An upcoming entry to the video card market from ATI has the potential to recapture the gaming crown.

 

As I write this, it has been a full three months since NVIDIA launched their latest GPU. The 7800GTX was an overnight success, receiving laudable reviews by industry experts and the consumer market alike. Finally! A card that could play their precious Battlefield 2 and Far Cry at maximum details and playable framerates. Perhaps more important was an entirely different aspect of NVIDIA’s launch: the card’s immediate and widespread availability. As has been the case in the past, when a new GPU is released it takes a while for it to show up in stores, and the limited availability keeps the prices above MSRP. With the 7800GTX, prices debuted at MSRP and dropped well below within a month’s time.

Meanwhile the problems persisted at the ATI camp: leakage problems with their new R520 core and the difficulty of getting decent 90nm core yields from the silicon wafer. PC Hardware analysts everywhere were predicting some tough times ahead for ATI, who already seemed to be losing more ground to NVIDIA during the last generation of video card competition.

Yet amidst all the rumors of ATI being on the verge of going under, they have managed to succeed in getting the R520 under production at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). And while the released specifications don’t quite live up to early speculation from some disreputable sources, the new ATI card is still expected to make quite an impact on the market.

At first glance you might notice that the R520 based boards have at most 16-pipes, even on the top-end X1800XT model. This is because most video cards nowadays have ultra-threaded quad cores, which are basically just a cluster of 4 pipelines on the core. The R520 has 4 of these so that means 16 pipelines in total. When comparing this with the 24-pipes on the 7800GTX, the logical conclusion is that ATI is about to deliver an underperformer. But look at the other specifications: 625mhz core clock, and 750mhz memory clock, along with 512MB of GDDR3 RAM on a 256-bit bus, utilizing a reworked 512-bit memory controller which allows potentially four times the bandwidth of the next best thing. We can calculate some of the theoretical output values for the card using just the clock speeds, pipelines, and shaders, but what we don’t know for sure is how well all of these things will work together. “512-bit internal memory bus”? We have never seen that before. You have to assume that there will be increased performance, but it is still being channeled through a 256-bit bus in the end so it’s almost anyone’s guess how much of an increase. In the past, ATI’s core logic has been superior to NVIDIA’s on a clock for clock basis. Taking this into account along with the already high clock speed and expected ample overhead for overclocking, the 16-pipe concept kind of loses importance.

There are other cores being released at the same time as well, the R530 and the R515; for mid-range and budget cards respectively. Important to note on this front is the R530 which will be a 12-pipe core with supposed 600mhz clock rate on the core, meaning that the MTexel fill rate of the middle class X1600XT will be equal to the MTexel fill rate of the 6800 Ultra Extreme, NVIDIA’s premiere offering before the 7800GTX. I find it interesting that NVIDIA does not have a mid-range card out for their new generation quite yet, rumors have it that they are experiencing production problems with the chips for them as well.

It is plenty possible to calculate the fill rates of all the models, but doing so would be kind of pointless because most of the details needed to accurately attain such quantities are not yet finalized numbers, and as such the information given about clockspeeds in this article should be taken with a grain of salt. On a related note, there have been some benchmarks of the cards released from a website called “Hardware Analysis”. These benchmarks are the product of the author’s imagination and have been denied as being accurate by representatives from ATI.

As mentioned earlier, ATI is starting mass productions on all of these chips and the release date is October 5th, so we can at least hope for wide availability immediately thereafter. All R520 boards will have support for ATI’s dual video card mode called “Crossfire”. There will be a special Crossfire Edition of the X1800XT and X1600XT which can be paired with any of the other cards for use on a Crossfire ready motherboard. Another common feature will be a TV encoder, which will enhance the multimedia abilities of the non-AIW cards.

So keep checking that countdown on the ATI website and get ready for some pretty interesting and impressive things from these new technologies.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Support FPSLabs! Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Mixx
  • Google
  • Reddit
  • Slashdot
  • StumbleUpon

You Should Also Check Out These Post:

More Active Posts: