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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.
The page you really need to go is this. It talks about not just raw FPS, but about running UT2003 with 4X Anti Aliasing enabled at 1600x1200x32. This is where ATI trounces Nvidia with a whopping 251% faster performance.
Though the framerates at 1600x1200 on UT2003 are not exactly playable (there goes my hopes of running DoomIII at 1600x1200 on this baby) ATI has finally produced a card worthy of their name.
Nvidia has atleast six months to go before they can have something to show. And running the 927 leaked build of UT2003 on a GF4 Ti 4600, you dont get playable framerates beyond 1024x768 with every detailed notched up.
Rapid Nirvana
The Raven.
The Raven
If you think the Radeon 9700 is amazing, just wait till ATI produces the R300 chipset in the 0.13 micron process version and cranks up the graphics card clock speed to likely way over 400 MHz.
:-)
Slow it definitely won't be.
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.
That depends on what your definition of drivers is....</voice>
If by "drivers" you mean "closed source drivers for the FireGL card based on this chip that support all the card's rendering features, but none of the video capture or tuner functions of the inevitable AIW version", then I would guess about 8 months.
If you mean "closed source drivers that support all the rendering, video capture, tuner, etc. functions of this card" from ATI, then I suggest you monitor Mr. Andy Krist's credit cards for purchases of cold weather gear - this will happen about the same time the MBA selects Dr. Hawking as a star player.
If you mean "Open source drivers that support some of the rendering, none of the video capture, and none of the tuner", then I would guess about 18 months.
Sad but true. A pity - were there to be good drivers for this card (good = open source, all features supported by the standard APIs (Xv, Video4Linux2, DRI)) then I would pay up to $500 for one.
Now, the question is, what about all the Mac owners?
www.eFax.com are spammers
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.
You don't seem to understand the direct relationship between MHz and pixel/texual fill rates in video cards.
The Parhelia gets beaten in DX8 bechmarks by the GF4Ti because of the difference in clock speeds. If the 9700/10000 wants to compete with the NV30 at the top then raw MHz is needed - the DX9 specs state that both cards need 8 pixel pipelines for compliance (and both ATI and Nvidia say their next-gen cards do). This means whoever has the highest clock rate will have the highest pixel fill rate. Need to wait and see if the NV30 has more than one texture unit per pipeline, the R300 only has one (for a total of 8 texture units) which means if the NV30 has two or more for each pipeline, then it will beat the R300 in texel filrates by architecture alone (though for more than one texture unit per pipeline will need HUGE amount of memory bandwidth which is not likely to happen until DDR-II is utilized).
So MHz does equal performance... which can mean a marketing success or failure. Parhelia is not grat for gamers (other than TripleHead) due to low clock speeds. Nvidia have delayed the NV30 to make use of the 0.13u process to get higher clock speeds (rumoured to be 400+) and ATI plan on releasing the Radeon 10000 next year based on a 0.13u process as well to try and beat the NV30 if it proves to outperform the 9700.... which is expected to happen.
- HeXa
The picture on Anandtech clearly shows a pass through connector with a floppy power connection in the middle. So that should solve that.
Honestly though, the past few power supplies I've bought did have a 2nd floppy connector on them. Never figured out what the hell they'd be used for until now though.
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.
When we can do realtime 3D effects that are indistinguishible from reality, we might be there.
I find it interesting that untouched realism is frequently just not fun. There are aspects to games that require tweaking or simplifying the environment so it isn't frustrating or impossible to make progress.
Masters of game-making understand that fun isn't derived purely from realism and that some unrealistic elements are the only way to make a game interesting and playable. For example, do you really want a football to get lost in the sun, so the receiver screws up and you lose the game? Or do you want clues in a mystery game to be so well hidden that you have to have take the hours of a real forensic investigation to find that triply-ricocheted bullet embedded in the neighbors compost pile?
I really think that super-realism in games is a pipe-dream, and the only way to achieve it is in a Star Trek-style immersive holodeck...or, perhaps, just going outside.
It also seems to be harder to find the basic time-waster games, since, I guess, it is a waste to put classics like Tetris or Solitaire on gigaflop-class consoles. In a way, this really is not progress at all.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
"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
We, 3dfx owners know how a company they are... Since we are without new drivers since nvidia bought 3dfx.
No need to describe, I guess 3dfx owners with a clue understood what kind of a company they are... In hard way...
Oh me? When it ships (or shipped already), I am buying it... I won't buy from a company which left me in "digital cold" just because they bought my card/chip maker...
mod me as you wish, I couldn't stand not saying this stuff...
You've not got the slightest idea what you're talking about. Nvidia did not buy 3dfx. They bought the intellectual property of 3dfx. They bought most of the 3dfx design work, technology, patents, etc. They didn't buy any of the office space, manufacturing plants or employees. They bought the IP because they thought that there was something in it that would be useful in their future chip designs.
3dfx Interactive is still a company and is still in business, in a manner of speaking. If you want more info on the nVidia purchase of 3dfx IP, you can read about it here, here, or here. But don't go blaming nVidia because your favorite graphics card company stopped producing and supporting your product.
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.