Graphic Cards R600 News Thread

Aces170

Aces170

ex-Mod
At a recent analyst session ATI’s Senior Vice President and General Manager of PC Group, Rick Bergman, has confirmed that their next generation of PC graphics products will feature much of the technology developed for "Xenos", ATI’s XBOX 360 graphics chip. We’ve surmised that this is likely be the case previously, given that Xenos utilises a unified shader architecture at the hardware level, with both Pixel Shaders and Vertex shaders utilising the same ALU resources it becomes a ripe time to implement it with DirectX10 unifying the vertex and pixel shader programming capabilities in the API.

Vertex and pixel processing have previously always been separate hardware functions, though vertex processing moved from a software based solution to hardware with the introduction of NVIDIA’s GeForce 256 and has subsequently got closer to the pixel processing capability with each revision of DirectX Shader Model, to the point where DirextX10 will should dictate the same programming capabilities across both. Even with this being the case there is nothing to suggest that the hardware has to be unified for processing as pixel operations generally have to hide greater latencies than vertex operations thanks to the greater use of texturing in the pipeline. However, Xenos’s design has attempted to remove the texture latency issues from shader programmes by creating a highly threaded design that separates texture instructions from ALU instructions, allowing multiple shader batches to run concurrently, and so it comes as no surprise that ATI should adopt this architecture for the PC, seeing as the investment has already been made.
Click to expand...

http://www.beyond3d.com/#news28611
 
R6xx to Utilise 80nm and 65nm Processes

ATI have previously mentioned that their next generation, DirectX10 architecture would leverage much of the technology designed for "Xenos", ATI’s graphics processor developed for the XBOX 360, and we surmised that would equate to the R6xx generation featuring a unified shader architecture at the hardware level. In a conference call discussing their latest quarter’s financial results ATI’s CEO, Dave Orton, more or less confirmed that the next generation architecture will be unified, and suggested that they will be better off for it with the technology having a proving ground with the XBOX and R6xx effectively being their second generation unified architecture.

A question was asked as to what process their next generation architecture would be based on, and Dave Orton pointed out that the 80nm process comes in a number of flavours, including a cost reduction option, which is currently in the process of being adopted for ATI’s low end parts, and also an 80nm HS process, to be used on more expensive higher end solutions. Dave then went on to say that none of the R6xx generation is likely to be 90nm based, instead split between 80nm and 65nm processes. This suggests that ATI may be adopting the process choices they did with the R3xx and R4xx generation, by introducing the new architecture first at the high end on a known process, and moving the derivative, lower end parts to a newer, smaller process. ATI didn’t do this with R520, choosing to move build the new architecture on the new 90nm process simultaneously because their Shader Model 3.0 choices quite clearly required it, however this utimately ended up backfiring with chip being held up for several quarters while a bug in a 90nm library needed chasing down.
Click to expand...



Source
 
After convincingly taking away the performance crown from NVIDIA, ATI seems to be on a roll. The R580 was a smashing hit, but the R600 seems to be even more stunning. If our sources are to be believed, then the specifications sheet for the R600 will look something like this:

1. Unified shader architecture.

2. 64 pixel/vertex shaders. Since ATI is incorporating an Unified shader architecture, these 64 shaders can be either all pixel, all vertex or a combination of both. In contrast, the R580 based X1900XTX had 48 pixel shaders.

3. 80/65nm fabrication process, though ATI wouldn’t elaborate on the exact split as well as why they weren’t sticking to just a single fabrication process.

4. There was also some passing mention of GDDR4. However, we could not confirm either way whether the R600 would come with GDDR4 onboard. Later variants of the architecture will definitely the updated DRAM standard.

5. As for the clock speed, ATI said they weren’t really too concerned about raising the clock speed to particularly high levels, so we suspect the core clock may not be much higher than the current X1900s.

6. It will obviously be Vista ready and (ATI claims) has been built from the ground up to support DX10.

7. The R600 will also be the first practical implementation of ATI’s GPU concept. This is something we would be very interested in seeing because if this works as well as ATI claims, then apart from cutting down CPU load, it might put certain PhysX processor manufacturers out of business, simply because ATI cards would not need an additional card to do necessary computations for Physics. The onboard GPU will take care of it.

8. The launch of the R600 is expected to be somewhere around Christmas this year.
 
Can't decide yet with all the speculation going on... when I put a new rig together I will want the fastest card available at that time, nVidia or ATi ;)
 
hunt3r said:
So it has 64 shaders, but still no word on the no of ROP's and TMU's. Anyone have any info on that.
Click to expand...

I'm guessing it'll stay at 16/16 but they might bump it up to 24/24. The reason I like ATI's cards are cos they never put any half assed "on paper" features on their cards. When they put in a feature, it works. It was true of pixel shader 2.0, same with shader 3.0, FP blending, h.264 acceleration and now dx10. I for one appreciated the fact that they didn't waste transistors on vertex texture support on their SM3.0 cards cos its dog slow on nvidia which does support them. Now that unified architectures are here, I'm sure there'll be vertex texture support.
 
ATI's R600 to be the biggest graphic chip ever

WE LEARNED that ATI's upcoming R600, its next-generation high-end chip, might end up as the biggest graphics chip of all time.

It won’t be cold either. Indeed, it might be the hottest chip ever, but we were informed that it might be the fastest chip as well.

Even though many have assumed the chip will be the same as the one ATI supplies for the Xbox 360, it won’t be. It will share a similar design but won’t have the integrated memory on die.

It might have as many as sixty four Shader units that would easily make it much more powerful than the Xbox 360 graphics. There may be a lot of 'mights', but there can be no doubt that it will end up faster than the current generation of consoles. And, don’t forget that it can, and will, support the upcoming DDR4-four memory format.

At current schedules, the launch date is expected towards the end of the year.
Click to expand...
 
A whole gigahertz of graphics
R600 WONT be launched that soon, but as we said before it aims to be the fastest and the biggest chip in the computer graphic industry.

ATI is working hard on R600. It won't finish it until the end of the year but it aims to make the fastest chip to date. We heard that the chip might achieve and even surpass the magical 1000MHz clock.

The fastest that Nvidia and ATI can do with 90 nanometres is around 650 to 700MHz and we know that you won't be able to overclock much more with a 90 nanometre chip. This may mean that R600 will be a 65 nanometre component.

We expect that Nvidia might introduce its G80 a few months before ATI, we expect G80 at late summer or early autumn, while we know that R600 wont see the face of the earth until late Q4. Things can always get delayed, as you know.
Click to expand...
 
^^ Now it seems( nothings certain yet) that ATI will delay the introduction of R600 till vista is launched. And since vista itself will be launched only early-mid next year ?? , ati may well launch another card to compete with G 80 before it introduces R600.
 
Vista is coming in January 2007.

ATi will be dumb to delay it further :p..

I hope nVidia has a good answer to the 1000 Mhz Clock Speed :/.
 
^^ Many believe that vista will be delayed despite what M$ says.(It usually takes around a yr. for the OS to come out in the market since the release of its beta version)But if it does come out in Jan. then ati will not prob. delay it launch
 
Back
Top