AMD: R9xx Speculation

I was sitting this round out until then. £132 for a 6850? That's less than the 5770 at launch.

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/244431

 

So...why are they releasing drivers on a Friday? Not being picky however, from the review MLAA won't be released until December 2010. So I have to wonder what's so special about the drivers tomorrow instead of mid week? I understand that they want to correlate the release of the drivers with the release of the 6870/6850. But I would like to know if there is more to it than that?

 

If these performance and power consumption numbers extrapolate to Cayman then it could be a beast. Antilles would just be embarrassing for all involved. I'm hoping somebody does a full blown review of all cards with current drivers and a common platform so we see the actual improvements. HardOcp does but they muck it up with their subjective playable settings nonsense.

 

I think Guru3D's results are useless.

 

They usually do some "Apples to Apples" benches, though usually it's just 2-3 cards compared.

Hopefully Anandtech will as well, since they're one of the biggest.

 

Anandtech is nearly as bad at reviewing with up to date drivers.. iirc their "GPU Database" thing still uses the ATI 10.3 drivers, obviously with a new product launch they would use the accompanied drivers however bets are they'll just roll in the comparison numbers using 7 month old drivers.

 

Something like the 2008 Froblins demo perhaps
Nah, ATI doesn't want people to actually use tessellation

 

How is a proprietary implementation that isn't compatible with DirectX a valid response to that question?

 

DX11 implementation is a superset of the earlier ATI implementation by my understanding.

 

There is no subset of DX11 tessellation. Either you support it or you don't. In any case that's not the issue. Instead of complaining about nVidias use of tessellation they should be out getting devs to show us how it should be done. AvP and Dirt2 didn't.

 

And what about the Sandy Bridge preview using year old 5450 drivers?

I know we'd love it if they retested every time, but it's a horrible task and nobody can be expected to do it tbh.

edit - on benchmarks, I have a feeling Hexus is going to give two big thumbs up to the 6850 soon. Not sure about the 6870 yet but hopefully hexus will have their reviews up before too long.

 

http://developer.amd.com/gpu_assets/Real-Time_Tessellation_on_GPU.pdf

 

So what does everyone think ATI did to improve Crossfire scaling? Could it be driver enhancements that they're intentionally disabling for older cards, or is there something in the hardware?

Why? What makes you think NVidia should have significant improvements in the few months since the 460 was launched?

 

They don't have to disable the enhancements for the older cards if the sites reviewing don't use newer drivers on the older products.

 

So implementing the tech in hardware, writing sample code, programming guides, tech demos, doing industry expo presentations & direct devrel for several hardware generations aren't enough?

Somehow its not obvious to devs that it is retarded to make the machine do a whole lot more work than is necessary to provide the effect that they want?
Its not actually hard to understand that the adaptive modes are there for a good reason, that they should be used as much as possible & that you shouldn't overdo the tessellation factor.

 

Guru3D's results usually are.

 

But of course there are subsets, lots of possible ones.
Yes, you either FULLY support DX11 spec or not. But you can have some tessellation feature in DX10.1 that are compatible with DX11, you just can't call them DX11.

 

ROFL not even close.
Newegg prices are up:
Cheapest HD6850 $179
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814131374

Cheapest HD6870 $239
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125347

 

$179 and $239 it is. Nice job AMD. Now we know why they resisted lowering prices for the 5850 & 5870 to meet the gtx460 the last few months. They had something up their sleeves.