When will R520 ship and how much will it cost?!?

I guess people are just tired of running around in circles trying to figure out what r520 will be. But even if there were some big efficiency gains over the r420 I doubt what you predict is possible.

XT PE -> Ultra : 30% higher clocks + lower precision + equal pipes
500Mhz 16-pipe R420 -> GTX : 16% higher clocks + equal precision + 1/3 less pipes.

You're looking at a 50% reduction in clock advantage and a 1/3 pipe deficit. You must be expecting some pretty massive improvements!! And do we really know how often stalls occur in current hardware?

A 500Mhz 24-pipe R520 is much more believable as a GTX killer IMO.

 

I'm still strongly of the belief that R520 is a 16-fragment-shader pipeline design.

I don't think it's possible to do clock-for-clock or pipe-for-pipe comparisons across the IHVs - the architectures are just too different. I've tried numerous times... Curiously, I think pretty much all the synthetic pixel shader benchmarks show a massive advantage for NVidia hardware (an easy "clock-for-clock" win) - but for some reason it rarely comes out like that in games.

Then you've got the complexities brought into play of AA/AF.

I think it's simplest just to take R420 and extrapolate from there. Core 520MHz versus 500MHz isn't a big deal. Memory 1120 versus 1400 is a bit more interesting.

Then we're just down to how much of a utilisation gain a radically new scheduler provides (if indeed that's what's at the heart of R520). Is it 20%, 50% or what?

7800GTX seems to be about 20-50% faster than R420 - with the odd exception, both in favour of 7800GTX and in favour of R420.

So in general I think a 500MHz R520 will be within 10% of 7800GTX - but there'll be the exceptions.

I doubt that R520 will have the double-Z-rate ROPs that NV40/G70 gain so much with in games like D3 - so games using that kind of technology will still favour NVidia.

Games that use lots of texture-based effects (e.g. motion blur) will, I suspect, continue to strongly favour ATI.

Ah well, only another month to wait, if we're lucky.

Jawed

 

I'm feeling lucky again, I think a month sounds about right.

 

That which renders Oblivion the prettiest and the fastest shall I bestow upon its rigid surface mine blessings (and my money). Nothing else matters. And, sadly enough, I'm dead serious.

 

I'm hoping that RV530 will be out at the same time.

With a bit of luck it'll be X800XTPE performance for top-end mid-range money, and available in AGP. Though the 128-bit bus may put too much of a strangle-hold on things for AA. We shall see.

Jawed

 

Understandable attitude, at least you know what you want it for.

I'm just hoping for an AGP variant, now that I got me contacts back I think I'll push for info on that.

 

For my daughter and I also.

 

I'll most likely do the same, with aproval from the head office.

epic

 

John, does that most likely mean that it will be ATI since the xbox360 is ATI? I am just curious what you think, that is my gut feeling, but intellectually I am not sure that it will actually make much difference, b/c the 1st console titles often suck at working optimally with the hardware.

 

No idea, since I don't know how similar R520 is to that console chip ATI engineered. According to Dave's endless parade of teasings, not very.

 

There are some.

 

That is perhaps the winner as far as vague posts goes, especially in light of Johns statment.

I take it there are some similarities though from that post.

 

Both are made by ATI and produce graphics...

 

Thus my dichotomous love/hate feelings toward Dave.

 

Rys, have you punched Dave for me yet? Please say yes.

 

Hmm, if I were to guess what the similarities are... probably in the memory controller on the shader die (the one that addresses the UMA memory). They probably had to do quite a few tweaks on that puppy to get it to play well with others, and be efficient. Not only a crossbar architecture, but possibly a virtual channel architecture?