Early Evaluation of the R600

[Lemur]

This is the first comprehensive preview (http://level505.com/2006/12/30/the-full-ati-r600-test/1/) I've yet seen of ATI's upcoming DX10 card, the R600. Feast your eyes on the bleeding edge, me mateys ...


The R600 Specs are:

64 4-Way SIMD Unified Shaders, 128 Shader Operations/Cycle
32 TMUs, 16 ROPs
512 bit Memory Controller, full 32 bit per chip connection
GDDR3 at 900 MHz clock speed (January)
GDDR4 at 1.1 GHz clock speed (March, revised edition)
Total bandwidth 115 GB/s on GDDR3
Total bandwidth 140 GB/s on GDDR4
Consumer memory support 1024 MB
DX10 full compatibility with draft DX10.1 vendor-specific cap removal (unified programming)
32FP internal processing
Hardware support for GPU clustering (any 2^n number, not limited to Dual or Quad-GPU)
Hardware DVI-HDCP support (High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection)
Hardware Quad-DVI output support (Limited to workstation editions)
230W

[sapi]

This is intersting enough, but there's serious doubts about the credibility of that article...

[Lemur]

Hmm, I'm only finding a single source that conforms with that, Sapi -- the usual folks at Digg saying "Video or it's a fake," and this commentary (http://dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=5524) from DailyTech, which is not exactly a disavowal:


When DailyTech contacted the site owner to get verification of the benchmarks, the owner replied that the benchmark screenshots could not be published due to origin-specific markers that would trace the card back to its source -- the author mentioned the card is part of the Microsoft Vista driver certification program.

If Level505's comments seem a little too pro-ATI, don't be too surprised. When asked if the site was affiliated in any way to ATI or AMD, the owner replied to DailyTech with the statement that "two staff members of ours are directly affiliated with AMD's business [development] division."

[Husar]

230W sounds nice, unless they get those cards a lot lower, they shouldn't count on this customer here.:juggle2:

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

Prices?

Probably won't get a DX10 card for a long time. Just got (:wall:) my x1900, which I'm happy with.

[sapi]

@Lemur, i've been reading this (http://games.internode.on.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=101717&start=0) thread and it's raised some interesting points:

- No pictures have been posted, and there's no real reason why (their excuse about the source being identifyable is nonsense - they could easily blur the tags in ps)
- As you've said, two of the site's employees also work for amd/ati
- ATI has been known to do this before, but to a lesser extent

I'll believe it when it's tested over more than one site...

[Spino]

Well I sincerely hope there's a modicum of truth to these benchmarks as I would love to see AMD/ATI's market share in the 3D market jump a bit higher to keep the GPU race close and the prices competitive.