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ATI Radeon 9700 Dissected

Posted by michael on from the stay-alert-and-keep-your-soldering-iron-handy dept.

Bender writes "The guys who laid out the future of real-time graphics a while back have now dissected ATI's Radeon 9700 chip. Their analysis breaks down performance into multiple components--fill rate, occlusion detection, pixel shaders, vertex shaders, antialiasing--and tests each one synthetically before moving on to the usual application tests like SPECviewperf and UT 2003. You can see exactly how this chip advances the state of the art in graphics, piece by piece. Interesting stuff."

5 of 192 comments (clear)

  1. Occlusion detection... by zebs · · Score: 2, Funny

    occlusion detection? Is that used for detecting the occult?

    I can see how it might be usefull for games like Quake, Doom etc, but I'm not so sure about GTA etc

    Ok ok, its probably just a typo

  2. Just what we need by master_p · · Score: 2, Funny

    Yeap, I really need such a monster card to play UT2003 at 120 FPS...really...what, you don't believe me ? why ? just because my eye can't tell FPS after 60 ?

    The crossbar solution is very nice though as a memory interface. It has 19 GB/sec memory bandwidth. I would like to have that bandwidth in the main CPU though. An Athlon/Pentium 4 will smoke those cards with such a memory bandwidth.

  3. Re:Enthusiasm for procedural shaders by cooldev · · Score: 4, Funny

    Again, Pixar is notorious for this. ("We modelled the threads on the screws, even though you couldn't see them!")

    How else would the objects stay together? Magic? Sheesh.

  4. Mmmmmm.. dissection. by Fydo · · Score: 1, Funny

    Reminds of Biology class.

    Now those Radeon 9700's know what it feels like to be a frog.

    Ribbit.

    --
    .:| fydo |:.
  5. Analytically, not synthetically by vaxer · · Score: 3, Funny

    If you're putting pieces together and considering them as a whole, that's synthesis.

    If you're taking pieces apart and considering them separately, that's analysis.

    If you're explaining this on Slashdot, that's anal-retentiveness.