R300 Discussion

[kl899]

Taken from this interview: http://www.reactorcritical.com/interview-ati-2002/interview-ati_2002.shtml

"Reactor Critical:Maybe you can give us some alludes about the R300?

Pierre Laine: Well, it will be powerful. It will be a lot more powerful compared to the RADEON 8500. As is known, we doubled the complexity and performance of our GPU with the latest new family If you remember the gap between the original RADEON, you can expect the same between the RADEON 8500 and R300. On the graphics side, it will be a huge step forward. "

Since the Radeon was 30 million transistors and the Radeon 8500 was 60 million transistors, does this mean that we can expect the R300 to be 120 million? That sounds awfully high to me.. even if there is a die shrink to .13 microns.

If they stick with their promised 9-12 months cycle, I believe that puts the R300 for a release in the July to October time frame. Seeing as how DirectX 9 isn't in public beta yet, how realistic would it be for ATI to make that time frame? I guess it depends on how long it takes to beta DirectX 9... how long did the beta of DirectX 8 last?

 

[Sabastian]

Hmm, just snooping around RAGE3D and found a couple of interesting posts. Not sure what it is implying though, just a small connection I have made between drivers and the R300, also I read in a thread that the R300 is taped out, is this true?

http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?s=bd770934b27d6d932cf6dea4bcdbc3b0&threadid=33614569
"ATI has commited to a strategy of frequent driver updates. This strategy has so far resulted in three driver postings in just over two months, a substantial increase over the previous approach. In the very near future ATI will have a very significant change of direction in our drivers. I don't know all of the details, but stay tuned."

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/show...219#post1011219



http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?s=bd770934b27d6d932cf6dea4bcdbc3b0&threadid=33614609
"In the 9026 drivers there is a new file: ati3duag.dll (like to ati3d1ag.dll for R100 and to ati3d2ag.dll for R200).

I opened this file with hexdecimal editor and it contains various D3D setting for R300 and a lot of new and old D3D settings:

R300FFVSCacheDebug
R300FFVSCacheSizeLog2
R300FFVSCache
R300VSConstMgmt
R300VSConstGranularity
R300OptimizePVSCode
ForcePrefetch
128BitVectorWrites
ForceFPUs
LocalTextureTiling
LocalTextureMicroTiling
UserScissorEnable
AllowDitherWhileBlending
ColorCompression
CMaskEnable
TCLEnable"

 

[jvd]

well

its good to see ati working on drivers so far in advance ... i hope this card from ati is good ..... i'm begining to like them

 

[Ante P]

Re: well

its good to see ati working on drivers so far in advance ... i hope this card from ati is good ..... i'm begining to like them

There's been references to R300 in the drivers for ~6 months now

 

[Dave Baumann]

Thats becuase the specs have are likely to have been finailsed and operational on the simulator for quite some time now.

 

[Humus]

128BitVectorWrites
ColorCompression
CMaskEnable

These looks really interesting
Color compression sounds very cool. I also hope 128bit vectors refers to fragment shading capabilities