R600 PRO to fight 8600 GTS

[JPB]

http://www.fudzilla.com/index....view&id=2302&Itemid=34

http://www.fudzilla.com/index....view&id=2305&Itemid=34



Sources close to the company have confirmed that the R600 PRO is designed to fight Nvidia?s Geforce 8600 GTS and it is supposed to arrive very soon.

The R600 PRO is an R600 with a few Shaders disabled, but according to our sources this chip should be enough to fight and beat the 8600 GTS in most of the benchmarks.

We don?t know what the fixed launch date is, but we expect it within a few weeks time. The key thing is that the R600 PRO or Radeon HD 2900 PRO will use the fallen R600 chips, the ones where not all of the Shaders works.

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The beauty of the R600 design is that the chip is really modular and you can turn on or off entire parts of the chip. We already wrote that it will have less Shaders and possible even less ROPs than the real R600 chip but the R600 PRO will also feature a new slower memory interface.

This is supposed to be a more expensive mainstream card that should sell for $200 to $250.

The R600 PRO will have 256 bit memory and it will use GDDR4 at high clock speeds which should be enough to beat the Geforce 8600 GTS, even the overclocked ones.

The Radeon HD 2900 PRO will simply have more memory bandwidth, but the chip will be as big as R600 and will eat a lot of power. At the end it will bring you the performance, but it will be an expensive card for ATI to produce.

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Updated from Fudzilla....


http://www.fudzilla.com/index....view&id=2328&Itemid=34

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ATI has already announced a R600PRO based card clocked at 600 MHz for its FireGL range, but as far as we know the HD 2900 PRO card will end up with 160 Shaders and half of the ROPs.

The Radeon HD 2900PRO will end up with 160 Stream processors, 8 ROPs, 16 TMUs and a 256 Bit memory interface.

The Texture Memory Units are the week spot of the R600 design and ATI didn?t reduced its number which will sure come in handy.

The rest of the 160 Stream processors are simply disabled as well as additional 8 ROPs.

 

[jjzelinski]

Originally posted by: JPB
http://www.fudzilla.com/index....view&id=2302&Itemid=34

http://www.fudzilla.com/index....view&id=2305&Itemid=34



Sources close to the company have confirmed that the R600 PRO is designed to fight Nvidia?s Geforce 8600 GTS and it is supposed to arrive very soon.

The R600 PRO is an R600 with a few Shaders disabled, but according to our sources this chip should be enough to fight and beat the 8600 GTS in most of the benchmarks.

We don?t know what the fixed launch date is, but we expect it within a few weeks time. The key thing is that the R600 PRO or Radeon HD 2900 PRO will use the fallen R600 chips, the ones where not all of the Shaders works.

_____________________________

The beauty of the R600 design is that the chip is really modular and you can turn on or off entire parts of the chip. We already wrote that it will have less Shaders and possible even less ROPs than the real R600 chip but the R600 PRO will also feature a new slower memory interface.

This is supposed to be a more expensive mainstream card that should sell for $200 to $250.

The R600 PRO will have 256 bit memory and it will use GDDR4 at high clock speeds which should be enough to beat the Geforce 8600 GTS, even the overclocked ones.

The Radeon HD 2900 PRO will simply have more memory bandwidth, but the chip will be as big as R600 and will eat a lot of power. At the end it will bring you the performance, but it will be an expensive card for ATI to produce.

With a little Rivatuner or ATITool lovin' this could be sweet...

 

[Slugbait]

Most sites picked up this news last week at the Inquirer. AMD has posted info about the FireGL based on the R600 Pro, but I couldn't find anything else, so this is probably still just an Inquirer story.

But I don't think this card is going to fight with the 8600GTS, simply because I don't think they will price it competitively. For people looking for a mid-range card, it's probably going to fall in-between the choices of a 8600GTS and 8800GTX 320.

And if it doesn't do HDCP, bets are off.

 

[Cookie Monster]

Yes, and i could imagine the margins being poor for this card.

A flagship GPU to take on a midrange G84?!? This is basically the third time ATi has done this.

However, i guess they could atleast fill in the gap between the 8800GTS320 and the 8600GTS.

 

[JPB]

This would be an OK Crossfire option, if the price was right. I wonder how many shader's ATI/AMD will disable for this card ? I also agree that this card will not compete ( price or performance ) with the 8600GTS. The PRO versions of ATI's cards has always been pretty good performers. The 8600GTS is 128-Bit...Wonder since this card will be at least 256-Bit, if it will be a good bit faster ?

 

[ronnn]

If if actually uses less than 150 watts .. may be a very interesting choice. I like the cheap cards. :beer:

 

[Matt2]

Originally posted by: JPB
This would be an OK Crossfire option, if the price was right. I wonder how many shader's ATI/AMD will disable for this card ? I also agree that this card will not compete ( price or performance ) with the 8600GTS. The PRO versions of ATI's cards has always been pretty good performers. The 8600GTS is 128-Bit...Wonder since this card will be at least 256-Bit, if it will be a good bit faster ?

Depends on how many shaders or more importantly, TMUs are disabled. You can have all the memory bandwidth in the world, but if you are bottlenecked somewhere else, it wont make any difference (2900XT).

i think AMD needs another option between 2600XT and 2900XT, but I dont know if this is going to be what the doctor ordered. Performance may be there, but as others have said, profits are going to suffer.

Makes you wonder why companies like Nvidia and AMD dont think of these things before they launch cards. This "Pro" would have made more sense if it was released along with the flagship.

 

[jjzelinski]

If we're lucky though this might be a repeat of a 6800nu with disabled shaders. If this card is softmodded to mask some native features and they could be unmaksed via rivatuner or whatnot that would be sweeeeet.

 

[HannibalX]

It better beat the 8600 GTS seeing as my X1950 Pro can mop the floor with it.

 

[coldpower27]

Originally posted by: jjzelinski
If we're lucky though this might be a repeat of a 6800nu with disabled shaders. If this card is softmodded to mask some native features and they could be unmaksed via rivatuner or whatnot that would be sweeeeet.

I think both Nvidia and ATI learned their lesson after the Radeon 9500 NP, Radeon X8xx Series, and the Nvidia Geforce 6800 Series, they will be likely hardware cut with a laser, so that none of this softmodding is possible.

 

[coldpower27]

Originally posted by: Cookie Monster
Yes, and i could imagine the margins being poor for this card.

A flagship GPU to take on a midrange G84?!? This is basically the third time ATi has done this.

However, i guess they could atleast fill in the gap between the 8800GTS320 and the 8600GTS.

I will say it before and say it again, considering the humongous gap this generation Nvidia and ATI should have created 4 different core configurations as opposed to the 3 that have been used in the past few generations.

 

[JPB]

Updated....

New info ? Maybe ? Maybe not ?