Huddy says "R600"

Cool, thought the ADD was MADD capable as well. How'd you get 12 flops per R580 shader though?

Don't you mean more capable

 

Is it really more efficient though?

Im no expert so I would love to here the devs views on this but I think its at least possible that while overall ALU usage is up (obviously) in a unified system, the individual ALU's are less efficient due to the lack of specialization. Wouldn't these two factors counteract each other somewhat?

 

Oh my bad. Thanks for the link.

 

Why don't we ever have numbers to go with the supposition that unified is more efficient Console devs speak up !!

 

True, but raw power isn't the only advantage of the USC.. im thinking we have to go that way regardless because of the developer flexibility it affords.

In the end I assume it will simplify GPU design aswell.

 

Well locking in a ratio isn't a valid comparison since the architecture wasn't designed to be locked in in the first place. What I meant was that devs should have a good feel for Xenos and RSX by now. That's 64 unified vs 56 specialized (48+8). I think somebody should be able to make a comparison by now. Huddy isn't exactly an objective source!

 

That - "we should only compare architectures from the same company" - argument doesn't fly. We know the number of shaders, the general capabilities of each and the clockspeed. That is more information than most people use to make a judgment on superiority. If we can get feedback on relative performance of Xenos vs RSX then we will be able to extrapolate that to the PC space. There are assumptions there as well but I'd take that over a comparison that involves crippling the architecture.

Well the argument that ATI wouldnt build R600 if Xenos didn't work is one thing (the assumption being that they could do anything about it anyway). I'm just talking about simple, run-of-the-mill performance comparisons.

Well given feedback from developers here I'm certain that these guys do a lot of focused testing and don't just build a game and then start worrying about performance. Of course these guys know how fast individual hardware components are on specific tasks.

 

Bah, guess I'll just have to wait till February

 

Im not sure how true it is, but wasn't there some kind of internal conflict in ATI over whether to make R580 unified or not? There may be other factors at play but that suggests to me that the performance advantage of unified over seperate can't have been huge (or even existent) with that transistor budget given that they settled on seperate.

I could be way off base though.... Im sure at least a few people here know the answer

 

Heck, by my understanding (no inside info) there was internal conflict over whether R4xx would be unified...

 

Inquirer rumor about a next-gen ATI card? Then it must be true.

 

Xenos is 48 unified ALU's, not 64.

So in that sense, RSX supposedly actually has more raw power (although there are so many caveats, it's almost impossible to make any comparison).

If you could draw one conclusion, it would probably be that unified has NOT gained Xenos a vast amount of efficiency, it doesn't blow away RSX by the (current?) games, despite, similar die sizes and so forth.

 

Its not Inqurier rumor, its come from asia http://www.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hardspell.com%2Fnews%2Fshowcont.asp%3Fnews_id%3D30133&langpair=zh-CN%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF8

 

Light travels faster than sound; that's why some trash tabloid authors appear bright until they open their traps (sorry couldn't resist...).

 

Ah true. But you got the gist of what I was saying.