I dont mean to spread fud..

[AlphaWolf]

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.

Yes they should just do like nvidia; 2 drivers a year plus 10 unofficial leaks.

 

[hovz]

ok i just want to gather some opinions from people who run review sites(bjorn, dave, etc.).

in a few months when the mature drivers start coming out, how do you see the r420 and nv40 stacking up?

 

[Razor04]

in a few months when the mature drivers start coming out, how do you see the r420 and nv40 stacking up?

It depends on how desperate the companies get when they lose but a few frames per second or X number of 3DMarks.

 

[rwolf]

Our shader compiler is getting better with every release. The performance increases from it will benefit all cards, including 9700's. Some upcoming updates will increase performance > 10% for longer shaders. For most of the current batch of applications, the shaders are pretty short already, so I don't know if they will get much benefit. We also have other optimizations that will benefit various cards in different ways (96's, X800's vs. 97's) -- I don't know most of them.

As for the X800 series, it's getting a lot of its upcoming performance benefits from our work in optimizing the memory controller. We've got a huge amount of flexibility in how it can be programmed and used, and we've just scratched the surface (the state space is huge, and it will take some time to come up with optimal cases). People can expect significant (>>10%) performance increases, esp for AA.

Is it possible to take several multipass shaders append them together and then optimize?

 

[OpenGL guy]

Our shader compiler is getting better with every release. The performance increases from it will benefit all cards, including 9700's. Some upcoming updates will increase performance > 10% for longer shaders. For most of the current batch of applications, the shaders are pretty short already, so I don't know if they will get much benefit. We also have other optimizations that will benefit various cards in different ways (96's, X800's vs. 97's) -- I don't know most of them.

As for the X800 series, it's getting a lot of its upcoming performance benefits from our work in optimizing the memory controller. We've got a huge amount of flexibility in how it can be programmed and used, and we've just scratched the surface (the state space is huge, and it will take some time to come up with optimal cases). People can expect significant (>>10%) performance increases, esp for AA.

Is it possible to take several multipass shaders append them together and then optimize?

Not really, no. The app can do this, but then the developer wouldn't have created the multipass shaders in the first place.