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!"

Comments

Rocking v2.0.

[saintlupus]

You decide if it is real or not, a solid dual GPU solution would surely rock the industry to massive proportions ...as soon as the next version of the drivers come out, I presume. This is an ATI product, remember.

--saint

Stereo

[oever]

2 GPUs: that means 3D viewing. One for red and one for blue. I better find them goggles.

Re:Stereo

[jra101]

The goggles do nothing!

Re:Stereo

[ceejayoz]

So everyone who makes a Simpsons reference should be immediately modded up?

D'oh! (mod me up) :-/

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Which industry?

[FortKnox]

a solid dual GPU solution would surely rock the industry to massive proportions!

Which industry would that be? The gaming industry is slowing down as far as graphics go. Mark my words, there is going to be a shift soon from graphic intensive to gameplay innovation. People don't want games to be any prettier (or don't notice much of a difference). Notice how the mod community is getting bigger and better? Its cause they take the graphics engines and add innovation.

I'm rambling, but I think that these new video cards aren't going to be this big explosion that they were in the past. Sure they are big and powerful, but people aren't going to fork over the cash to get this one when they can get a good GeForce2 that can play their games just as well.

Re:Which industry?

[FortKnox]

Because they are both time restrictive. If you want a game with great innovation, you need to buy a graphic engine and work solely on the innovation. If you want pretty graphics, you spend a ton of time on the engine, and little on the game.

If you do both, either your innovation or your graphics will be outdated by the time you finish.

Re:Which industry?

[chrysrobyn]

Which industry would that be? The gaming industry is slowing down as far as graphics go.

Hi, FortKnox, I'd like to disagree with your "marked words". I'd say that anything that dramatically increases the performance of graphical gaming will be welcome. I grew up playing PC-Man, Friendlyware PC Arcade and other ASCII games. I eventually progressed to Doom, to Quake (by way of Heretic, which I liked more than my friends). On opening day, I bought Warcraft III. Turns out my 16 meg Radeon doesn't play it perfectly smoothly, so I may end up buying a new video card by the end of the year for my dual G4. In my case, the vid card is clearly the bottleneck.

People have been talking a deal over the years about how consumers don't want anything prettier (or won't notice), they're happy with what they have. Game play is what's important. Don't try to tell me that Myst was more than an eye candy excuse. Sure, consumers are happy with what they have now, but it turns out that pretty is what sells in the stores -- nobody wants to read a novella describing "game play", they want to see screenshots!

I'm rambling, but I think that these new video cards aren't going to be this big explosion that they were in the past. Sure they are big and powerful, but people aren't going to fork over the cash to get this one when they can get a good GeForce2 that can play their games just as well.

You actually remind me of the neigh-sayers (or nay-sayers, depending on where you're from) a decade, two or three ago saying that games were nothing more than a distraction on computers. Nobody ever designs a computer for the things, and certainly nobody would fork out over $500 just to play games! Can you tell me which industry is driving which? I won't say that iD is single-handedly responsible for Intel's bottom line over the past 10 years, but I will say that consumer's demand for "prettier, better, smoother" has been responsible for a great many computer sales. They don't need 2GHz Pentiums / Athlons to balance their checkbooks or play with Mozilla (yet).

The ultimate in game play, I'm willing to bet, is an eyepiece or two that behaves as a huge, high-res screen, but takes up the entire field of view. That will be a great number of pixels (dare I guess 10k horiz by 5k vert per eye?) Maybe we'll have some game play innovations along the way, but there is certainly a need for more innovation. Perhaps we'll be stopping by 32" LCDs (or OLEDs) on the way, banks of seamlessly tiled conventionally sized screens, or even something different. The fact of the matter is, consumers are happy with what they have -- until they see something better. That's where the bucks are. Where would Gateway/ Dell/ Compaq/ Toshiba/ HP/ Apple be without those consumers wanting the next pretty thing?

Oh, and yes, I do see the mod community getting bigger. They even have some great successes. But, do you see them modding Wolf 3d? Doom I? Or do they move on, exercising the latest engines to the fullest of their abilities? Would they prefer engines that allow them to show on the screen what they have in their heads?

Dual GPUs

[Rupert]

Right, like all those dual CPU desktops I see.

Re:Dual GPUs

[sporktoast]

What a GREAT idea!

I'll start up a computer company to capitalize on the hig demand for such systems. We'll put all the horsepower into killer graphics and put them in cool looking boxes.

I think I'll call the company SGI. With a plan like this, we'll be around FOREVER.

Re:Dual GPUs

[Anonvmous Coward]

"Dual CPU's on the desktop are a waste of money, by the time you need the extra horsepower..."

That's not necessarily true. I've been running dual for a couple of years now, and the benefits I see to it are far deeper than adding 'extra horsepower'.

I'm a 3D artist. I use Lightwave primarily, but also use Photoshop and After Effects quite extensively. I spent a LOT of time waiting for stuff to get done. My boss got me a dual Athlon 1600 with a gig of RAM early this year. She didn't get it for me because she wanted me to halve my rendering times, but rather she wanted me to make better use of my time while the computer was busy.

