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Dual GPU graphics solution from ATi?
Graphics Guru writes "Last week TweakTown posted an exclusive picture of the ATi Radeon 8500 MAXX with believable accompanying information also regarding the highly anticipated ATi R300. 3DChipset is today reporting that they have confirmation that the 8500 MAXX is indeed real and is due to be shipped fairly soon. Here's what someone from ATi told them: "The ATI Radeon 8500 Maxx is for real and the card is already in full production and about to be shipped soon. ATi has finally nailed certain issues with the dual chip. Final testings have been done and you should here noise from ATi regarding this offering." You decide if it is real or not, a solid dual GPU solution would surely rock the industry to massive proportions!"
UntiL ATi makes their own *nix drivers, im stickin to Nvidia.
You mean like the linux drivers that ATI wrote for the Radeon 8500 and 8800? Guess you'll be switching to ATI now, right?
Dinivin
I know this was a troll, but there is a driver for raedon cards.
Sure it is not specific to the latest card in this slashdot article, but I'm sure the drivers will be made to work with the new Raedon soon enough.
I read a lot of people complaining about ATI. I think people need to put a little perspective on things. NVidia came out of the blue and used their superior 3D chipsets to grab the mainstream Video market. ATI's response was slow at first, but is really gaining steam. I've got a Mobility M4 in my laptop with great new OpenGL drivers. In my home PC I've got a Radeon 8500 LE that runs 99.9% of all the DirectX games. In the case of the former, my 2D performance was the biggest factor. In the latter, the price gap for comarative performance was a joke. $99 for the ATI Radeon 8500 LE (NewEgg.com) vs $180 for a Nvidia GF4 4400. NVidia is now using their market dominance to bleed the market (a familiar strategy that eventually backfires). Not to mention the beautiful All-In-Wonder I bought for my parent's computer that has the best MultiMedia and TV Tuner I've seen (DScaler ain't bad but can't seem to pick up as many stations).
For all you GNU/Linux junkies, ATI has been much more forthcoming in information for developing XF86 drivers than NVidia(proprietary binary only).
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Here's a picture of it off the forum:
http://www.jeffwilhelm.com/files/r250.jpg
Hey Cat,
r o/ ragefurymaxxdrivers.html
The rage maxx Fury had a 98 driver, in fact im running it on my only 98 box in the house. Did you mean a 2000 driver? That doesnt exist, YET.
The driver released was 95/98/me only
Get your fact straight before posting.
In Fact heres the link,
http://www.ati.com/support/products/pc/rage128p
That picture looks like a photoshop job ..
..
..
.. although some of the stuff has been switched around this is a pretty amateur job.
8 500-64m b.jpg
For one the Heatsink fans are exactly the same - right down to the positioning of the fan fins
For two the wires from one of the fans are not casting a shadow
In fact if you do a Google image search you can find the original image
see original here:
http://home.earthlink.net/~doniteli/radeon
Probably because it's cheaper to build new hardware than it is to try and optimize what's out there. Seriously.
If you can spend $1M on hardware development and come out with a new chip that's 20% faster or spend $1M on software and put out drivers that are 5% faster, where is the money better spent? Besides which, you can charge for the new hardware. Charging for the new drivers is not acceptable to consumers.
Freezing the hardware for "a couple years" is not acceptable. Companies will simply cease to exist. Upgrades are part of the business model of the industry, and that modern systems are capable of doing virtually all tasks home and business users would require of them is part of the reason for the technology bust in the past couple years.
Look, it's simple. If you don't play the latest and greatest games, or don't care if you can play those games at uber-high res with all the effects turned on, then you don't need to upgrade. And yes, you can generally play the new games just fine on an older computer (my system is an Athlon 750, 512MB PC133, 32MB GF2 and runs DS and NWN just fine. Plays Q3 just fine. Will it play UT2 just fine? I doubt it... but it's 2 years old now).
As for "nobody asked hardware companies to push" -- speak for yourself. Go look at the Doom3 demo. You simply can't do that on current hardware with any semblance of speed. Yeah, you can run it on a GF3/4/ATI 8500, but you'll have to run it at a lower resolution and turn off features. Run it on a GF2? An ATI 7500? An MX anything? Maybe. It won't have anywhere near the eye candy.
Once we're to photorealistic scenes being rendered in realtime with no drops below ~60 fps on large, outdoor scenes you can say we've gone far enough. And by that time we'll probably want 3D or something else that will continue to push the bleeding edge.
Until then, there is room for improvement. And there's a lot more room on the hardware side then there is on the software side.
> UntiL ATi makes their own *nix drivers, im stickin to Nvidia.
In ATI's defense, unlike nVidia (who are strictly proprietary), ATI do make the chipset details available so anyone can write open source drivers for whatever esteoric OS they happen to be using - there's more OSs than just Windows and Linux, you know!
Of course, it would be nice if ATI released both specs and drivers, but IMHO, it is better in the long term for open source OSs if the specs are released.
ATI's dual proc cards used Alternate Frame Rendering
GPU1: renders a frame
GPU2: renders a frame - GPU1: Displays frame it just rendered
GPU1: Renders a frame - GPU2: Displays frame it just rendered
etc.
ATI *cannot* do SLI because it's patented, and nVidia bought 3dfx's patents on SLI among other things. This is why ATI used another method--their methos was just as simple and effective; each GPU renders alternate frames. In fact, it has fewer theoretical problems when doing alternate frames, than Voodoos did with rendering alternate scanlines. The scanline approach produced occasional tearing or shimmering effects, though it's very rare.
The problem with the Rage Fury MAXX has to do not with the method of interleaving or the presence of GPUs, but rather the method ATI chose to bridge the two chips, which isn't permitted in the NT AGP code. ATI couldn't find a way around it, so they abandoned the card. Sad, since it was a nice performer under Win9x...
However, many other implementations do 2 graphics chips right with NT support, such as the Voodoo 5 5500 and the high-end multi-chip Quantum3D boards.
So, ATI could easily do a Radeon MAXX part with WinXP support, since they know what mistakes not to make in silicon this time around...
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
Field of view changes very little with changes in resolution. Go ahead, try it.
FOV is based on the "camera angle" (which is probably hardcoded in NWN) and width/height ratio. In 800x600, you actually have a wider FOV than in 1280x1024.
All Your Memory Are Belong To Java
Some numbers for you.
5 .html
5 83&p =9
Q3A, 1600x1200x32 bit (no FSAA)
GF4 Ti4600 : 160.6 fps
V5 6000 : 58.7 fps
Expect almost a linear scaling for FSAA. Note that at 4x, the GF4 would be pushing out around 40 fps. The 6k? About 13. At 8x? Let's be generous, and call it 8. Yes, the machines being tested are very different (a 1.3ghz Athlon vs. an 800mhz P3), but at those resolutions, you're very close to being 100% CPU bound.
I admire the meaningless iconoclasm that would lead one to tout an evolutionary dead-end like the 6000 as the be-all end-all of video cards, but in the future, you would be better served by appealing to the Voodoo's superior blast capacity, or the "warmth" of its image, rather than trying to make a technical argument without even the slimmests of legs to stand on.
Best,
'jfb
Links:
V5 6k benchmarking: http://www.voodooextreme.com/hw/previews/v5_6000/
GF4 numbers: All over, but I used these:
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.