The LAST R600 Rumours & Speculation Thread

The current nVidia drivers in Vista are beyond pathetic. I am forced to run a dual-boot setup or sacrifice half of my framerate in games; seemingly all games.

Just to preface, I am running an overclocked 7900GTO on a watercooled Core2duo @3.4GHz. 2 gigs of PC800 DDR2, and a twin RaptorX Raid-0 array.

I booted into Vista for the first time, awed at the beauty I proceed to load up WoW and am immediately mortified to see my framerate in the low 50s. This coming from a never dipping 75fps in XP. No biggie I think, I'll simply turn off aero for the time being and just play games with all the goodies of Vista turned off. No dice; disabling all the visual effects/sidebar/etc. has virtually no impact on in game framerate. Jeez, Vista must be a complete resource hog, I think to myself.

Then I look over and see my friend who also just loaded Vista happily running WoW at full frames.

This throws me into a frenzy as he is running basically the same computer, only air cooled @ 3.2Ghz, 1 Raptor X, and heres the clencher: an x1950GT.

Just to put this into perspective for those too busy to dig up specs on all that, his x1950 is running 12 pipes at 500MHz, my GTO is running 16 pipes at 703MHz(OCed). http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=500&card2=459

After doing a smidge of quick research on the intarnets, I am greeted with unending sympathies from those in the same position that I currently find myself.

The only saving grace to this ordeal is that I was planning on sticking the best DX10 card in this machine from the get go, the GTO was just to tide me over until it arrived. You can bet your sugar sweet ass that I'll jump to the R600 in a hummingbird's heartbeat even it is marginally *slower* then the 8800GTX just to avoid craptacular drivers completely crippling my hardware.

I would dread to be running any kind of *true* high end SLI setup right now. Awesome job alienating your early adopters oh mighty nV. Jesus...(in asian blizzard boardmember on southpark wow episode voice)

Typing this from Vista, waiting for drivers.

 

Citrous, that's rather dishonest of you to claim that it's halving your framerate in all games, then just cite World of Warcraft. Websites that have done tests tend to show that it's more of a wash, depending entirely upon what games and settings you are looking at.

Though one thing I would recommend trying is switching the rendering mode. I believe WoW supports both OpenGL and Direct3D?

 

I second that. I just forgot to insert the context...typical brainfart, sorry. But as you say practically SRAM has worse latency than a flipflop circuity and DRAM has wore latency than SRAM. So the core statement of mine is correct.

 

xp drivers are pretty bad too, every game i play has some type of serious/noticeable issue.

ut2k4 - EXTREME stuttering, its so bad that u would think the fps is just dropping to 1 if u didnt have fraps on. also sometimes when u load up the game ur system will just crash. u have to hard reset your computer.

tm united - pixelation in the shaders and shadows, same type of thing that u saw on far cry for nv40 back in the day, so it could be a precision issue. also various AF problems

coh - random performance drops by about 75%, alt tabbing and turning aa off then back on usually fixes it. also random distortion of the terrain

just cause - very noticeable shadowing glitch over distant landscape

fear - drops to the teens and below when killing someone in slowmo. game will randomly drop in performance by about 50%, then after about 6 seconds go back to normal. im not referring to loading a new area, u can just be sitting in an empty room when it occurs.

dmomm - drops to 15 fps and below simply by equipping certain weapons, also flickering polygons and textures is a regular occurrence

i can honestly say these are the worst drivers ive ever had to use. lcd scaling doesnt even work which is a huge downer

 

ATI’s First DirectX 10 Chip Slips into Q2 2007

From X-bit labs

 

Wow, even more slippage? I hear the plops of the champagne bottles in Santa Clara...

 

That's totally insane. I suppose they are quite fine leaving their competition occupy the top spot for what ? 6 months ?

 

Farts..

 

if it was meant to be released at the end of March and now it's going to slip at the beginning of April..who cares? If...

 

Sounds like AMD are either trying to get their midrange cards out at the same time, or they just haven't had enough time to make enough inventory for full availability by the end of March.

 

However I can think of no good reason why they would take more delay just to relace with the other midrange and low-end cards.

I mean launch RV610 and RV630 with R600 and those chips will go a bit unnoticed, well unless they have reasons that they want that to happen.

 

nv30

 

In this way, I think it's better to skip R600 gpus and launch R700 by the end of the year.

 

It's not a if... the R600 was supposed to be launched in March. But today most editors got a note from AMD saying that it has been postponed to a date that is yet to be announced.

 

Well, at least there will be proper WHQL drivers available from the get-go...

 

Huston we have a problem..we got the drivers..but now hw..

 

Yeah! by the year 2020

 

If this true, this will be the last step to the end, R.I.P. ATi. (called today as AMD graphics division).

 

Hmmmm. That's two in a row from ATI (R520, now R600). Surely they can't keep handing the advantage to NV like this. What with AMD taking an ass mastering from Intel, it's a pretty sorry all round story at present.

 

God bless u NVIDIA, every moment pass it makes me believe that NV engineers is very capable, talent and the have
much efficient design than ATI engineers. Every generation ATI must to have advantage on NV to compute.
I don't know why people don't blame ATI with all that delay like they did with NV30
Even R600 has much the same feathers NV30 had. And about performance we didn't see any real benchmark yet.