Lightwave is multithreaded, but not very elegantly. As a matter of fact, I rarely enable the multithreaded option. Instead, while it's rendering, I set up processes on the other processor to continue on with what I'm doing. Sometimes I'm building the next model, sometimes I'm generating a texture in Photoshop, or I'm setting up a composition in After Effects.

So while my computer is busy rendering, I'm still busy being productive. Some of you are saying "Yeah, but you'll never get 2x the processing out of it." And you know what? That's basically true, at least in a benchmark point of view. I get close to double clock speed when I have a rendering running on each processor, but I doubt I hit 2x. I don't need 2x anymore, though. About a year ago I started layering my animations. That means that my computer would render elements of a scene, which render much faster than the entire scene. As each frame is generated, it gets added to the composition in After Effects. So while my computer is rendering, I'm busy in After Effects getting it all put together. This sure beats waiting for the rendering to get completed. Heck, thanks to this technique (and the dual proc), I rarely have 'over-the-weekend-renderings' that have the potential to go horribly wrong.

Would I be better off with a second machine? No. For the amount if money that was spent on my machine (roughly $1,500 sans monitor and hard drives), I probably could have gotten more 'pixels rendered' per minute. But, it'd be a huge blow to my workflow switching between two computers. It wouldn't take very long for the 100mbit connection between them to become a huge bottleneck. As a matter of fact, I'm not sure it would have been all that cheaper. We'd still have to get me high end video cards and monitors for each machine.

Are dual proc desktops for everybody? Not really. The best benefit you'd see is that Windows 2000 behaves a LOT better. Explorer and IE are both very multithreaded, and are much more responsive. As a matter of fact, my Athlon 1.2 gig machine at home felt sluggish compared to my old Dual P3 550. It kicked the 550's butt at rendering, but when it came to browsing the web, doing email, etc, the dual 550 was much more responsive.

In short, dual processor machines have their place. If you primarily play games, you probably won't care much. But if you do CPU intensive work, it'll make your life a lot easier. Unless, of course, you like having nothing to do while your machine is busy.

Re:Bull

[levik]

Ummm... ATI had nothing to do with the voodoo 5, you know that, right? Anyway, the ATI driver support is supposedly improving. Maybe if they concentrated on making solid drivers about figuring how to make things look faster in Quake3, they would have a better reputation on the market.

Re:ATi

[dinivin]

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

Promises, promises...

[bachelor3]

...would surely rock the industry to massive proportions!

Yeah, they said this about the final Kiss tour as well.

Stop Slamming ATI

[N8F8]

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).

Re:Stop Slamming ATI

[Zathrus]

For all you GNU/Linux junkies, ATI has been much more forthcoming in information for developing XF86 drivers than NVidia(proprietary binary only).

People who whine about this just prove how inane and stupid the free software movement can be.

Look at this, and virtually every other thread, regarding ATI. See how many complaints there are about the poor drivers despite the superior hardware. Contrast to nVidia, whose drivers support every card made going back 3 years, have great performance, and are usually very stable.

Now tell me again how there aren't trade secrets in that driver code?

Picture

[jwilhelm]

Here's a picture of it off the forum:
http://www.jeffwilhelm.com/files/r250.jpg

Feel the heat

[wazzzup]

Is it me or sometime soon are we going to have to plug our computers into the 220 socket where the washing machine used to be?

Besides, who needs clean clothes when your getting 200 fps ;o)

Rock the industry?

[Saurentine]

"You decide if it is real or not, a solid dual GPU solution would surely rock the industry to massive proportions!"

(emphasis added)

When did Slashdot start hiring cheezy '80s Hair Metal band rejects to post stories to the front page?

It's "News for Nerds", not "News for Mullet-Sporting Losers Who Can't Get Over Their High School Glory Days".

Flamebait? Maybe a little. ;)

Re:Picture -- FAKE

[jest3r]

That picture looks like a photoshop job ..

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 .. although some of the stuff has been switched around this is a pretty amateur job.

see original here:
http://home.earthlink.net/~doniteli/radeon8 500-64m b.jpg

I doubt it matters.

[The_Shadows]

You know what the best card out there is? It might surprise you. At a low end price tag of ~$800 and up to nearly $6500 the Voodoo 5 6000 is one of the best cards out there. The price tag is that high because it is, unsurprisingly, a collectors item.

I've seen this card work. I runs fast and it looks gorgeous.

You know what the Parhelia tried to do? Fragmented AA? Voodoo could've torn that up years ago. The V5 6000 did 8x Full screen AA. Fast. At 1024. It's amazingly gorgeous.

Think about it. This card is 2-3 years old. The architecture is what matters. Not the amount of GPUs. The GeForce4 4600 can't even consider 8xAA. The V5 6K does, and it does it well. On 128M of SDRAM. I'd still maybe take the 4600 over the V5 6K. But it would be a hard decision. The 4600 with it's DDR memory and GPU can handle some things better. Some. Not all.

