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ATI R300 and R250V
Chuu writes "The ATI R300 (Radeon 9700) and R250V (Radeon 9000/Radeon
9000 Pro) reviews are out, at all the
usual suspects, but the one you want to
pay attention to is over at anandtech.com, since somehow Anand got permission to publish his benchmark results for the R300
while the other sites were stuck with whitepapers. The results? The R250V is a GF4MX killer, which is not saying much. On the other hand, the R300 absolutely trounces the GeForce4 Ti4600, running
54% faster in
Unreal Tournament 2003 and 37% faster in Quake 3 at 1600x1200x32 on a Pentium4 2.4ghz."
The reason Anand got to post his benchmarks is because he doesn't have actual numbers... just correlated data. The R300 didn't post 256 fps in UT2k3, it just did x% better than a GF4 Ti4600.
Of course, as he points out, the GF4 numbers are available, and it only takes some simple math to extrapolate from there.
The card looks very impressive. It's out 4 months before the NV30. Maybe by then ATI will have drivers worth a crap too.
Now we can all play games at 3x the refresh rate of the monitor.
Sure you can. Hell, you've been able to for years now. Just drop down to the lowest resolution available, turn off all the effects, textures on lowest quality, and look at the not-so-pretty pictures.
What? You want all that? You want fog, bump mapping, realistic lighting, high quality textures, and anti aliased to boot? At 1280x1024? Well, then keep upgrading. Because while the R300 comes closest to that of any card to date, I doubt it'll be able to handle it for long. Real time graphics still aren't even approaching the level of Toy Story, much less that of Final Fantasy (the movie), or (*gasp*) photorealism.
When we can do realtime 3D effects that are indistinguishible from reality, we might be there. We aren't even close yet.
Oh, and you contradict yourself - you ask for disposable form factors and then ask for an open laptop standard. Hint - if it's disposable, it's not going to be open. Unless you're talking about something as silly and trivial as alkaline batteries.
As I see it, the R250 and R300 are ATI's answer to the GF4 line. The Radeon 8500 was meant to compete with the GF3 line but that hasn't stopped everyone from comparing it to the GF4's. Now the R300 will be out a few months before nvidia's next part, why not compare it to current cards.
If you don't compare it to current cards you don't have a frame of reference for how powerful the new cards are.
I don't see why there won't be. I play RtCW under Linux/XFree86 with my Radeon VIVO and it runs just fine at 1280x1024x32. The composite video in also works, as well as video capture. Give the GATOS people some credit, their Radeon drivers have performed better for me than any ATI Windows or OS/2 (back in the day) drivers ever did.
It really isn't a question of will _ATI_ release linux drivers, but will they release enough documentation so folks like GATOS can implement a driver in a reasonable amount of time.
Hello? Anyone listening?
:)
Yes, an excellent troll; you've sounded passionate enough and invoked "cheaper!" enough to confuse some moderators into giving you points. Let me go over your completely misleading rants:
Now we can all play games at 3x the refresh rate of the monitor.
We don't PLAY games at that rate; we benchmark them there for comparison with other cards. I have a 15" LCD that I game with. I run my refresh at 60Hz, which I am imaging you are translating to "a maximum displayable 60 frames per second." I'll let someone more technical than myself debunk that one.
I just got a very nice MSI GF4 Ti4200 (for $145 from GameVE.com, free shipping, only because newegg doesn't carry them and they are extremely overclockable cards with a great software bundle). If I ran this card in my LCD's native resolution of 1024x768, with the basic graphics settings, I pull approximately 180 frames per second in Quake 3. If, however, I go to the driver settings, crank up Aniso filtering, and turn on 4x FSAA (anti-aliasing is beautiful, btw), and set all settings to max quality in the game, I get about 85 frames per second in Quake 3. That is what my GF4 MX440 card was pulling with no options on.
We need cheaper and more integrated. Get rid of the DIMM and PCI slots and all the legacy hardware. Put the memory on the motherboard and create a disposable form factor and an open laptop standard.
Again, very nice karma troll. Cheaper is nice, and integrated has its place, but we do not need it. We don't want to put memory, cpu, and all peripherals on the board, for a variety of reasons. The two bigs ones are 1) repair/replacement after failure, and 2) CHOICE. If you want to buy a $20 video card to put in that AGP slot, you can! If you want to buy a $400 Matrox Parhelia to run 3 monitors in Quake 3, you can! Anything and everything between, as well! Everybody has a different budget and a different set of needs. Let the consumer decide.
Disposable form factor? Is that tongue in cheek? Do we want disposable PC cases? Or just good standards like ATX? I know plenty of people who have had ATX cases for 5 years and have housed 4 different generations of hardware in them.
Open laptop standard? Good idea, but many OEMs already work from something similar. The problem is the high cost of development on miniturized, highly integrated systems like laptops, especially when they need extremely tight cooling systems. Someday there will be a standard, where you can go into a store, buy a chassis (for 12, 14, 15, 17 inch LCDs), assemble the mobile parts, and walk out the door... but why bother? There are tons of cost-effective, and vendor-serviced laptops available in any conceivable configuration RIGHT NOW. Just because you can't get it for $1.99 at 7-Eleven does NOT mean the market is broken.
So my summary is that we don't need more integrated, and cheaper is good, but we have cheap already. You were trolling, and I was feeding you. Any questions?
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
> Now we can all play games at 3x the refresh rate of the monitor.
:)
> We don't need faster anymore.
Nonsense.
A *lot* of people want movie quality graphics in real-time. Imagine playing a game with the visual quality of "The Matrix", but completely interactive!
There are a ton of physical effects that still can't be done in real-time (yet), due to the memory bandwidth and geometry complexity.
e.g.
High resolution (4Kx2K) color/z/stencil buffers used for ray-tracing, radiosity, and displaying thousands of models each with a million+ vertices (used by CAD/Medical/Games), etc, come to mind.
Then when you add in compositing / blending multiple alpha layers you just burnt all your left-over speed (if you had any). DOH!
There is a reason that Pixar and other CG studios render scenes at the *sub* pixel level @ 64 bits/pixel. We're talking about 100+ triangles PER pixel. Because detail, such as hair which is less then a pixel wide, needs to be "super-sampled". Right now, games show hair by approximating the surface of it which makes it look "blocky". UGH.
So if you want graphics to stagnate, and never look more "realistic", then sure, stick with your GeForce4 (or below.) It will continue to be usefull for the years to come.
The rest of us will be trying to dazzle the world with new visual FX making people go "Wow!".
Who cares if ATI is top dog untill the next chip comes out? Who cares if ATI will be second place next month? Who cares who is the current kick ass product?
/. releases a story about the security hole big enough to drive a semi-trailer through anymore? Or do we read it, and patch it as needed (or mutter something to the effect of thank god I have Linux)?
Personally I don't, and you know why? Competition. Good clean, healthy, product innovating competition.
Something that is sadly lacking in the DeskTop OS market. Not to name any names *cough*microsoft*cough* but there is a very good example of what having one and only one player in the field. Poor quality product that we keep seeing so many bugs that we've become desensitized. Really, who falls over stunned when
So ATI is ahead today, so nVidia will be ahead tomorrow, so what?
Be glad that there is more than one dog fighting over the bone
Phoenix
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
It's a game of leap frog. It doesn't matter who had the best performance first, or who has the best performance now. It doesn't matter who's generation of cards are compared with who's generation of cards.
All that matters is who has the best cost/performance ration (right now), and who has the best performance come Christmas time when people really start spending money.
Looking at these benchmarks it appears that ATIs advantage is in their memory bandwidth, by using state of the art memory and better pipelining they are able to beat Nvidia by significant amounts only in benchmarks that require extreme amounts of memory bandwidth. At normal resolutions their actual '3D' throughput using their next generation chip is not that much better than nvidias current generation chipset. This does not look good for ATI. Give Nvidia equal memory bandwidth and they would be within spitting distance on all the benchmarks even with the current level of GeForce.
I think that he's saying that graphics cards can't yet do real time photorealistic rendering. When they can, that's when we need to stop developing faster boards and make them more intergrated.
Games will never need to be photorealistic to be fun, the two things are totatly unrelated. I think that most graphics in games today are wasted on the player anyway, I never realized how good looking many games were until I could watch instead of play them. GT3 is a good example, amazing to watch, fun to play but you really can't enjoy the graphics when you are playing it. Same with many games for the X-Box. Or in MGS2, all the time, I'm checking out the little radar in the corner of the screen to see where guys are, not seeing any of the awesome special effects that they spent so much time on.
Because when I find bugs in the driver, I will be able to fix them faster than the company will get around to it.
Because I can compile the drivers for my CPU, and screw compatibility with other CPUs I don't have.
Because I will know it will work with the kernel I am running, which may be some mutant patched up version that the vender has never seen.
Because when the card is discontinued, I will STILL have it, and will still be USING it, and will still want UPDATES to the drivers.
Because my bretheren who run *BSD also deserve to have good drivers.
Because I am an embedded software developer, and damn it I NEED to be able to tweak the drivers if I am using it in my designs.
www.eFax.com are spammers
"Trouncing current cards is a big yawn, but if it can go toe-to-toe with the big boys in 3 or 4 months they'll have something"
Nice Logic. What are you some sort of Nvidia fanboy?
So when the NV30 comes out(its more like 5 months away), is it O.K. for the ATI people say "yawn" big deal, put it up against our next card in 3 or 4 months.
Disrepect ATI all you want but don't act like a card that will crush the top of the line Nvidia for several months to come is just something to take for granted.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Right. YOU will be able to fix bugs in the driver that the developers can't fix. Of course. You are smarter than all of the Nvidia and ATI engineers, and have more expertise in the field of graphics card drivers than all of them combined. Yeah right.
Point #2 will give you a 0.01% improvement. Using open-source drivers that support half the card's features will give you a 40% disadvantage.
