RussianSensation
Elite Member
- Sep 5, 2003
- 19,458
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Ok the inquirer is often right but this to me is BS. It takes probably 2 years to design a gpu or at least 1. Last time, the rumour was that ATI bumped its pipelines to 16 from 12 to compete with Nvidia. Yeah sure.... It's not that easy to just bump pipelines from 12 to 16. The extra 4 have to be there in the first place. Now lets assume, Nvidia's card is slower. ATI just keeps those 24 pipes. But the remaining 8 that are "turned off" are there and not doing anythign? But that means the chip is that much larger for nothing? Costs are higher for nothing? Hotter chip for nothing? This makes very little sense. This sounds more like a marketing game than anything -- just rumours flying around. Probably the only thing both companies can do if they release their cards sometime this summer is change the gpu and memory speeds. But the number of pipelines for both graphics cards are already fixed. If ATI or Nvidia plan to release their cards sometime soon, production should start very shortly. Neither company would be able to guarantee yeilds if they suddently increased the number of pipelines. Again, those pipes actually have to be there. Given that X800 cards are 160 million transistors and Nvidia is 222 (and it has been said that a large portion was allocated to SM3.0), 300 million transistors would hardly fit 32 pipelines. Also, it's not like M5 releases 400hp car and then at last minute decides to add a button to add another 100hp to beat the competition? If a company is capable of producing a 500 hp engine right away, they'll release that even if the competition is worse to be that much better than the competition. In the videocard industry no one holds back thats why cards are usually clocked close to the limit.
Again to back up my opinion -- "ATI Technologies will offer a number of versions of its forthcoming visual processing unit?s code-named R520, which seems to be in mass production now" - xbitlabs
Xbitlabs says - "ATI code-named R520 VPU is also projected to support Shader Model 3.0 and other innovations. Still, specifications of ATI?s code-named R520 VPU are unclear at this time. Some sources suggest that the chip may have up to 32 pixel pipelines and up to 350 million transistors, which makes the processor extremely complex. However, given that a new 90nm fabrication process is to be used for the manufacturing of R520, it is unlikely that the visual processing unit will be tremendously large in terms of transistor count and complex in terms of the number of pipelines. Fabless semiconductor designers tend to balance complexity of their chips for new fabrication processes. For instance, since 2002, ATI has not launched manufacturing of high-end graphics chips using a new process technology unless the technology was tested on mainstream chips. Still, even on relatively new manufacturing processes, ATI has set pretty high clock-speeds for its VPUs."
I am not going to agree or disagree with the 32 pipeline statement. But I will disagree with the fact that ATI is still deciding between 24 and 32 pipelines. At this point in the game, ATI would be crazy not to have a finalized design if they plan to release their card anytime before Christmas.
Maybe stability is an issue, but that didn't stop 2 X850XT PE to beat 2 6800Ultras at Doom 3.....Doom 3 XFire Bench Of course it takes time to work out the drivers for every new technology.
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