Jawed said:
No, it's simply the count of texturing units that's holding R520 back.
Yeah, that's what I meant by "unnecessary," in a roundabout way. ATI spent all its extra transistors on shaders, whereas NV increased both shaders and texture units.
Oh, and the lack of double-rate Z - which will plague R580 too.
Yep. Still can't figure why they'd only apply this to RV530 (and maybe RV560), yet leave it out of R580--unless you're right in that future shadow algos won't lean on Z ops as much.
I have my doubts - texturing bandwidth is simply going to strangle a card with a theoretical texture fillrate of 16800 or 22400. G71's memory will be no faster than GTX-512's.
Of course, but that doesn't stop G70 from competing very well against R520 with equal bandwidth. Bandwidth might become the predominant bottleneck (if it isn't already), but it seems that current games that still favor G70's extra texturing units will continue to show that in G71 benchmarks. My seat-of-the-pants wild guesstimate may be wrong, though, and you may be right in thinking that R5x0's ostensibly more efficient memory controller will give it an advantage as we run against RAM speed constraints. Or maybe bandwidth is already a huge bottleneck and (thanks to that) G71's rumored extra pipes will prove useful only with shading, not texturing. But why, then, move up to 24 ROPs as well? For that matter, why does the 7800GT prove faster than the X1800XL in most cases?
I'm deliberately excluding AA, as I'm sure most reviews will show both non- and AA benchmarks, so NV may still show a conspicuous lead w/o AA and merely remain competitive with AA (losing by 10% doesn't catch the eye as much as winning by 30%).
Why compare those when X1600XT is priced against a 256MB 6600GT? Shouldn't you be asking how an 8-pipe 7600 is going to compare with X1600XT?
Sorry, just workin' with what we've been given.
It's just that the GS is so available and only $20 more than either the X1600XT or 6600GT (both also sporting 256MB 500+MHz RAM). At this price point, an extra 10% for
much higher framerates returns seems eminently wiser. You're right about RV530's intended 128-bit competition, but it's hard to ignore the 6800GS's ubiquity. (We'll see what happens to NV's profit margins--surely AIBs aren't paying NV $20 more per GPU and then eating into their profits with the more complex PCB.)