What the hell does the kernel have to do with video drivers? These are in XFree, not the kernel. There are some hooks in the kernel, but nobody says you can't give away the source for the module. That's what nvidia does.
When the card is discontinued, you'll probably throw it away. And if you will be the only person left using that card, drivers won't fix themselves even if they're open source. And I seriously doubt that you can maintain them, given that you probably don't even know how they work. Who in the world uses video cards so old that there aren't any drivers for them? For what?
The bsd people can very well run the drivers if the company makes them for bsd. Given that there are very few games or 3d apps on bsd, I don't think there's a market there. It's mostly used for servers, anyway.
If you're an embedded developer, I don't think you'll be integrating a PCI card into your "designs," much less tweaking drivers for it.
I'd rather have fast, stable, closed-source drivers that work than piece-of-shit reverse-engineered open source drivers developed and supported by amateurs. No company in their right mind will give away the complete specs, anyway. So we will be stuck with crappy slow drivers that can only take advantage of half the card's features. Just compare then Nvidia drivers on Linux (fast, stable, compatible with all cards) with alpha drivers for the ATI Radeon 8500 (that the WEATHER CHANNEL paid to develop, no less).
Just a bit of food for thought...
Intel had to REALLY stretch to get the PIII core up to 1.1GHz on a 180nm fab process, including having to recall their first attempt entirely. With the P4, they had little trouble releasing a 2.0GHz core on the exact same 180nm fab process.
Which do you think is faster, a 1.1GHz PIII or a 2.0GHz P4? Intel's design strategy for the P4 wasn't all about marketing, being a little bit less efficient but clocking a LOT higher isn't entirely a bad thing.
Of course, I don't know just how well this correlates to ATI's newest video card, we'll just have to wait and see.
How do you know it meant a shittier design? Were you in on any of the design meetings? Didn't think so.
Now, reread the section you misquote so heavily. The reviewer was specifically discussing an Intel-like design in that they hand picked transistors to go in specific places, rather than letting a VLSI design program layout the chip according to how it thinks is best. Intel and others have shown that this strategy - hand tuning critical junctures - can pay off in performance and manufacturing.
Intel's chip designs have been pretty damn amazing for the past two decades. They've frequently been the ones pushing Moore's law (yeah, go ahead and take the obvious whine - "because they needed to, their chips are so inefficient"), and they've eeked a helluva lot more features and performance out of designs than anyone in their right mind expected. Their fabbing is second to none and their processes are emulated industry wide. A 35% yield for a first run Intel design is godawful, but considered spectacular for other companies.
Have they made missteps? Yup. And I largely attribute those to upper management sticking its head deeply up its ass rather than to the engineers. Intel's brass stopped listening to their engineers 4 or 5 years ago. And it's been biting them since. Remains to be seen if they've figured this one out yet.
that MHZ no longer equals performance
No, it doesn't. But it's often a damn good indicator of performance, particularly in the GPU world. Frankly, the only people who know what the clock speeds on the chips are are the geeks who are into this thing. They're not advertised on the packaging.
Well when people choose fps numbers over quality
Huh?
What crack are you smoking man? You're claiming that 3dfx had quality? What a load of horsecrap.
3dfx supported only 16-bit color long after nVidia, ATI, Matrox, and PowerVR had moved on to 32-bit color. Their 2D output was even worse than nVidia's, and they had no features other than pure fps.
I had an original 4 MB Voodoo, and I bought a pair of 6 MB V2's. I still saw the writing on the wall when 3dfx ignored the rest of the industry and continued pushing 16-bit and Glide while 32-bit and DirectX/OpenGL were ascendant. Their anti-aliasing sacrificed too much performance for too little advantage, their cards were overpriced, and the chips were designed with such monsterously large traces that they created too much heat and used too much power (yeah - ATI and probably nVidia will now require additional power too.. but these are 0.15 and 0.13 um designs as opposed to the 0.25 beheomoth that 3dfx had).
Also I know Aureal story, what a sad thing in fact. Just by "law" you can "kill" your rival
Although I wish Aureal was still around (and still think A3D is far better than EAX), you still don't get it.
Aureal and 3dfx were already dead. Bankruptcy, selling of goods, and so forth. Competitors bought the intellectual property (read: patents) because it meant they could utilize some of the nifiter features in future products. It sure as hell doesn't mean they have to support the old products - they didn't buy the product lines, plants, existing inventory, etc. And it doesn't mean that someone else couldn't buy all of that and support it.
Did Creative kill Aureal? Essentially. Aureal was a couple years ahead of itself in order to make a break in Creative's stranglehold on the audio market. But Aureal failed to market themselves properly and fell to a much larger, much more market savvy, highly entrenched competitor.
Did nVidia kill 3dfx? Again, essentially. nVidia produced superior products with superior support, pricing, availability, and features. And unseated the 800 lb gorilla of the graphics market. Whining about the fact that 3dfx died only proves that you have no clue just how incompetent a company they really were.