Radeon 9700 NDA Lifted

One this part i was more thinking that nVidia would paper lauch the NV30 on late August/early september and the cards would be available late october/early november. Should be the target time table i think.

Well at least 2 cards will bring real improvements to the market during 2002.

 

Man, the flash demos (and movies) on ATI's site are awesome. I await orgasmic response from DX9 enabled visuals.

 

Knowing what we all know (i.e. suspect), personally, I would wait a few months.

It's a no contest for someone considering a GF4Ti4600 and this one and needs a card now but I would wait...

 

Good catch.

It's not clear to me, however, whether a single texture unit per pipeline might not turn out to be a reasonable standard on all vendors PS 2.0 pipelines. I'm not sure that you'll really need more texture units with 8 pipelines and the advanced rendering with PS 2.0 (like the number of texture inputs per pass go up to 16, 32 address instructions and new stuff like 4 render targets that might complicate things like dependency etc.)

I guess that the days of a Voodoo2's dual-texture ability just isn't that fancy anymore.

 

I find this interesting:

OK, we covered the the fog a bit...but has anyone done a comparison on AA with the HyperZ functions turned off and turned on? I'm wondering if something new was mentioned by a tech at that conference, even if it was just to "damage".


EDIT: Maybe he just meant this:

 

Oh dear,

Who would have guessed that NVIDIA would loose the Quake3 trophy on July the 18th 2002...

 

Well, with 16 textures per pass the need for multitexturing in hardware will definitely be rising as these capabilities are used more, so I’ll wager they will move back up to 2 textures (or more) when the silicon process allows them.

However, this possibly raises more questions than it actually answers, because theres more to it than just the number of TCU’s you have per pipe. For instance, 8600’s ability to address 6 textures meant that each pipeline also had 6 texture registers, giving a total of 24 texture registers. With the need for 16 registers in DX9 how does R300’s pipeline handle this? If it build it up over 16 cycles then that would mean that each pipe has 16 registers giving a total of 128 registers for the chips – which I assume would be huge; alternatively does it use pipeline combining meaning that some/many of the actual pixel pipes are not doing anything for much of the time when multitexturing is in operation but would cut down on the total number of registers used.

Questions, questions…

 

Here's the calculated FPS based on the "normalized" scores in the Anandtech review.

Unreal Tournament 2003 (DM-Antalus)
1024x768x32 High Detail Settings
Radeon 9700: 130.4
GF4 Ti4600: 94.5
Parhelia: 54.4
Radeon 8500: 57.6

Unreal Tournament 2003 (DM-Antalus)
1280x1024x32 High Detail Settings
Radeon 9700: 87.8
GF4 Ti4600: 59.3
Parhelia: 35.1
Radeon 8500: 37.9

Unreal Tournament 2003 (DM-Antalus)
1600x1200x32 High Detail Settings
Radeon 9700: 63.3
GF4 Ti4600: 41.1
Parhelia: 24.6
Radeon 8500: 25.2

---------------------------------------------------------------

Unreal Tournament 2003 (DM-Asbestos)
1024x768x32 High Detail Settings
Radeon 9700: 210.3
GF4 Ti4600: 178.2
Parhelia: 100.4
Radeon 8500: 91.1

Unreal Tournament 2003 (DM-Asbestos)
1280x1024 High Detail Settings
Radeon 9700: 144.3
GF4 Ti4600: 115.4
Parhelia: 65.5
Radeon 8500: 58.9

Unreal Tournament 2003 (DM-Asbestos)
1600x1200 High Detail Settings
Radeon 9700: 104.1
GF4 Ti4600: 82.0
Parhelia: 46.9
Radeon 8500: 42.0

---------------------------------------------------------------

Jedi Knight 2
'demo jk2ffa' 1024x768x32
Radeon 9700: 122.5
GF4 Ti4600: 125
Parhelia: 90.5
Radeon 8500: 123.5

Jedi Knight 2
'demo jk2ffa' 1280x1024x32
Radeon 9700: 123.2
GF4 Ti4600: 124.4
Parhelia: 74.9
Radeon 8500: 116.9

Jedi Knight 2
'demo jk2ffa' @ 1600x1200
Radeon 9700: 124.3
GF4 Ti4600: 113.0
Parhelia: 65.9
Radeon 8500: 93.2

---------------------------------------------------------------

Serious Sam 2: The Second Encounter
'Little Trouble' 1024x768x32
Radeon 9700: 115.2
GF4 Ti4600: 100.2
Parhelia: 67.4
Radeon 8500: 58.2

Serious Sam 2: The Second Encounter
'Little Trouble' 1280x1024x32
Radeon 9700: 102.6
GF4 Ti4600: 72.9
Parhelia: 49.5
Radeon 8500: 45.3

Serious Sam 2: The Second Encounter
'Little Trouble' 1600x1200x32
Radeon 9700: 77.6
GF4 Ti4600: 51.7
Parhelia: 37.3
Radeon 8500: 32.1

 

Did anyone else catch that ATI is also doing framebuffer compression as well for storing multisamples? There have been rumors of the NV30 having 4:1 compression when 4XMSAA is turned on, and here ATI are claiming 6:1 when 6XMSAA is turned on. Must be the same method, so NV30 won't have this as an advantage. Thus, the R300 is already very efficient Hyper-Z, anisotropic, and MSAA wise, but and it has a 256-bit CROSSBAR bus. This means NVidia's IMR efficiency won't help them because ATI now has everything the GF4 has in terms of efficiency tricks.

