Quake4: Nvidia6800 vs ATI Xenon

[overclocked]

Hopefully a USA with the right backup of the xCpu will lead too a smother gameplay with less drops in certain frames/areas beacuse of the nature of Xenon.

 

[Hardknock]

You'll need to elaborate?

If you're suggesting that off-loading the work to XeCPU would be more suitable for long vertex shaders and dynamic branching than Xenos, then yes it may well be. Off course, US architecture has it's advantages, but not always 'equally' suitable for vertex and pixel work with the coarse grained SIMD architecture in Xenos.

I was merely refering to your "long shaders" comment. I remember reading something about the memexport would be utilized for this.

Here it is:

http://www.beyond3d.com/articles/xenos/index.php?p=10

Although 4000 is a reasonably large number of instructions to support in a single code block, this is a limitation on the number of instructions that can be applied to a single shader program because the full program is stored on the chip and never partially retrieved from memory. However, should the developer wish to exceed that in a single block then ATI's F-Buffer technology is included to increase the shader length. Alternatively ATI's "MEMEXPORT" (see "MEMEXPORT" section) could be used to increase the length of a shader program beyond the nominal 4000 instructions.

 

[j^aws]

I was merely refering to your "long shaders" comment. I remember reading something about the memexport would be utilized for this.

Here it is:

http://www.beyond3d.com/articles/xenos/index.php?p=10

Ah okay...but that's not what I was referring to though. It was more specific to differences in MIMD and SIMD architectures for vertex shading AND dynamic branching...

 

[pipo]

The PC version of Quake 4 is finished and will be released in the US on October 18th, id Software and publisher Activision announced today. The fourth instalment in the FPS series has been in development at Raven Software under series creator id's supervision and is also due out on Xbox 360 later this year.

Indeed, with X05 taking place today and tomorrow in Amsterdam (have we rammed that home enough yet?), we may even see its release date confirmed late on tonight.

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=61133

 

[hugo]

Didn't knew that Ati's part is called Xenon.[sarcasm]