I dont mean to spread fud..

How do we know they won't?

 

Yes, the point is, we don't know.

 

Dude that is absolute total FUD.

I mean come on people...

The X800 has more paralellism in their Pipeline than even the Nv40.. It has many times more instruction processing than any version of the R300. Sure it may be *based* on the R300 but come on. Its like you are intentionally ignoring the Architcture and processing in each Quad, ignoring the improved Vertex shaders, ignoring the increased pipelines etc etc...

 

I personally think we should wait for the drivers to come out that include these optimisations and hopefully they aren't IQ dropping or application/shader/texture/mesh specific optimisations. If the speed increases don't come out in few drivers then we should get up them for their pre-sales marketing.

 

Here is one r97p owner that you just got a little bit happier! Now I can hopefully stand to stay with it until i can raise enough money for x800...
Btw, would you care to be more specific in what do you consider "longer" shader? If you could mention any current or known future game or benchmark that would have them? Finally about r97p, is Ati aware of Colourless' multipass Ruby demo wrapper for r300 and how do you think these driver updates will benefit it? Would that be good example of the "longer" shaders?

And yes, making lots of effort to optimize the memory controller of x800 seems to make sense since a lot of games are so cpu limited that you only start to see difference in speed between competitors - and even your own previous generator cards - and your current lineup when hitting the AA to the max.

Ati's driver department has come a long way since the introduction of Catalyst brand. Keep it up! 8)

 

Does anybody find ati's version numbering a bit weird? Traditionally, a beta would be made and released before the Release Candidate. But now, we find that the 4.5 betas are actually newer than the 4.5 RCs that were sent to microsoft for WHQL.

 

How did you measure this "parallelism"?

 

Well, for <10 instruction shaders, unless they are badly written, the compilers we have can probably do a good job. For longer shaders, say >20, there's a good chance that the new compilers will do more to advance things, since there is more to do. Of course, some shaders will benefit more than others (a serial dependancy stream cannot be optimized very much, for example).

Yes, there's still a lot of work there, on both the X800P & X800XT. Probably won't get even at 90% until later in the summer.

 

Thanks sireric. This means my 9600xt will see some improvement also. Will these things end up in 4.6 or 4.7 then?

 

At first I was thinking that is pretty crappy b/c by the time you get the performance people will have new cards, but then I realized that people who buy them now are doing it b/c they are satisfied with the current price/perfornance ratio and so cannot complain.

 

We certainly wish we could introduce the cards with the highest performance, for many reasons

However, the reality is that we get something out that's reasonable (which hopefully meets price/performance goals), and then keep on improving it.

 

so the programmabilty of the memory controller is new compared to r3x0?

 

Right I have a 9700pro that i got almost 2 years ago. The x800xt offers 2-3 times the performance of my 9700pro. Its a great time for me to upgrade. Not only that but if we do see alot more performance out of the cards with aa then i could see a 2.5-3.5 jump or even a 3-4 jump depending on the game . My 9700pro has gotten much faster over the first day i owned it .

 

I think what Chalnoth is so eloquently trying to say is that ATI has added clipping planes and other such useful enhancing "OPTImizations"

 

When I first saw the Gt4 test and it's 20% increase I did raise an eyebrow as this is such massive jump, but I cannot believe Ati would do the same sort of cheat as has been done before by the " graphics contestents" in the 3dmark arena. So I think it is valid. However, of course you'd hope for 20% improvements in other DX9 titles as well, so that will be the acid test.

Unless of course there is a bug of course that Ati have not spotted, I'd laugh if after 6 months someone posts, " hey, what happened to the turtle .. it't gone, dragothic stylie "

 

I'm sorry what new cards will these people have? Are you suggesting X800Pro or XT owners will already have replaced their cards in a couple of months time?

 

Sure, "traditionally" it would. But with a 1-month release cycle, a traditional release policy is out of the question, isn't it?

 

I have a suggestion ATI: slow down your drive release schedule! 12 drivers per year is too much..

edit: grammar

 

No doubt. There should only ever be 1 driver per year.