The NEXT LAST R600 Rumours & Speculation Thread

At this point in time, any leak would help keep me from buying a G80 out of frustration. If they'd say it's atleast similar in speed, then I'd wait for quality comparisons at least.

 

No. No, no, no! They can't be six months late AND be similar in speed with somewhat better image quality. From a product being six months late, I expect it to be a) considerably faster, b) cooler and consuming less power, c) equal or better image quality! Especially it being on a smaller process. Come on!

They either fulfill those three major points or their product is burried on launch.

 

Does ATI itself usually hype up its upcoming cards? Lack of direct hype != a bad card.

 

Well PR is almost always stupid. I rather have a bad product with shit-loads of hype than a mediocre one with no hype. Perhaps it's distasteful, but I think it is the right thing to do from a business standpoint. All this non-noise is only driving people to buy 8800s, which will help dry up demand by the time the R600 comes out unless it's completely awesome. At least with lots of unjustified hype, people would hold out.

I recall that with the R300, while people were indeed impressed, they weren't impressed enough to simply ignore what nVidia was going to show, and only when it was clear the NV30 was crap did most people jump ship. This is not the case with the G80. People are impressed enough that many have already jumped ship.

 

No in general people were floored by the r300 it was pretty much the first card that had usable AA and AF on new games. The R300 caught pretty much every one off guard with its 8pipes 256bit bus and incredible performance. It completley laid waste to everything in site at the time. The only people who held out were the most delusional Nvidia fans. I can't remember anyone on this site who did not give mad love to ATI for the R300 when it hit.

 

Someone's already declared every GPU discussion devolving into R300/NV30 comparisons a B3D Forum Law, right? Me, I prefer car analogies.

I still think R600 won't be cheaper than G80 simply b/c it should have more RAM per comparable SKU. I'm guessing NVIO is a comparatively negligible cost and GPU cost will come out even thanks to 80 vs 90nm. I'm also guessing G80 will continue to have relatively more TMU than shader power than R600, and that ATI most likely won't push more than 4 AA samples/s. That leaves huge bandwidth as the differentiator, and though it wouldn't be out of character for ATI to boost baseline IQ over max performance, I still think performance will be the differentiator at the high end and ATI will have a slight edge with (to borrow an NV term) HRAA scenarios.

Still, the shader scenario continues to intrigue. 320*800MHz vs. 128*1350(++)MHz. Will it matter enough given current benchmark suites? Not to mention that a G80U pushing 128*1800MHz pulls pretty close upon naive inspection, and may not need to clock the rest of its core much higher if it's got more TMUs, which may mean even a G80U consumes significantly less power than a R600XTX.

There, I got all that clueless speculation off my chest. I'm good for another week of waiting.

 

Kinda like the G80 right now, right?

I'm pretty sure most people expected Nvidia to respond in kind. Many I recall were quite shocked when it didn't perform as well as the R300.

 

ROFL

Errr...why only 4xAA or was that just a typo? As for HRAA differences I'd personally prefer to see a few more ROP-interna details before I'll speculate too much about anything. Frankly I would expect to see also here single cycle 4xMSAA and thus at least also 8xMSAA, but a finer description of all the ROP capabilities would help a tad more.

As for the theoretical maximum GFLOP numbers which IMHO will come damn close to the theoretical maximum values (for both) only in singled out synthetic benchmarks, I wouldn't be surprised if NV clocks some sort of "Ultra"-whatever slightly higher and gives it a significant shader domain boost to equal at least those rather senseless numbers.

I'm not saying that I don't expect R600 to not end up any fast than the 8800GTX, rather the contrary; but senseless maximum theoretical numbers don't really mean all that much and that goes for both sides.

 

I must have missed something. 3dmark-06 uses AA/AF?

 

Ail, whoops, typo. I meant 4 AA samples/clock, like G80.

IbaneZ, I thought 3DM06 uses no AA and 4x AF by default?

 

I guess we will see a lot of 8800 cards on ebay after r600 with 1gb ram gets out

For me either ati/amd does not seem worried.
The postpone could been good for several reason,
marketing a whole one for all solution with the spanish baby with a red dragster using a cruisecontrol in all levels of products seems like a nice launch,
its just not a videocard anymore, its a full set of products used in conjunction with eachother.

