pakpassion
Banned
Question 1: Looking at R520 and R500(Xenos), which one, in layman's terms is
more powerful?
Answer: These 2 chips aren't designed for the same use. R520 is a high end PC
graphics chip, while Xenos (it's not R500) is designed for a home
console. You might consider Xenos more powerful since it has 48 shaders,
while R520 has effectively 16 (x2 ALU) pixel shaders plus 8 vertex
shaders. But with the higher clock speed of 520 it comes out close in
terms of raw shader ALU. But when comparing memory bandwidth, Xenos is
more powerful due to the high memory bandwidth to the EDRAM chip.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Question 2: Looking at Specs of R520 , Xenos, and RSX (PS3 GPU with G70
Architecture with higher(550mhz) clock than 7800, lower memory
bandwidth, FlexIO connection and possibility of TurboCache), which of
these cards will output better graphics as time goes on (R520 life
ending with R580 I assume?)
Answer: They are all very evenly matched. In the end Xenos has 2 advantages.
It has a unified shader, so it can use all 48 shaders for vertex
operations. It also has a much greater framebuffer bandwidth than either
of the others.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Question 3: ATI has said Unified architecture is revolutionary, how much
revolutionary is it?Will it makes Games on Xbox 360 look better than
the Nvidia card?
Answer: It is revolutionary in that vertex and pixel shader are unified. This
is a major change in graphics hardware which we haven't seen since the
introduction of the vertex shader, and that was just an add on, not a
major change like this. It means xbox games can use up to 48 vertex
shaders, where as PS3 can only ever have a maximum of 8. That is a big
change for developers once they start to use it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Question 4: ATI has talked of efficiency, with current PC cards being 50-60%
efficient while Xbox 360 is more than 80% efficient? what does it mean
specifically?
Answer: I'm not sure what these efficieny numbers are referring to. They
could be shader or memory bandwidth efficiency. This is certainly
something that we are always attempting to improve upon.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Question 5: I have seen that to make HDR work well, you need to reduce AA , but
I thought AA was virtually free when ATI first announced this card in
Xbox 360 and another question, how is it that AA had to be reduced
with full HDR in Kameo but HDR and AA are running at full capacity in
Project Gotham Racing 3?, is this true?
Answer: The 360 has different HDR formats. The 64 bit per pixel formats take
up more memory in the EDRAM. So if you are at the limit of memory you
will have to reduce the number of AA samples. But if you use the 32bit
HDR formats then you can run at 4x MSAA. I don't know the details for
Kameo and PGR3, but there are many modes that the 360 can run in.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Question 6: In the recent Chip manufacturs convention I got hold of information
from ATI that there is Direct3d Compression between the GPU and memory
which means it virtually acts as if the GPU-Memory Bandwidth is
doubled from 22.4 GB/s
Answer: Assuming you are referring to texture compression, then the 360 has
support for several texture compression formats including all the
DirectX compressed texture formats.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I wanted to ask all the pressing questions here. I hope I did a good job with those questions. Discuss.
more powerful?
Answer: These 2 chips aren't designed for the same use. R520 is a high end PC
graphics chip, while Xenos (it's not R500) is designed for a home
console. You might consider Xenos more powerful since it has 48 shaders,
while R520 has effectively 16 (x2 ALU) pixel shaders plus 8 vertex
shaders. But with the higher clock speed of 520 it comes out close in
terms of raw shader ALU. But when comparing memory bandwidth, Xenos is
more powerful due to the high memory bandwidth to the EDRAM chip.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Question 2: Looking at Specs of R520 , Xenos, and RSX (PS3 GPU with G70
Architecture with higher(550mhz) clock than 7800, lower memory
bandwidth, FlexIO connection and possibility of TurboCache), which of
these cards will output better graphics as time goes on (R520 life
ending with R580 I assume?)
Answer: They are all very evenly matched. In the end Xenos has 2 advantages.
It has a unified shader, so it can use all 48 shaders for vertex
operations. It also has a much greater framebuffer bandwidth than either
of the others.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Question 3: ATI has said Unified architecture is revolutionary, how much
revolutionary is it?Will it makes Games on Xbox 360 look better than
the Nvidia card?
Answer: It is revolutionary in that vertex and pixel shader are unified. This
is a major change in graphics hardware which we haven't seen since the
introduction of the vertex shader, and that was just an add on, not a
major change like this. It means xbox games can use up to 48 vertex
shaders, where as PS3 can only ever have a maximum of 8. That is a big
change for developers once they start to use it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Question 4: ATI has talked of efficiency, with current PC cards being 50-60%
efficient while Xbox 360 is more than 80% efficient? what does it mean
specifically?
Answer: I'm not sure what these efficieny numbers are referring to. They
could be shader or memory bandwidth efficiency. This is certainly
something that we are always attempting to improve upon.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Question 5: I have seen that to make HDR work well, you need to reduce AA , but
I thought AA was virtually free when ATI first announced this card in
Xbox 360 and another question, how is it that AA had to be reduced
with full HDR in Kameo but HDR and AA are running at full capacity in
Project Gotham Racing 3?, is this true?
Answer: The 360 has different HDR formats. The 64 bit per pixel formats take
up more memory in the EDRAM. So if you are at the limit of memory you
will have to reduce the number of AA samples. But if you use the 32bit
HDR formats then you can run at 4x MSAA. I don't know the details for
Kameo and PGR3, but there are many modes that the 360 can run in.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Question 6: In the recent Chip manufacturs convention I got hold of information
from ATI that there is Direct3d Compression between the GPU and memory
which means it virtually acts as if the GPU-Memory Bandwidth is
doubled from 22.4 GB/s
Answer: Assuming you are referring to texture compression, then the 360 has
support for several texture compression formats including all the
DirectX compressed texture formats.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I wanted to ask all the pressing questions here. I hope I did a good job with those questions. Discuss.
