The NEXT LAST R600 Rumours & Speculation Thread

I don't think it's texturing that holds back R600. Its filtering capabilities, from what comes from the slides, are far beyond R580, and while I think them being inferior to G80, I don't see so many games being only and so texture limited (and anyway in the worst case texturing power should be very similar to GTS according to what R600 is supposed to be). Other very strange topic of R600 is its behaviour with cranking up AA and resolution. Being a bandwidth monster, it should perform better where bandwidth is needed but it seems it lose a lot of performance (even in comparison to GTS) where it should have a lower hit.

So I think there are a lot of problems in optimizing with this architecture. In the VR-Zone review I saw a great result with 3D mark 06 sinthetic vertex shader, where pixel shader test was simply underwhelming. Probably the co-issue thing needs still a lot of work in order to extract maximum performance...

 

Perlin noise test contradicts that assertion.

Jawed

 

I took the original PNG's and used ATI Compressonator to do a comparison, put a negative filter on them to make the differences a bit easier to spot, unfortunately they're close to 4mb each, thus too big for imageshack! If anyone can suggest an alternative free host, i'll throw them up there..

There are differences, but in motion, i think 99.9% of them will go unnoticed..

 

So, is that a "yes" or a "no" to one picture being blurrier?

 

I wonder because the Geforce 8800 Ultra has "Panic Button" written all over it.

 

Then why "pixel shader" test was so bad? This GPU should be way off the GTS in pixel shading power, even counting the "missing MUL" on the G80's based GPU.
And in the 3Dmark sinthetic test is on par with GTS. So? Where's the problem IYO?

 

I had the same problem with PNG. The original version of that picture was a 3.4mb file. I ended up going with 97% jpeg in Infran. However, since the quality of source material and the save settings are the same for both shots, it's not that one would suddenly start looking worse then the other.

 

It's a ZOMG my eyes hurt from the staring!

Seriously though, I think the one on the right is blurrier around the white highlight, the one on the left is blurrier below that in the "valley" in the foreground. But really I think we'd need to see them in motion to assess the real impact in IQ (and honestly I think that a short movie clip would probably show a thousand times more info than a single still).

 

Actually not really a panic button, look at the price of the 8800 Ultra, that kinda started the hints off. I guess it was there just incase, but with a price like that, I think nV already had a good idea of what is coming out, thats was 2 weeks ago. But those emails also have the pics of the different AA modes. So either they go someone to take the shots for them or they took those shots themselves, either way, they had access.

 

Regarding Ultra, I wonder what is being talked about here.

 

Agreed. Plus, i think initially the ultras were clocked at 650mhz on the core, but as you can see the XT cant even beat the GTX. Being nVIDIA they put the core clocks down to 612mhz (even with the a3 revision it seems like some of them cant even reach 650), increase the yields a bit and called it a day.

Wonder if this will affect the launch date for G90 or the refresh of G80 since R600 is only competing against a crippled G80 core (GTS).

 

Only 4 months had passed between the 7800 GTX 512MB and the 7900 GTX launches.
So, if we extrapolate the same time frame now, i'd say... August.

 

Depends on whether G90 brings significant cost benefits I guess. Also, Nvidia might want to move in for the kill if they think they have an architectural advantage.

 

Left = HD 2900XT Right = 8800GTX

All I did was adjust the contrast a tiny bit and a bit of brightness to the HD2900XT image. NO sharp filter or blur or anything else was used at all. The GTX shot was left the same. Saved both back to a .png file and now look at them.

Do you notice anything different in the HD 2900 pic? I see the front of the airship loos better and the top of it too. What do you think?

Please note: the thumbnail images are the exact same as the original poster, I didn't feel the need to make a thumbnail pic of my new image.

 

But how can XT perform so good in FEAR, Oblivion and Prey, what makes these games so different?

 

Someone mentioned earlier about the memory controller. With the X1K series ATi did release several drivers that improved performance noticeably in several games. Could this be one of those cases? Maybe it has been tweaked for these games already?

 

I want to see someone with an X1800/X1900 card take the same screenshot as i dont think its changed at all. Personally when it comes to IQ, so far, im very very dissapointed. IQ is HUGE with me. The card could of performed substantially worse but if they did some real improvements with IQ i'd easily of bought one. I dont think im the only one who was expecting this area to get some serious attention with this new core.

Speaking of which has anyone who owns the card done an AF test to see if the pattern has changed yet?

 

Try holding off judging IQ until we can get a detailed analysis. And most especially some screens comparisons using 12x (8x+narrow tent) and 24x (8x+Edge Detect) CFAA modes.

I'm a little dissapointed that AF is still at 16x, however if Edge Detect is what I think it might be, that might be a moot point.

As well there is still a tiny bit of room to make the AF completely angle independant WRT X1k series. However, I don't expect something like that will even be noticable compare to the very slight dependance of the X1k HQ AF.

If edge detect is what I think it is, it might have the possibility of cleaning up aliased lines within textures while still leaving the rest of it untouched and thus unblurred.

Or edge detect could be completely and totally unrelated to what I think it might be. No way to find out until some site does a good job analyzing IQ.

Narrow Tent I'd imagine will have significantly less blurring, but will it help much with anti-aliasing if it does? The fact that it's labed as 12x CFAA vs 16x CFAA would mean it doesn't do as good a job with anti-aliasing as a wide tent. However, the question is, will it noticably improve on 8x AA while also not noticably blurring textures?

Regards,
SB

 

Edge Detect sounds like the standard edge detect kernel filter used in most image software.

 

That's what I was thinking. The implication then being that it's a further refining of the tent filters.

Whereas Narrow and Wide Tent filters are applied globally, my theory is that Edge Detect only applies the Tent Filter (no idea whether it's the wide or narrow) where it detects an "edge" within a texture as well as applying the Tent Filter to actual polygon edges.

Regards,
SB