Caporegime
- Joined
- 18 Oct 2002
- Posts
- 33,188
its possible but i highly doubt it will have 512mbit memory of out of no where have more rops added as it would change the balance of the hardware quite a bit and take a bit of effort. the 512mbit interface will simply add layers to the card, interfence problems and power problems meaning more expensive parts, it will become a lot more expensive, they are competing with a cheaper to produce ati part who have dropped the cost of the 3850/3870 to peeve off nvidia yet again.
THe 3870's clearly work well on the 64 blocks of 5 shaders, its using more than 1 of the block for certain as its shaders are what, half the core speed of a 8800 series, if they weren't working quite well it would be working half the speed of nvidia. its an incredibly efficient and inteligent design. the blocks of shaders are so the ringbus can work more effective. its a higher latency memory access than crossbar that they used to and nvidia still use, its just got WAY more bandwidth available to it, in other words, nvidia will have to head that way too
. the less stops the less latency, 320 stops, of 64. think of it like you need to get a memo out to 320 employees, tell each of 320 yourself, or tell 64 people and they all tell 5, exponentially faster. THe problem is with nvidia adding funding to MASSIVE numbers of games, turning the coding of the game to as effectively underuse ati's card as possible is almost certainly going on.
I for one haven't said i'm happy with ati's rebranding, dx10.1 seems little more than a gimmick, at least for now, but at least its "something" of an upgrade that has the potential to be used in the future. it was also ATI who massively pushed the costs of these cards down which again, is a plus point and something nvidia had no intention of doing.
Lots of industry guys put the long time between "real" generations at nvidia because in the end a £150 card will sell 1000x as many as a £300 card. ati forced nvidia's hand to work hard and quickly on a lower cost part rather than a faster part. which ok, may have caused a slight delay in a newer faster card. but hopefully that next gen card will be £200-250 instead of £350-500 so its still all good. ATi's plan has worked great, they are competitive, they are fast at all price points, the x2 can't be beat for speed or price now, priced toa 8800gtx as of price cuts. They are selling massive numbers in the low and mid end for cheap highly featured cards, this all bodes very well for ati and amd obviously. The delay they managed to cause nvidia will also help them get their next gen out closer to nvidia's.
Another thing to remember, as i said since release, is the ROP's are i think, very VERY much holding back ati's numbers aswell. infact, i would guess a 50% increase in rops would do some very good things for ati, and nvidia probably.
But i do want to see better reviews to show the 9600gt, more of it, more high res gaming, more AA, i assume it would suffer there greatly, we'll see.
