R520 Infomania

So now that we've firmly established how little we actually know about R520, anyone care to speculate about NV_ENGR1? :?

 

Sounds to me like a test product for testing the PCI Express interface with other parts. It may, for examle, be a dummy PCIe-AGP bridge solution with some null device on the AGP bus. Alternatively, it could just be the bridge itself.

But, regardless, that codename just doesn't sound like a graphics card.

Edit:
Well, actually, now that I think about it, this does make a bit less sense. This is a new addition, after all. So, it is mostly likely, then, a placeholder name for something we'll see later.

 

It's quite obviously the nvidia ppu unit soon to retail.

 

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=22486

You'd think they are a 24hr cable news outlet the way they operate whether they have anything to say or not.

 

I'm wondering what they gonna report if they find out/turns out that it won't have 24/32 pipelines.

Are they gonna be shocked or disappointed and who are they gonna blame for the misinformation?

 

Does it matter as long as it is done in a dramatic fashion? Drama sells and The Inq is quite good at it.

 

I'm looking forward to it. Could be fun

 

Heh. Yeah, I always get a laugh out of the Inq, whether I am laughing with them or at them.

On a larger scale I am very interested in how the R520 launch and final show of the numbers will be handled. The expectations have been driven up to immense proportions on a grass-roots level, especially with all this 'historic' hinting at how great R400 was going to be and how it is "too advanced". So, if it is not the unbeatable beast that it has been played up to be I would expect a lot of grass-roots work at bringing expectations back down and if it is "all that" then I wonder how they will play it because depending on the feature set, they are 'merely' catching up and maybe not bringing anything earth shattering to the table except the performance.

The more I think about the more I realize I hate thinking about it. I just want this thing out already and it better be great and someone better be willing to sell me one at a price that is lower than "my soul".

 

R520 has little to do with R400 if the rumors / "accepted as true" knowledge is in fact true. (It is thought that R520 might borrow some stuff from R400, but the "great stuff" about R400 is supposedly channeled more into R500 (Xenon) and the R600 (next gen PC architecture.)

 

Which makes sense, as there haven't really been any radical paradigm shifts since DX9/R300.

 

For ~7 months they had weekly drawings for the chance to buy one. Now you can purchase them freely through their site.
http://www.evga.com/products/moreinfo.asp?pn=256-A8-N346-AX

Nice juicy rumors in this thread....Is it June yet? I'm ready to get back on the ATI side of things.

 

I would find this so much easier to swallow if they'd just bumped the pipes 50% and moved on. But apparently they didn't.

 

Right...they obviously need support of SM 3.0 (which requires FP32 pixel shader support) for if nothing else marketing reasons.

As I said though, they likely did take "some stuff" from the R400 architecture, but it's Xenon (R500), not R520, that is suppossed to be the closest decendent of the R400.

Dave mentioned in some other thread (or perhaps earlier in this one), and I agree, that going with a "radical" departure in architecture (ala R500) in a PC system where you need to run existing software that was designed to run on "traditional" architectures, is much more of a risk than doing it in a closed box upon which software is being designed specfically for it.

With such a relatively small difference (between SM 3.0 and 2.0), it doesn't make all that much sense to bring an entirely new architecture in. It makes the most sense when there is a more radical change in the API / programming model.

So I don't expect to see R400 typw architecture appear in the PC space until MS is ready to release WGF 2.0 / Longhorn.

 

Cool. Seriously.

As to the rumor-mongering at hand, I'm not sure the R520 hype ever became as overboiled as you say, wireframe. The forums here have distinguished between the "tweener" R520 and the truer next-gen R600 (aka R400) for quite some time. I guess Richard Huddy's "too sexy for TV" PDF comment did light a fire with its promise of super branching performance and the expectation that it would arrive late last year (IIRC), but that was all we had to go on for a long while. You'd think even nV would have figured out how to achieve decent branching performance by now.

 

In any event the R520, whatever it ends up being, will make a nice upgrade from my 9800 Pro 256MB card.

 

Richard Huddy did not promise super branching performance. The words were "..with decent performance..."

 

I think this is some kind of a new PCIE chip from NVIDIA 8)

 

Right. And we all know what everyone thinks of NV40's branching.

So, put a number on your expectation for "decent performance" of branching relative to NV40. 50% faster? It seems to me that everyone agrees the bar is so low on NV40 that still won't get you there. 100% faster? Might still not be enuf. My benchmark is the kind of hurt (percentage-wise) that R300 put on GF4 re AA/AF. Seems to me that was the watershed where AA went from "some people, some of the time" to "darn near everybody, darn near all of the time --just a matter of how much, not whether".

 

I don't think i could say r520 is xx% faster doing DB than nv40 just as a general rule because there might be big differences between the tested situations.
I did not even see any detail testing done with branching on a nv40 yet.
Frankly the only test of DB i've seen so far is in shadermark and there it shows DB with better performance compared to the same situation without

 

Why do people think whatever is in the Xenon will functionally be any lesser than whats in the R600?