Recent content by ^eMpTy^

Well the cases I'm talking about here is comparing specs of the same family to see which is better. Obviously comparing the HD 2900 XT and the 8800 GTS based on paper specs alone would be almost impossible. But when you're just trying to figure out which of a bunch of cards from the same...

Hmm, interesting chart. Why does it show the 7900 GTX and the X1950 XTX as having 8 vec5 pipelines? I thought the X1900 series was vec4 and the 7900s were 4way superscalar...not to mention R600 isn't vec5, it's 5way superscalar...or am I just tripping over sematics? As for compiling...

I've considered this as well, but then you run into the problem of different drivers, different hardware, different settings, different games, and all kinds of other random factors which would make the information difficult to present. Though I am very seriously considering doing precisely this...

Well my problem is I don't want to get into the hardware review business, I simply don't have time. My ideal solution would be to set up 3 different test rigs of various CPU horsepower, upgrade them infrequently, and write a program that can run game benchmarks in batches. Then I could just pop...

Excellent points. I think I'll just let it slide for now and see how things shake out over the next couple of weeks.

At this point, I'd be satisfied to just have the numbers loosely make sense. I gave up on predicting performance using specs long ago, I just need to represent R600 on my site in 'naive' terms, and have it not be complete nonsense. Right now it seems to make sense to just list the pipeline...

So, after staring at this for a while, it seems like G80 has 128 scalar shader processors which do 1 MADD and 1 MUL per clock. And then each shader processor can also do a special op every 4 clock cycles (sin, cos, log, exp, ?). R600 seems to have 64 5-way superscalar shader processors that...

Yeah, I'm beginning to question if what I'm trying to accomplish is even possible. If I have to describe things in too fine a detail to retain accuracy, then it will take longer for people to understand the specs than it would to read a full review...and that hardly makes sense. Thanks for...

Oh I completely agree...that's why I go to great pains to list every review I can find for any given card on its associated page in my database. The idea being that you can get the at-a-glance specifications to give you a ballpark figure of the card's performance...and then you can go digging...

I'm the owner/operator of GPUReview.com and I wanted to get some input from the B3D crowd on how best to represent the latest generation of video cards in my database. Up till now it's been easy, everything could be described in terms of ROPs, fragment pipelines, and texture units. There were...

So, say R600 has 64 Vec4 shader pipes (plus a scalar? *shrug*) running at 750MHz. Is that enough to topple G80? What about 96 pipes? In my head I'm thinking 64*4*750 > 128*1350...but obviously it's not that simple. At what number of pipelines does R600 go from merely being competition for...

Well I know the reason that the P4 hit 3.8GHz forever ago and the Core2 and Athlon64 are still nowhere close, is because the P4 had 22 very short pipelines stages. Smaller stages = less time per stage to execute = faster clock speed. But where is the design change at exactly? And if clock...

Just as the title says, what did nVidia do differently to suddenly hit 1.35GHz on a major portion of G80? In my limited knowledge of computer architecture, I understand that clock speed increases come from 3 things: die size shrinks, process maturity, or longer pipelines (i.e. smaller...

Well I kinda botched the thread title...but my question was just what stops DX9 cards from doing DX10 stuff... I had admittedly forgotten all about geometry shaders. The question was prompted by someone asking me the question, and I laughed and started explaining how different DX10 is how...

Can DX9 cards run DX10 with a new driver? At first this seemed like a simple question: of course they can't. But then I remembered that the card doesn't actually have to have unified shaders, it just has to have the driver. So what is stopping DX9 cards from being able to do DX10 that can't...