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  • Regs - Sunday, September 11, 2005 - link

    That's all I really care about right now between Nvidia and ATI. 550 dollars for a video card is almost as marked up as today's crued oil market.
  • Rza79 - Saturday, September 10, 2005 - link

    One other possibility would be that each quad consists of 8 pipes on the R520.
    That would explain why they talk about 16 - 24 - 32 pipes = 2 - 3 - 4 quads.
    I seriously doubt that ATI would call it X1800 if it would have the same amount of pipes compared to the X800.
  • Jep4444 - Saturday, September 10, 2005 - link

    the GeForce 2(Mx aside), GeForce 3, GeForce 4(Mx aside again) and Fx 5800/5900 all have the same pixel pipeline configuration yet we saw some significant performance increases from generation to generation

    remember the R520 will utilize FP16/32 as opposed to FP24 so we should see some immediate performance changes there and the architecture is entirely different so i think a new name is fitting for the card, even if they do end up with 16 pixel pipes
  • JarredWalton - Saturday, September 10, 2005 - link

    We've heard specifically that RV530 is 12 pipelines. More importantly, deactivating 8 pipelines at a time doesn't make much sense - it's too coarse-grained. A quad of pipelines might use up something like 20 million transistors, so an octet would be twice that many. There are some pretty significant enhancements to the pipelines, so changing the name to X1800 would be warranted if the new chips are significantly more powerful, clock for clock.
  • Rza79 - Sunday, September 11, 2005 - link

    I was specificly talking about the R520 not the RV5xx series.
    But it's just a thought ...
  • shabby - Saturday, September 10, 2005 - link

    Any word on agp cards?
  • JarredWalton - Saturday, September 10, 2005 - link

    I have heard rumors that ATI won't be pursuing AGP versions of these cards at all. Nothing official, though.
  • Slappi - Saturday, September 10, 2005 - link

    The name is lame and the marketing BS talk about 4 quad trying to cover up that it is ONLY A 16 PIPE card smacks of desperation.

    Wow did ATI drop the ball on this one big time.
  • Griswold - Saturday, September 10, 2005 - link

    Wonder if you still say that once they pop 24 and 32 pipe versions - or even after this 16 pipe thing pulls even with the g70 due to some other "gimmicks". Pipelines isnt everything, you know.

    I probably still wont wait and buy me some NV piece this time, for my new box.
  • dwalton - Saturday, September 10, 2005 - link

    I highly doubt that we will see a 32, 24 pipeline version of the R520 if all the current 1800s being released are 16 pipeline parts unless your comment includes the R580.

    While a lot of people believe these new parts will be 32 pipeline parts with half the pipelines disabled, I find it highly unlikely for ATI to go this route. This would produce a lot of wasted silicon per core and wafer and would kill the profit margin on the 16 pipeline chips.

    Even if ATI could regain the performance title under this scenario, Nvidia could simply drop the prices of their cards and beat ATI on a performance per dollar ratio. This would squeeze the profit out of the R520 cards. Taking in account the capital invested into several tape outs of the 520 and this puts ATI in a very undesirable position. Its no use of being the performance king if you cannot not capitalize on it profitwise.

    I want to believe that ATI spent part of the delay taping out a 16 pipeline part that is somewhat competitive against the g70 and provides good profit margins. Enough to compete with nvidia on performance per dollar ratio if not on performance alone.

    ATI's time and resources would be better spent on concentrating on the R580 and R600. If nvidia's 5XXXs showed us anything, then it would be that a unsucessful launch of a underperforming GPU won't kill you if you are price competitive and have a better performance competitive GPU on the way.


  • wien - Saturday, September 10, 2005 - link

    If, and that's a big if, a 16 piped R520 beats the G70, why would ATI launch a version with more pipes? (Even if it's a 32 pipe design) The less pipes they have to activate to be competitive, the more chips they have to sell. From a business point of view that's much more important than beating the competition by miles and miles... Yes it wastes a lot of silicon (and makes us hardware freaks cry), but with the increased yields, it might not matter all that much to ATI.
  • bersl2 - Saturday, September 10, 2005 - link

    quote:

    The available marketing information claims that the GPU uses an "ultra-threaded quad-core 3D architecture" and a "512-bit ring bus" memory controller.


    Yuck. They're making a big deal about ring buffers.
  • Xenoterranos - Saturday, September 10, 2005 - link

    The ATI offering is shaping up to be interesting at least, and I can't wait until they show the rest of the lineup. I hope they spent all that extra time making these things better. I'm really looking forwad to a next-get video card built in to the mobo for some serious low-profile projects.

    btw, fp.
  • DestruyaUR - Saturday, September 10, 2005 - link

    I'm gonna keep waiting - I bought an XPS Gen 2 to last me until ~mid-2006/early 2007.

    About the only thing I might possibly splurge on would be a new graphics module for Christmas, since rumors are already flying about the 7800 Go series, and the most recent BIOS for the notebook hinted at more graphics card support.

    But desktops can kiss my ass until Vista, Displayport, and DDR2 on Socket M2 at the very least.
  • Xenoterranos - Sunday, September 11, 2005 - link

    :) couldn't agree more. That ULI "future cpu slot" thing really has me interested.
  • Pete84 - Saturday, September 10, 2005 - link

    Vista will make any hard ware upgrade until it is released uncertain at best.

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