Originally posted by: Pariah
I believe very few prerelease boasts from companies as they are inaccurate far more often than they are accurate. Nvidia didn't choose the horrible cooling solution they are using to impress anyone or for their own amusement, but because that's what they felt was necessary to run their hardware properly. Sure OEM's are free to use any cooling solution they want to, if they want to put a dinky chipset passive heatsink on the card they can, but it isn't going to run at all. We'll see what other companies come up with but to expect major improvements is wishful thinking unless Nvidia has really lost their edge.
Now you're just waffling. Is it a prerelease or has it been released? How can you question the truthfulness of their claims when every single assertion you've made about the FX is based upon assumptions? You think a company would risk their reputation and not be able to deliver? I'm not sure what you do for a living, but in the real world, people and firms are held
accountable for their assertions and "boasts." Of course no one is held accountable in this safe haven called the internet, where the only stakes are a troll or a flame. You should really look into whats going on over at Zalman, they've been producing quiet passive coolers for some time that hardly resemble a "dinky chipset fan".
Evan seems to think that R350 will only achieve ballpark performance of the FX, which is kind of silly when you can see the R300 is already beating the FX in a number of benchmarks.
He said that prior to the benchmarks being released based on his knowledge at the time. Maybe he knew something we don't. Maybe he still does. :shrug;
It isn't going to take much of a clock boost to push it past the FX in the majority of benchmarks. ATi has had 6 months since the R300 release, I would hope they have achieved more than a 10MHz speed bump of the GPU by now.
The R300 has proved to be a pretty decent OC'er so there is definitely headroom left. Mine hits 380MHz standard cooling, and it may go higher than that, I just haven't tried.
The fact that a 9700pro is currently a decent OC'er is actually a bad sign for the R350, IMO. ATI could have very well been depending on that extra headroom for an R300 refresh. Fault tolerances are built into every core design, but there's going to be a point where scaling hits a wall. Without a core revision or a die shrinkage, its anyone's guess what they'll be able to squeeze out of the .15 process. There have been rumors of lower power consumption as well, but we've seen that it does not guarantee higher clock speeds (early T-bred A's), just heat dissipation.
And again, there have been reports of driver problems leading to flawed AA and AF results with the beta drivers, making it more difficult to judge the FX's performance or potential. Many reviews noted that the FX ran significantly faster with aggressive AA and AF settings than the 9700pro, but b/c the quality appeared to be worse, they tested with the quality settings. Reports from nVidia cite driver issues and frame buffer screen capture techniques. Although the impact is questionable, it does introduce a difficult paradigm involving subjective testing methods based on preference. When its all said and done, maybe the aggressive and quality settings of the FX sit on either side of the 9700pro's performance, leaving the final judgement to the end user to decide between more frames per second or image quality.
Please post links to back up this claim. There isn't going to be any huge performance increase from the tested boards to the shipping boards in 3 weeks. Every product release no matter the company these claims are made, and they never turn out to be true. Maybe 6 months from now, but not in 3 weeks.
Not sure if this is a case of selective memory or genuine oversight. The Radeon 9500pro was released just over 2 months ago, and previewed 3 months ago.
9500pro preview dated 10/24
9500pro review dated 11/27
You should be able to quickly see there is in fact a significant increase in performance due to final silicon and drivers; enough to leapfrog an entire GPU family. nVidia may very well be able to perform a similar feat considering the quality of their shipping drivers tend to improve as cited by most review sites. As for having to wait 6 months, I highly doubt it considering they release WHQL drivers
almost monthly. There's often 1 or 2 beta releases between WHQL versions, so there should be improvement with each driver update and game patch (that optimizes for the FX).
? In some cases it gives you marginally better performance. But in order to have that, you need to suffer from the noise the FX makes. I for one am NOT prepared to do that!
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