The LAST R600 Rumours & Speculation Thread

[Aerows]

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

Uh, not to be argumentative, but I got an 8800 GTS two days ago, and I am using the latest drivers in XP. I am having no difficulties, other than the need to use RivaTuner for overclocking and to control the fan speed. I've played Oblivion, Sacred Underworld (which isn't demanding - I just love the game), the Silverfall demo and Titan Quest with it. It might be that we are playing different games, but I'm not having issues. Are you set to single monitor performance mode, or do you have multi-monitor support turned on?

Sorry to thread hijack. I seem to do that a lot, and from this point forward I will make a concerted effort to stop doing that. I just felt the need to point out that to say that the new drivers have issues across the board in XP was quite an overstatement.

 

[dizietsma]

It's at least a month so I guess availability in May for buying. Lets hope this means wide spread availability because if nvidia are bringing out a refresh part then they have time to stock up to do a main hard launch and not limited.

The delay also means that Ati do not bring in this extra revenue for AMD in the 1Q and now half the 2nd quarter. That is not good for the earnings release for AMD especially after they had to cut ASP's for the cpu line again recently.

If nvidia mainstream parts are revealed at cebit and are hard launched .....

It has got to beat nvidia in performance after all this, like Bob said above, it will be like DNF if they just continue to chase to have the best and therefore cannot release because thw world has moved on. But if they do not match nvidia then that's bad too.

R300 / nv30 seem an awful long time ago nowadays.

 

[Geo]

I'm pretty baffled by the suggestions that a further delay bodes well for the future...but I'll keep reading. Maybe I'll understand eventually

"bodes well"? Said who? I can't see this as good news for AMD by any means. The question is "how bad", and I think that's not clear yet.

 

[[maven]]

Well 2 possibilities i would say:

- too slow compared to G80
- Last minute discovered bug in the chip (6-8 more weeks for a respin)

Or maybe they were surprised by the quick follow-up with the lower-priced 8800 GTS w/ 320mb. It certainly surprised me (but then I'm not paying a lot of attention).

 

[ben6]

Hrm, cancelling Editor's Day after booking hotel, and flights would seem to indicate at least May before release. If it a matter of a week or two or even three, they surely would have kept Editor's Day and just slipped the launch. Remember it's 20 days before March 11th right now.

 

[Bjorn]

Or maybe they were surprised by the quick follow-up with the lower-priced 8800 GTS w/ 320mb. It certainly surprised me (but then I'm not paying a lot of attention).

So you mean that AMD has to have a competitor to the 320 Mb 8800 GTS at the time of the launch of the high-end R600 ? If that's the case, why ?

Sure, they need it eventually. But delaying the launch of the high end version because of that, nope, i'm not buying that.

 

[Geo]

Hrm, cancelling Editor's Day after booking hotel, and flights would seem to indicate at least May before release. If it a matter of a week or two or even three, they surely would have kept Editor's Day and just slipped the launch. Remember it's 20 days before March 11th right now.

Yeah, this would be part of what I meant earlier by saying it's beginning to smell like family launch. . .one of the more compelling reasons to slip it would be to bring more skus to the table.

 

[suryad]

One word...disappointing.

 

[Geo]

Duke^H^H^H^H R600 Forever

In the console forum, we regularly give members vacations for those kind of trollish one-liners in the middle of an emotional debate. It would be very saddening to have to impose those kind of rules in 3DTech, so please don't encourage that kind of thing, hmm?

 

[Evildeus]

Or maybe they were surprised by the quick follow-up with the lower-priced 8800 GTS w/ 320mb. It certainly surprised me (but then I'm not paying a lot of attention).

Sure but that has no impact on the high end part... For the 8800 GTS, they could say "we are going to release a competitive part in ... 2 month *

 

[trinibwoy]

"bodes well"? Said who? I can't see this as good news for AMD by any means. The question is "how bad", and I think that's not clear yet.

Well a suggestion that the delay is not due to a technical issue but rather a change in strategy seems to hinge on R600 being on schedule. I just won't believe that AMD is intentionally delaying the release of their flagship card in order to do a "family launch". IMO the prospective R600 buyers won't really appreciate being made to wait unnecessarily so I don't follow the thinking behind that one.

Edit: Doh I read you completely wrong, sorry. Didn't see that the shift in focus was accompanied by the notion of an R600 that couldn't dominate just based on performance.

 

[Corwin_B]

If it's so untouchable why not release it and then refocus? What's the strategic advantage to be had from holding back on a part that will dominate the market upon introduction?

Especially if considering that, right now, they don't have any competitive part at the high-end of the spectrum. I could understand moving back a part if your current card is king of the hill, but this is not the case for AMD right now.

 

[Aerows]

Desktop quad-core isn't due for another year after. So the only way enthusiasts are going to get their hands on quad-core AMD is by buying some variant of Barcelona, as far as I can tell.

Anyway, I don't want this to happen. I just want to know the techie stuff.

Jawed

Budapest is the desktop chip. I'm really looking forward to it.

In keeping with my earlier statement to stay on topic , I truly wonder if this is a hardware issue. The statement that "but they've had Vista for months" may or may not be entirely true. DX10 qualifications may have been very late to the party. And let's not forget that the foremost priority is to get business critical applications supported first; enthusiasts come second, as they should. It could also be a mixture of both a hardware and a driver issue affecting productivity applications, rather than performance.

 

[Tim Murray]

DX10 qualifications may have been very late to the party.

I don't think this was the case; people have been writing D3D10 code for quite a while now. WHQL tests may have been late, but I don't think there's been any question about what you had to do to get a card to officially support D3D10 for a very long time.

 

[Aerows]

I don't think this was the case; people have been writing D3D10 code for quite a while now. WHQL tests may have been late, but I don't think there's been any question about what you had to do to get a card to officially support D3D10 for a very long time.

Maybe the issue is what they had to do to get the drivers/hardware to play nice with other software under Vista? If there was an issue in the 3D portions of the Vista interface specific to R600, that would prompt a delay. Functionality issues in the OS and specific widely used applications would be a good reason to give it more time.

 

[epicstruggle]

I think the most likely event is what Geo proposed above, that they want to do a family launch. It would be rather sad, if it turned out to be hardware problems that caused this.

 

[trinibwoy]

What could possibly be the incentive for doing a family launch?

 

[Jawed]

What could possibly be the incentive for doing a family launch?

Dunno.

Maybe they're looking to turn OEM and SI heads?

But CeBIT is surely the venue for that. Gah.

Jawed

 

[Aerows]

I'm confused (nothing new, unfortunately). Are they not showing it at CeBit at all? I thought it was just a delay in launch/showing it to the press. They had already stated that there would be a showing only for the privileged and that no performance numbers would be shown.

If it is a performance issue, and they had already decided to postpone benchmarks, why decide to not show it at all?

 

[Tim Murray]

Maybe the issue is what they had to do to get the drivers/hardware to play nice with other software under Vista? If there was an issue in the 3D portions of the Vista interface specific to R600, that would prompt a delay. Functionality issues in the OS and specific widely used applications would be a good reason to give it more time.

I think they've had silicon working under Vista for a long time. How many spins have we heard about?