How were the RV250's pipelines improved over the R200's?

What the hell you talking?? There weren't no enhachement, R9000 is a cut-down R8500 ...

 

The changes to the 8500 core (R200) which resulted in the 9000 (RV250) were that the RV250 had 1 vertex shader unit removed (leaving one), which results in slower vertex processing power. This was semi-offset (not really) by the 9000 having an enhanced triangle setup engine over the 8500.

The 2 TMUs/pipe from the 8500 were replaced with a more advanced single TMU/pipe which came from the 9700. The single TMU can do 6 textures/pass instead of needing the 2 TMUs/pipe the 8500 has to have to achieve 6 textures per pass.

The 9000 also got more powerful pixel shaders from the 9700 instead of the pixel shader in the 8500. (can do things like the video processing the 9700 PS can do, which the 8500 can't, as well as being speedier than the 8500 PS)

Also the 9000 got the memory bus from the 9700 not the 8500.

All of that lowered the transistor count significantly, and hence the 9000 is a much cheaper chip than the 8500 to produce, while trading for some performance loss in some cases and maintaining performance in other cases (PS performance in particular here).

Edit: Oh yea, the 9000 aside from the pipeline changes also had a 2nd ramdac integrated into the chip, removing the need for an external ramdac for support for 2 vga monitors, which caused some confusion with some 3rd party 8500 boards. (and also helping reduce board costs for the 9000)

 

I don't know of any specific changes to the VS in the 9000 other than that it only has one, and that the 9000 got an "enhanced triangle setup engine" to go with it.

That doesn't mean there isn't something else going on under the hood that made the single 9000 unit perhaps more efficient or capable over the individual units from the 8500(9100)... but over all VS performance is better on the dual 8500(9100) VS than on the 9000 VS.

 

MuFu.

 

The simple answer is that the RV250 is not more efficient than R200.

The entire 8500/9000 situation is about to take a hilarious and farcical turn anyway:

http://www.tech-report.com/onearticle.x/4455

 

To "satisfy" market demand? I doubt it. Seems more like it's to attempt to generate market demand...it's not like 8500's aren't available.

They could at least do what nVidia does and increase the clock speed.

 

What's so bad about them reselling the 9100s? It makes me feel good to know that after all this time I got an "upgrade for free". Until this morning I had a Radeon 8500, but now I have a Radeon 9100!

 

Can it be that they r introducing R9000 Pro with 2 vertex shaders and calling it 9100?

I mean it would make it comparable to 8500 right? but it should perform better than 8500 owing to more optimized hardware and at less number of transistors. I am stating that cause the 2nd vertex shader in ti series did not add more than 10 million transistors if this is true it should still be cheaper to produce than 8500 (60 million transistors) and perform better than 8500 .

Anyway I heard that 9100 was actually RV280 the 8x agp refresh part of RV250 which seems more likely to me than renaming 8500 to 9100. (This is my basis for the speculation that it might also add a 2nd VS unit)
Just my 2 cents.

 

I doubt ATi would go through all the trouble of creating a new RV250 spin with only an extra VS. Likely they're just trying to clear out 8500 stock at maximal prices.

I'm looking for a budget card--who knows the best deal on a 64MB 8500/LE? Best I could find was $72 for a 250/230 card at NewEgg. I'm not sure if it's worth it, considering I can get a Tyan 275/275 9000 Pro for $87 @ TheNerds.net, which includes a DVI adapter and WinDVD.

 

A 275/275 9000 is probably faster than a 250/230 8500... clock for clock the 8500 is faster, but I'm not sure it's that much faster.

 

It depends on what you're going to benchmark. I can set up situations were either card wins hands down, but generally, a 8k5 LE is a bit more speedy than even a R9000pro @275MHz.

[edit]

Code:

                                                R9000                     R8500LE            
Environment Bump Mapping	127.8 fps                106.5 fps
DOT3 Bump Mapping                 72.8 fps                 81.3 fps
Vertex Shader	                        58.3 fps                 80.4 fps 
Pixel Shader	                         102.0 fps                 93.0 fps
Advanced Pixel Shader	          69.2 fps                  73.5 fps
Point Sprites	                          16.3 MSprites/s       25.9 MSprites/s

At the same core-freq, pipelines of the R9000 have been improved, esp. short and easy shaders (including PS-EMBM), i.e. the most likely first-to-be-used in actual games, perform better on an R9000 (quite likely due to an increased/optimized texture cache), while in situations with longer shaders the R8k5 can keep it's edge.