This card just proves that it really doesn't matter how much RAM or how many GPUs a card has. It's in the way the card is built. There aren't many cards I'd take over the V5 6K. If I could get one, for myself to keep, I'd pull me Geforce 3 out in a heartbeat. The GPU isn't a factor here. The RAM (DDR over SDR) isn't a factor. The V5 6K is just that well built, even 3 years later.

There. I've said my piece. After seeing the V5 in action, I don't care to get the least bit excited about the "latest greatest" graphics cards ever again.

Re:Really now...

[Zathrus]

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.

HW drivers vs HW specs

[KieranElby]

> 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.

AFR

[Toraz Chryx]

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.

Well...

[Chasing Amy]

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...

Re:Two really good reasons to avoid ATi

[The Pi-Guy]

Yup. I, too was fucked out of my money, by their
awful driver support.

About 4 years ago, when I was buying my new PC
(for the time... 400MHz P2), I had never heard of
nVidia. I had two options: nVidia card (cheaper)
or ATi card (more expensive.)

Well, never having heard of nVidia, I went ATi.
HAH! There were never any drivers for my poor ATi
Rage LT Pro... MAYBE if I was lucky, I could get
a half-decent framerate in the DirectX sample...
but there was NO OpenGL acceleration at all!!
Mind you, this was under 98, NOT 2000 or any
other platforms that are especially difficult.
The Linux drivers (UTAH-GLX) weren't much better
either - every other launch of a 3D app, the
machine would go down, requiring me to SSH in and
reboot. (I couldn't just restart the X server,
that didn't work. ARRRGGHHH!)

But, we also had another machine with an ATi
card, that time a P2-450 with (I believe) the
same card, except with digital out. That machine
ran 2000. Well, there were drivers once, all
right... the "recommended" drivers were the ones
that came with 2k (they said it themselves!), and
THEY SAID that those drivers didn't provide
acceleration. So, they also had the "alternate"
drivers. I gave those a shot - couldn't hurt
anything, no? I grabbed those. Now, I have an ATi
logo sitting in the taskbar, allowing me to
adjust nothing since it's a LCD flat-panel. It
looked promising... I ran my little app, Snake3D. The machine locked hard. "#$!%!!" I remember
not even trying DirectX, and I immediately went
back to the software drivers.

So, learn from my fuck-ups, and don't buy it
until you see it running in your favorite OS
(whatever it may be), running your favorite game.
(Preferably something graphically intensive -
make sure it's not software rendering, and turn
it to high quality.)

Or, if you just want to screw off ATi for fucking
everyone else off with high-priced cards and
missing drivers, go for a GF4. You don't need a
duallie GFX card anyway. :)

But whatever you choose, have fun!
--j

Why I think this is fake

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.jeffwilhelm.com/files/r250.jpg

I apologize in advance for the AC post, but being as my company has a working relationship with ATI, blah, blah, etc etc.

On to why I think this is fake:

1. Look at the heatsink/fans. From the picture, it looks like they are using different model fans for the different GPU's, looking at the position at which the power wires are coming from. Being that I am a board designer, I can tell you that this would never happen, in order to keep the bill of materials down.

2. On the very bottom right of the card, under the last SRAM chip, there is a small device (regulator?) that looks like its overlapping the edge of the board. This would never pass board layout verification, because there are certain clearances you need to observe when laying out pcb's.

3. It looks like the lower GPU is violating the AGP spec for connector keepouts. I'm not sure on this, as I dont have the AGP design guide handy, but that GPU looks like it's positioned extremely low.

4. Silkscreen for some of the parts further down the board (compare some of the electrolytic can & SRAM silkscreens) seems to be conspicuously absent.

5. Look at the ATI symbol silkscreen. Right above it is a fiducial (these are used during assembly, as a way for the machine doing the assembly to calibrate it's position to the board), and part of a silkscreen that looks exactly like the assembly guide for the SRAMs! This is the thing that to me stands out the most as being doctored.

What the Hell?!?

[djohnsto]

Do you even know what a V5 6000 is? It's a 4 GPU version of the V3!!!

Think about it. This card is 2-3 years old. The architecture is what matters. Not the amount of GPUs.

Again, this card had 4 processors!

...The GeForce4 4600 can't even consider 8xAA. The V5 6K does, and it does it well. On 128M of SDRAM.

It sort of had 128M of RAM. It actually has 32MB of RAM per processor. So, all the latest games that use up more than 32MB of RAM in texture / geometry caching will run really slowly on the V5. Also, for those that don't remember, this was the card that you had to plug into the wall separately from the computer.

Don't get me wrong, I've used the V5 5500 (2 GPU version), and it was really cool at the time. But I'll take a GF4 any day of the week over any voodoo you offer me (unless of course I can sell it at the collector's item price :)

Let's go to the numbers (Re:I doubt it matters.)

[nosferatu-man]

Some numbers for you.

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_6000/5 .html

GF4 numbers: All over, but I used these:
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=15 83&p =9