The LAST R600 Rumours & Speculation Thread

Can you imagine if XFX got into AMD's game ?

"XFX X2900 XTX XXX"

 

plz stop, dont waste another page on this nonsense.

 

its all good fun, nice to take a break from the serious talk

 

AMD Releases Final "R600" Specs

Interesting title but the article is actually a bit light on the specs, nothing that wasn't already known...

 

If you'd have hypothetically a 1024bit wide bus with 1.4GHz (2.8 DDR), the resulting bandwidth would be at 358,4 GB/s. As for whether I could find ways to saturate say 180GBs of bandwidth...sure 16x (real) MSAA in high resolutions. But before GPUs would go this far they'd need the analogue amount of pixel/zixel fillrate first, or even probably ROPs that are capable of more than single cycle 4xMSAA. Theoretically 4 loops through the ROPs doesn't sound that "efficient" to me. Besides a 1GB framebuffer would suffer for such stunts most likely too.

 

AF takes up bandwidth?

 

So eh.....hmmm....

All this talk about R600 having HDMI sounds sweet, but when I heard HD audio, the first think that clicked in my mind was this old old slide leaked long ago and dismissed as fake(because some stated it was sloppy looking...). When this slide was released, I got really excited about the HD audio part and the possibilty of R600 having a sound chip. I mean come on!! LOOOK AT MY NAME!!

Then we hear (imo) solid info on R600 using HDMI in this tid bit...

notice the part I highlighted in red that stikes me the most. This part completly reminds me of that old slide that stated the samething.

here is the slide...




It actully makes perfect sense IMHO. Look at GPU boards. They are actully mother boards on a mother board. It has a processor, it has ram, and a seperate PCB. The difference is that a GPU board is a entertainment/multi media board. It makes sense to add a sound chip to this entertainment/multi media board. Might as well intergrate it in a all in one package.

 

Look at the scheduled release date and memory BW...
It still is fake, as i doubt there were any leaks of nearly half a year delay coming from ATI or any of its partners lately.

Passing audio data through the HDMI port in a graphics card is not that difficult.
If you recall, even some 7600 GS/7600GS and X1300/X1600 cards were equipped with S/PDIF Audio In pins connecting them to the sound card.
Then the audio data is sincronized with video data and sent through the HDMI cable to the HDTV/PC Display/Decoder, always on a secure digital domain.

 

Id love to see this. Im tired of onboard sound and if i have to pay 600+ dollars for this card, I want to get audio too.

 

You're thinking that because there was some performance correlation made between 128 2x pumped scalar ALU's and 64 Vec4 1x frequency ALU's. Though according to the experts around here an array of scalar ALU's will in many cases achieve greater utilization efficiency than a similar array (in this case 64 1x freq. ALU's) of Vec4 ALU's.

Yeah, and I also hope that the r600 isn't as relatively texture op. choked as the r580 was. That would suck

 

No, yeah I agree with that. The point is the cases will exist down the road. Oh yeah, I agree that going that route for 16x MSAA and doing some nonsensical res/aa case isn't much good for todays GPU's. There's def. a reason why we won't have the 358.4GB/s bandwidth that you mentioned, and it isn't completely due to the size of the die or the complexity of the PCB required. If the company thought they needed it for a balanced part to make the most of their architecture they would (and will, eventually).

 

That conflicts with other reports that say the XT and XTX will launch together while the XL will launch a month later. I tend to believe this is the case.

 

Alittle bit, not too much though.

 

It's more likely just a passthrough for HDMI audio rather than a sound chip or sound functionality based off GPGPU capabilities. You still need the bandwidth for sending audio down the HDMI cable along with the video (something that a lot of the earlier implementations of HDMI are lacking). I suppose this is so that when you install a HD or BluRay player, you get full HDMI and HDCP all the way to your display device.

 

No quiet fan for retail versions?

If these are the final specs, where are the non-final specs with numbers of TMUs, ALUs, ROPs...?

 

The retail version has a vapochill cooler which is quiet. The OEM version, only has a fan without the vapochill, which is also quiet.

This might explain why the OEM version is larger. It needs a bigger cooling system because it's a standard heatsink fan. To make it effective and quiet, it has to be big. The retail version has a smaller, more effective vapochill system that is still quiet, but I bet is more expensive.

 

You know, that would piss me off if true.