about what the most logical source for this is. Who has direct interest in making sure their CURRENT parts sell, and who has direct interest in making ATI look like a loser for this so-called "generation", even though it has hardly begun?
They ain't stupid, and they know well enough that they can use their past failures to make "worst case" scenarios seem possible - but for the competition, this time around.
The most ironic part is that some apparently knowledgable information (NV = AMD, ATI = Intel, this generation, *architecture*-wise) would imo be suspicious from this point of view too, because this is what NVIDIA tried to do last-minute with the NV30. But I would still give credence to this theory since ATI seems to have done a fair bit of licensing & research in that direction.
On the other hand, NV would benefit from making ATI seem desesperate, even if they really aren't.

Uttar

[Chalnoth]

Come on, Uttar, you know as well as I do that there are more than enough people out their making up rumors already, without resorting to conspiracy theories about them being subversive in some way.

[Arty]

Originally Posted by trinibwoy

Sounds pretty close to what that sherman guy is saying. 24 pipes at 500Mhz.

sherman @ R3D = Gibbo @ O-UK ?