Did ATI hold back on R520 to make room for R580?

Well now it's looking like the x1900s might be equipped with 1.1ns memory.

 

Well they're will always be overclocked versions right

 

I also believe that ATI would want to contain costs and use 1.2ns memory if this part is to ship in volume and without immediate competion from G71 (and Orton did indeed claim that they are expecting OEM wins for R580). Besides, they will very likely need to keep some powder dry for NVDA's launch, when those cherry-picked R580 cores can ship with 900MHz modules. I don't see how else they will respond if the 7900GTX manages to clock to 700MHz+ as speculated.

 

Now I am not sure about IQ. Or why they only test with 8xAF..

What really stands out to me is how seemingly superior G70 is to the R520. ATi gets simply hammered in all the basic tests and Nvidia pretty much holds their own with 4XAA+8xAF. The GTX512 even bests a seriously over clocked R520.

Now I know there are some questions about quality and texture filtering shortcuts that Nvidia is doing, but man what raw power. I am beginning to wonder if ATi is going to even be competitive with the R580 once the G71 is released.

I am still excited about my X1800XT that arrives tomorrow. It will run my native resolution of 1280x720 with 4xAA+16XAF at really high FPS. Which is all I really need.

It does seem that ATi has lost the beat with where they were with the 9700. ATi seems to have abandoned what made them strong and Nvidia has embraced it. Not surprisingly the results show the error of that reasoning.

 

Erm. Is there a non OC-ed version of HIS X1800XT ? (just a silly question, I might have ordered this one, not even knowing it is OC-ed ...)

However, look at this particular test: FEAR

Without Soft Shadows, HIS X1800XT OC is fastr than the 512 GTX, what is strange because the Asus X1800 XT Top with similar clocks is a lot slower. Is that and editor's error, or such scenarios could really happen ?

Look at the Soft Shadows enabled, even the standard GTX is faster than a OC-ed X1800 XT. PCF soft shadows ?

 

I feel this way, too, only NV30 seemed a bit too backward-looking (except for double Z), while R520 seems too forward-looking. Seems like NV "integrating" the texturing unit with the pixel shaders is a bit like "unified" pixel shading, allowing for greater flexibility, whereas ATI's decoupled texture units seem unnecessary and perhaps even a limiting factor with current games. R520 & co. seem like a stepping stone to SM4, while G70 & co. seem firmly rooted in SM3.

Given the leaked R580 benches, both from ATI and independent sites, a G71 @ 700MHz--be it 24 or 32 pipes--seems like it'll just walk all over it in most current benchmarks.

If G71 is priced sky-high and ATI shows lower prices across the board (thanks to their more efficient use of their various bits and pieces), tho, then I'll certainly understand their design goals. It's just that they're harder to fathom when you look at, say, X1600TX vs. 6800GS at current prices.

 

I was thinking more along the lines of how they structure their pipelines.

R300 was wide and shallow. Everyone saw that this was indeed better than narrow and deep which Nvidia was doing at the time.

Now Ati has seemingly completely abandoned that, and gone with narrow and deep Vs Nvidia who has embraced wide and shallow.

How can you be sitting there at Ati and knowing your won history actually do this and not realize how dumb it is? ATi is abandoning Pixel Fill rate way to soon in favor of Shader fill rate. What’s worse their Shaders which are supposed to be great totally get hammered by the G70's

This looks to only get worse with the R580 and G71.

Ati needs to get back to kicking some raw power but and not "clever design" themselves out of competition.

 

Behind the scenes with ATI - Eric Demers interview

*edit* also posted here
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?p=680064#post680064

 

That’s nice, but they seem to be wrong.

It looks to me like its still very much about "pipelines and Z per clock". If you are going to say all that fancy stuff about "Shader throughput" then maybe your product should actually deliver it.

They are even getting beaten handily in Source. Which is supposed to be their ace in the hole. Or at least I thought it was.

 

are you sure pixel fillrate is the limitation, not memory bandwidth?

 

Dont they have more memory Bandwidth than Nvidia now? And a better Memory Controler.

 

With ATi possibly using 1.1ns GDDR3 ram instead of the 1.2ns, they may be holding back the R580 instead, and waiting for nVidia's release to bump up the core & memory.

 

Faster than the 7800GTX 256mb, slower than the 512mb GTX

X1800XL =500
7800GT =500
7800 GTX=600
X1800XT=750
7800 GTX 512mb=850

I expect ATI thinks just increasing the clock speed will yeild a big enough increase in multitexturing fill rate (they lead in pure fill rate)

 

the 18 or 19? there are no benchmarks out with the correct drivers yet..

 

No the GTX 512 has 17.2% more memory bandwidth than the x1900xt - the x1900xt actually has less bandwith than the x1800xt.

 

That seems reasonably true. And for most of its life R300 was stymied by a complete lack of decent SM2 games, so NV30 was happily competitive in DX8 games.

Now it looks like R520 is in the same position, with a reliance upon games that use per pixel dynamic branching and lots of ALU operations.

No, it's simply the count of texturing units that's holding R520 back. Oh, and the lack of double-rate Z - which will plague R580 too.

Shadowmapping (as opposed to stencil shadow volumes) will favour R580 as the lack of double-rate Z will no longer be such a dominant factor in games.

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 there's always the possibility that G71 has a far superior memory architecture (like R520 over R420) - but I doubt it.

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?

Jawed

 

Methinks a 1700 would spoil any 7600 paper launch..
Looks like G70 and G71 took up so much time that the low and mid-end will be all r5x0

 

You have something to share with the group about X1700 launch date? Please do! I haven't heard anything that would lead me to expect there is a chance we'd see it before 7600.

 

I'm almost sure RV350 has double z capability, are you sure R580 and R520 don't?

 

ATI architectures have double-rate Z for AA, but RV530 is the only one with double-rate Z for non-AA (and quad-rate Z for AA).

This seems to be the long-standing reason for ATI cards' disadvantage in D3 and Chronicles of Riddick, both of which rely upon non-AA Z fill-rate for stencil shadow volumes.

We can't be sure about R580, yet, because it's not quite released. But the "16-1-3-1" spec looks ominous in comparison with RV530's "4-1-3-2".

Jawed