Graphic Cards R600 News Thread

Retail AMD R600XTX pictured and benchmarked

VR-Zone : Technology Beats - CeBIT : Retail R600XTX Pictured & Benchmarked

Just a recap of what we have told you before, R600XTX retail card is codenamed Dragonhead 2. It is a 12-layer card at 9.5" long with a max TDP of 240W. It is clocked at 800MHz on 80nm process technology, 512-bit memory interface and has 1GB GDDR4 memories onboard. It has 6-pin and 8-pin PCIe connectors but two 2x3 PCIe power can be used. Rumors surfaced over at CeBIT that the final product may be on 65nm if it can be produced in time with reasonable good yield. So far we have yet to get a confirmation that the first shipping R600 cards will be on 65nm but we can't rule out that there are experimental R600 chips at 65nm now. If our source is right, the yield at 65nm is poor at this point of time and expect a limited quantity of 20,000 pieces of R600XTX by middle of April.

Next, we got hold of some preliminary benchmarks figures of the R600 XTX card with core clock at 800MHz vs a GeForce 8800 GTX card. Using a Core 2 Extreme 2.93GHz processor on an Intel 975X board, the 3DMark06 score at 1600x1200 resolution is 97xx on the R600XTX compared to 95xx on the 8800GTX. Seems like R600XTX is running slightly faster than 8800GTX on the early release of drivers for R600. AMD is still working hard on the drivers and there are some more performance left to unlock. However, the DX10 benchmarking war between ATi and NVIDIA has not started yet. The targeted display driver version for launch in May is 8.361 or later (Catalyst 7.4 or 7.5).
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Chimpzilla's Director of Desktop Discrete Product Marketing confirmed that R600/RV610/RV630 are compatible with bridge chips and that there is no problem to bring AGP cards to the market. We doubt that there will be a R600 AGP board coming, due to power issues (four molex connectors required), but mainstream and low-end markets will receive the much-wanted part.

The AGP market may be slowly winding down, but demand for products is still great, and there will be at least three or four different DirectX 10 parts in affordable range.
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AMD confirms future AGP support
 
R600 HAS A secret weapon, an internal sound card. This is the one thing that Nvidia's G8x can't match, other than HDCP on dual-link HDMI.

The ATI sound implementation is not GPGPU code. It is dedicated silicon, probably brought on by the Vista DRM infection and MS twisting arms to force it on people.

In any case, R600 will be compliant with the Vista requirements and can send sound directly over a HDCP/HDMI link. We are told this is a full HD sound setup, not a cheesy 2.1 channel thing.

In contrast, NV G8x parts can't do this. They have to run an external cable from the sound chip to the GPU. This may not sound like much but it blows out several kinds of auto configuration and worse yet violates Vista logo requirements Windows Logo Program Requirements V. 3.0. One has to wonder if this is why NV can't seem to make a functional Vista driver six months in.

The problem with Vista is that the DRM infection mandates that you do not share S/PDIF output over unencrypted links. R600 does this by combining audio and video streams, then pumping them out over HDCP infected links. This is user antagonistic DRM, but it complies with MS logo requirements, and they don't care about user experiences any more than the content mafiaa.

Add in that the R600 can do dual-link HDCP and you are going to be swimming in bandwidth, more than enough to pipe sound down.

Nvidia's G8x on the other hand can't do dual link HDCP at all, so if you have a 30-inch monitor, you will get a black screen. At that point, sound is the least of your problems.

Basically it looks like the sound card in R600 is going to be the killer app for home theatre type apps. G8x simply can not do what is needed here, buggy drivers or not. While the DRM infection stinks, at least R600 will be able to comply.
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R600's secret weapon revealed
 
AMD: We Can Ship R600 Today

Originally set to be released in the fourth quarter of 2006, ATI's first DirectX 10-compliant graphics product is now more than a quarter late. In addition to technology-related issues, Henri Richard, the sales chief at Advanced Micro Devices, said that his company could have started to ship the long-anticipated code-named ATI R600 cards any time, but the world's second largest maker of x86 microprocessors decided to wait until the more affordable derivative graphics chips get to a commercial release point and the whole lineup of DirectX 10-compatible products can be shipped.

"The R600 will be out in the second quarter. The reason we decided to delay the launch was that we wanted to have a complete DX10-enabled solutions top-to-bottom. A lot of people wrote that the reason it is delayed is because of a problem with the silicon, but there is no problem with the silicon. We are demonstrating it. We can ship it today. But if you think about it, looking at where the market is at, the volumes are going to be in the RV610 and RV630, so it makes sense for us to do a one time launch of the entire family of DX10 enabled products," said Henri Richard in an interview with Hardware Zone web-site. Specifications of ATI R600 published by a web-site earlier resemble specs revealed by some other sources back in mid-2006, but are not identical:
64 4-Way SIMD Unified Shaders, 128 Shader Operations/Cycle;
32 texture mapping units, 16 raster operation units;
512-bit memory interface full 32 bit per chip connection;
150W – 230W thermal power envelope;
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X-bit labs - Hardware news - AMD: We Can Ship R600 Today.
 
^^ Yes, I could read that in the Quotes.

I just wanted to lash out!... :p..

Ive waited for too long on this X800XL you see =X..
 
Lol..

If the R600 releases @ 500$, Ill "cut of my left leg and beat myself to death with it."... LOl...

The X2900XTX2 is going to be around 600$ for sure.. Lol..
 
Fudzilla

R650 is 65nm redesigned R600.

The R600 chip is simply too hot and it has terrible heat dissipation and this problem has to be fixed. Dissipation of 230+ Watts is simply too much for any graphic chip and any standard ... this can definitely confirm that R600 won't have a good and great life. R600 will be replaced as soon as possible as soon as the R650 redesign is done.
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PoBoy said:
Fudzilla

R650 is 65nm redesigned R600.

The R600 chip is simply too hot and it has terrible heat dissipation and this problem has to be fixed. Dissipation of 230+ Watts is simply too much for any graphic chip and any standard ... this can definitely confirm that R600 won't have a good and great life. R600 will be replaced as soon as possible as soon as the R650 redesign is done.
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Doesn't look too good for those looking to get one straight away
 
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