Ati on Xenos

This brings a tear to my eye...
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I just came back from a trade show and talked to a guy from Sapphire. He says the new series of cards from ATI will come in September (X900?). Rumours say the new ATI cards are faster than the G70. And G70 is very similar to the RSX. So, I'm wondering if this is good news for XBox 360? Maybe Xenos is equal to or better than RSX.

Then again, I don't think X900 and Xenos are very similar so forget everything I just said :D
 
I think Xenos has a fair chance of matching or beating the RSX. Everyone overreacted when Sony rolled out their theoretical numbers at E3. It's going to be a while before we know the truth, but it would be a real coup if MS turned out to have better graphics than Sony again.
 
Deepak said:
Common sense says that later hardware is more poweful than an earlier one.

that might be true if they were coming out a year or more later but, not much changes in 6 months
 
Deepak said:
Common sense says that later hardware is more poweful than an earlier one.

Well there is only a 6 month time diffrence or so . SO really it can come down to the actual design .

Looking at video cards you would have thought the geforce fx 5800ultra was better than the 9700pro and it came out almost 6 months later but the oppisite was true
 
I can well believe Xenos could have more oomph than RSX, or vice versa. Might well be a "A is better at x, but B is better at y" scenario - it normally is. Either way I expect both to be so close that any 'better' is marginal.

I think the key difference will be AA. Xenos handles this nicely (in theory). We don't know how RSX handles it. Buth remember that these aren't standalone parts but part of a system. Even if RSX minces Xenos on paper or vice versa, when limited by the other components of the system it might struggle to keep up with it's competitors.
 
jvd said:
Looking at video cards you would have thought the geforce fx 5800ultra was better than the 9700pro and it came out almost 6 months later but the oppisite was true

And more recently, who'd have thunk it'd take ATi 6 months to get out a card that barely outperforms the 6800 Ultra, and only in some cases? In really crappy quantities to boot? ;)
 
Shifty Geezer said:
I can well believe Xenos could have more oomph than RSX, or vice versa. Might well be a "A is better at x, but B is better at y" scenario - it normally is. Either way I expect both to be so close that any 'better' is marginal. ...

I think this is a key point that some overlook.

The Xenos is running on a DirectX platform (which since the x800 series ATI has sort of held the DirectX crown). The RSX is running on an OpenGL platform, which it has dominated for ages. It is really hard to compare -- Doom 3 ran better on Nvidia cards by a decent amount and HL2 (I think) ran better on ATI cards by a decent amount. Both chips are running with their strengths, which is good for us. Both chips will be probably more optimized to work with their strengths than previous generations (even RSX, there is obviously optimizations going on, or it would have been taped out a while ago). So even if RSX is based off a G70 I think it's safe to say it'll perform better clock for clock because of it not having to deal with DirectX and OpenGL and allowing for some optimizations -- same for Xenos (although it is nothing like the R520). The versions of DirectX and OpenGL being used for each console is also probably highly optimized for the platform, so they'll be able to squeeze even more performance out of them than they could ever dream to on the PC front. There are a lot of things they can do on a closed platform that are impossible on an open platform like the PC.

As to which will be better overall? It's impossible to say really -- we don't have any real information, we need to wait until there is lots of games out (probably 2nd+ generation) to really tell -- at that point it might be negligable at best.
 
Considering how little difference there was between the 3 current consoles graphics in "joe average users" eyes i would make a wild bet and say RSX or ATI doesn't matter.
 
Considering the amount of time and effort Ati has put behind the R500 (compared to the fact that Nvidia took-up the RSX project recently), I would be surprised if it wasn't a little ahead of RSX many respects. Ati took a gamble early on and we'll see how it pays off.
 
Luminescent said:
Considering the amount of time and effort Ati has put behind the R500 (compared to the fact that Nvidia took-up the RSX project recently)

They've had plenty of time to work on RSX. A lot of the technology going into it was being worked on before Sony and NVidia came together also.

R500 has a lot more "new things" going on it for ATi, even more than the same chip would have had for NVidia (NVidia was already at SM3.0, for example). So that takes time. Another factor that might be worth consideration is that in terms of graphics products, NVidia has pretty much been able to focus almost entirely on its next-gen technology for the last while, asides from the "usuals". They've had no significant release since the summer of 04, versus late 04 for ATi. ATi has been working on a lot more stuff besides - Xenos, Revolution's GPU, AND their next gen GPU. That may or may not become evident in their respective designs, I guess we'll see.
 
Edge said:
That's a huge chunk of your transistors doing no work each cycle.

What on earth are you talking about? The design of the arrays is all of the ALU's are operational all of the time, something that is not the case with current processors.
 
Jaws said:
So I can't see the 48 ALU clusters (48 Vec4 + 48 Scalar) ALL working on fragments or vertices per cycle. Unless I've missed something, 32 ALUs, peak, would work on fragments and 16 ALUs on vertices and vice versa...

Why not? There will be occasions where it will be working soley on pixels, occasions where it'll be working on both, and occasions where it'll only be working on vertices (easy example of the last one is a Z only render pass - all 48 ALU's will be calculating the geometry in order to populate the Z buffer).
 
Titanio said:
R500 has a lot more "new things" going on it for ATi

The real question is "why" does it have a lot of new things. If they didn't percieve a fundamental issue with the current pipeline then why make as radical a switch as they have?
 
Sounds to me he does not know what he is talking about. The biggest bunch of nonsense have ever heard about any chip, especially on a unified shader architecture, which means each shader has one execution unit not doing work each cycle to either accomodate a pixel or vertex operation, and not both.

I think what you're describing is the traditional nonunified shader approach where things do sit idle. :LOL: ;)
 
DaveBaumann said:
The real question is "why" does it have a lot of new things. If they didn't percieve a fundamental issue with the current pipeline then why make as radical a switch as they have?
What percentage of current GPU's is sitting around idle on average at the moment then?

nVidia have claimed they've looked at unified shaders but the lack in effeciency compared to customised shaders they felt meant it couldn't outperform a conventional architecture. I find that hard to swallow unless unifed shaders are about x% slower than customised shaders where x% is the percentage that shaders are idle on conventional GPUs.

I presume your Xenos article will hit on this.
 
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