ATI's R580 = X1900?

[otispunkmeyer]

ATI will announce its new flagship GPU on Tuesday 24th January, 2006 if reports from China today prove to be accurate (thanks to reader Adrian Diaz for the translation). Thus far, the new chip has been known by its R580 codename, but it will reportedly be released as the Radeon X1900.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2005/12/13/ati_radeon_x1900_launch/

ATI has not disclosed specifications of R580, but we are under the impression that it will have significantly more shader power and higher clock speeds over R520. We're expecting to see 48 shader processors attached to the Ultra Threaded Dispatch Processor compared to the 16 shader processors in R520. However, there will be no increase in texture units or pixel output engines - there will still be 16 texture units and 16 pixel output engines.

i sense another good read coming up....thing i love most about new hardware is reading about the technology, understanding how it works.




and for those of a Nvidia dispostition dont worry!.........



Of course, NVIDIA aren't likely to take this lying down. If R580 proves to be substantially quicker than X1800XT, and therefore also GeForce 7800 GTX, then expect Santa Clara to counter-punch with G71. Little is publically known about this new GPU, other than it improves on G70's 110nm process by joining ATI at 90nm.

This normally results in lower power consumption, less heat generated, and higher clock speeds - rumours put G71's core clock in excess of 700MHz; possibly as high as 750MHz. It's worth noting that the reference speed of the 7800 GTX is 430MHz, though the recently released GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB increased that to 550MHz. This would put G71 over 60% faster than the former, and still a third quicker than the latter.

runours yes.........interesting all the same

 

[Lonyo]

Ref: G71
It would be interesting to know whether they have much more headroom RAM wise, and whether increase core clocks will really give that much of an improvement in performance.
Games are going towards shaders, so shader power is obviously gaining in importance, and increasing speed will obviously help this, but RAM speed may also be a factor, and we could see little gain by more bumps in core clock speed, although ATi also seem to be focusing on shader power, so it could be that we don't really need much faster RAM, as what we have at the moment is sufficient.

 

[Munky]

Ati may increase the ram speeds a bit, and probably will with the r580, but it has plenty of bandwidth already. More importantly, with the ring bus controller, Ati not only takes a smaller hit from AA even with slower mem, but it's also ready for ddr4 whenever the memory becomes available, so the mem would be the least of Ati's concerns. The gpu speed is still the major factor in modern games, and as games become ever more shader heavy, I would suspect this trend to continue in the future.