The NV30 will need atleast a 256-bit bus (or edram, etc) if it is still an IMR, otherwise, the only thing I can see saving them is a radical departure from their IMR architecture, with say, tiling. The only problem with this is, the future looks to be HEAVILY textured, so even a tiler would benefit big time from more bandwidth.

 

demalion-

On AA + HZ on the 8500- although this is something I'll definately test out of interest, I dont know if this quote refers to a real difference in HyperZ function in the 8500, or just an optimists way at looking at the increased number of z-buffer accesses required with multisampling. The way it reads:

.. could kind of mean either way. From "AA modes on this chip", I would speculate this means the new HZ is exploited even moreso with MS vs SS and therefore stands much to gain? Time for some benches.

 

Indeed, indeed. I just think that a DX9 chip's ability to feed a single texture unit (or all 8 of them more correctly!) with up to 16 textures will pose bigger problem than the benefit of more texture units will add.

It'll take a lot of texture cache to feed those hungry pipes. In other words: If you have silicon to burn you might want to improve texture [fetch] efficiency rather than built another texture unit that will sit idle some of the time waiting for data.

Like Carmack said regarding the GF4 vs R8500 on Doom III: The R8500 can render it in one pass, but the GF4 is still faster because of its efficiency although it takes the chip 2 or 3 passes to render.

So questions abound indeed...

 

Which one said framebuffer compression? I only quickly read it but I only noticed Z-buffer compression; if it is only Z and NVIDIA has Frame buffer and Z buffer that will still be a performance advantage for NVIDIA.

Well, HyperZ-III sounds remarkably unchanged so if NVIDIA has some more efficient occlusion culling routines, as has been suggested, there is also room to gain here.

 

From my observations and kipping the unfinished release (quack) drivers.

First we had what seemed to be a RGSS at 2xQ but in d3d it could be jittered perpixel, 4xQ looked to be 2xq on a supersample buffer 2x as wide. Again perpixel jittering in d3d. All other modes looked like OGSS.

Then in the 9xxx series all opengl went to OGSS and d3d non ordered was reduced to no-fog only it also seems only able to change the pattern a few times across the screen and this change looks like its rotated the pattern 90 degrees. The only reason I can think of for removing the AA from opengl was that it created an odd diagonal tear across the screen.

Now according to ATis r300 tech demo it seems that SV1 worked on a kind of v5 basis and mentions nothing of a psuedo random sampling pattern. I'm not quite sure how that fits in as there definately has been evidence of a changing pattern. I wish they'd get it sorted though .

Interesting to see in that tech demo that the r300 can use super and multisampling together, presumably in varying amounts. Its also boasting a 6x supersample perfromance increase over the r200s method.

 

I am still reading the Anand´s article but:
-The chip design is getting closer to CPU´s design (critical paths, clocks skews, etc...)
-This chip has a CPU like packaging
-It is the third GPU with a 256 bits bus 8)
-It is incredibly fast with benchmarks and using floating point precision pixels

Funny some people did not believe when talking about the possibilities above for consumer level GPUs

edited: congratulations to the ArtX design team, they are really good.

 

One more post off topic concerning demalion's tidbit..

I moved some test data on this side R200 topic here:
http://216.180.225.194/~beyond3d/forum/viewtopic.php?p=23603#23603

 

In Anand's article, in regards to ATI's anisotropic filtering, he says that it has been finally fixed. I remember reading here that it was never broken in the first place, now Anand is saying it's broken. Has it ever been confirmed if it is broken or not? I'm just confused.

Just the thought of 128-tap trilinear anisotropic filtering has me drooling.

 

AFAIK it was never broken - that was an implemtation choice so why sites are saying 'fixed'/'broken' is beyond me.

 

Well in that case, I guess cards that uses multisampling is broken as opposed to supersampling. lol I agree, I could never understand why they call it broken, when ATI clearly states it's adaptive anisotropic filtering. When I used the R8500, it certainly didn't seem broken to me.

 

The Radeon 9700 is still 2 months away(Sept timeframe). That puts the NV30 just 3 months behind, not "almost half a year".

Still, the NV30, if it uses 0.13u, should have a decent advantage.

 

Wow,

looks nice. I want to know more about the AA - Alpha texture/blend stuff as I always seem to bring that topic up And I also agree with Sharkfood as I want to see some more detailed reviews. I am glad that ATI trumpted nV as that will mean that nV will work harder to make the nV30 better which is good for all of us