Spanish baby=barcelona K10 quad genuine cpu.
Red dragster= r600 high end videocard.
cruisecontrol= new chipsets.

Use AMD to bring out the power in your videocards.

 

http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=354&Itemid=1

 

As the old saying goes, haste makes waste. The thing about "jumping ship" is that you want to avoid doing it when you can, unless you have a magic wallet and you don't care if you have to jump back... If R600 turns out to be appreciably better than G80, then the early "ship jumpers" are going to wish they hadn't been so hasty. OTOH, if G80 turns out to be appreciably better than R600, then the only "penalty" I can see that people will "pay" for waiting to buy it is that they'll probably wind up with much better G80 drivers from the start than the ones that have shipped with the G80s thus far.

IE, since it is well known that the R600 launch is imminent, it really makes no sense to "jump ship" right now, does it? Far better to wait until the product launches to decide on what ship you want to sail. Besides, at the moment, there isn't a single game out there, or which has recently gone gold that my current x1950 Pro AGP won't run with ease...

BTW, the only reason people waited to "jump ship" post R300 (I didn't--I went straight to R300 from nv25) is because ATi was a darkhorse 3d gpu maker at the time, and people weren't accustomed to ATi leaping out ahead of the former pack of 3dfx and nVidia. That made it much easier to believe some of the hype nVidia kept spewing about nV30 right up until nVidia canceled it. Since then, Ati has been out front for a long time, and ATi has completely revamped its driver reputation. So I think that today it's much easier to wait and see what ATi is bringing to the table.

 

Do we? Last time it was imminent also, don't you think? Not that i think AMD will delay once more the launch, but i think it would be wise not to be certain knowing the past of the R600 launch dates

 

Hmmm what about those people that held on to pretty weak GPU's while waiting for R600 when they could have been having a much better gaming experience on a G80 based card. You know, like those people suffering with X1950Pro's for example

 

To be honest, it is quite amusing to see fanboys making excuses.

Sorry, but if R600 is anything remote to a monster performance-wise, and if the only problem is yield, ATi won't delay it, it will simply release a degrade version with lower frequence and disabled units, since it will be enough to keep the competition and buy their time and money, thats something anyone whose IQ >50 can figure out.

No,the reason why R600 is so late, is not because the bullsh!t family launch, is not because ATI want wait until there are some DX10 games in the market, nor is because it is too strong so ATI want to hide it to give NV a deathblow (lol, you have to love those die-hard fanboys' funny little logic).

The only reason that why R600 is late, which is quite obviously to anyone whose IQ>50, is because it DO NEED all the fvcking help, and DO HAVE TO clock that high to just keep the pace, and hence the power problem, the yield issue and the delay, delay and delay.

So please, quit day-dreaming, after all, NV30 is only 4 months later (Nov compare to Jul), and it is not hard to image the performance of R600 based on industrial history

 

btw, when I say NV30 is 4 months later, I mean it is 4 months later than its competitor, R300.

And now R600, is already 4 months later, and is projected to be about 6 months later, judging by the trend, it won't take too much time before ATI is one generation later

 

Please stop

Actually the performance of the r600 is very good and yeilds are probably the only thing holding it back, don't know if lower clocked parts will yeild better, because don't know where the problem is.

Launching a card with poor yeilds will have the same effect if not worse if the product is only competitive in nature or slightly faster. More people will jump ship, because now everyone knows the performance there won't be anything holding these people back.

As you said look at history see what happened in the last 2 generation launchs for ATi, they came out with products with performance slightly better performance (initially for last gen, drivers improved the performance much more later on) but still got pounded on sales. Now after the g80 was released the last gen ATi dropped prices on thier mid top end cards and grabbed marketshare back.

You can't use the nv30 as an example, because the analogy doesn't work out since the nv30 had more issues then being late and hot.

 

The irony and flame-bait in the above two posts is obvious.

 

Indeed, G80 was supposed to launch in May of 2006 (Computex) and be a direct competitor to R580. instead it was delayed for months and when it finally was released it proved to be a revelation in nV's product portfolio, Delays tell you nothing.

Just.. as the user himself.