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AMD ATi Pulled a fast one HD 3800... ?

Assuming they don't have some unknown beast of a GPU waiting in the wings - yes it seems a daft move. But is it any more silly than nVIDIA releasing an 8800GTS with 112 SPs and keeping the same name?

They've actually timed this pretty well. If the G92 based cards are going to be released on the 29th, the factories will be hard at work now. Boxes and manuals will already have been printed etc. ATI turn up a couple of weeks later, with what (as far as your average punter is concerned) appears to be a new Gen GPU supporting DX10.1. Job's a goodun!

Edit: I keep hearing this 'same architecture'. It's clearly not. DX10.0 to DX10.1 is probably a bigger jump (feature wise) than from 9xxx series to Xxxx series. We can only hope the performance jump will be there.
 
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Doesn't look like G92 (new 8800GT, GTS) are 10.1 but it's still mostly rumour and speculation.

Nobody's yet mentioned the possibility that the HD3800 series aren't RV670, Although I'll be very surprised if they've managed to get the R700 ready yet.
 
OK but say R700 is also DX10.1, it comes out Janary and they call it HD3900. We have a consistent naming scheme, where *800 is the mid range part that performs on par with the previous high end and *900 is the high end. Who says the high end needs to launch first? It's the volume sales that make the money.

I liked it when everything ATi did was vanilla or Pro. Bring back simple, consistent naming schemes!
 
Funny how this thread shows how much we actually believe the rumours that get thrown around in the GPU market. We all seem to 'know' that RV670 has a 256bit bus, that R700 is coming out in January. It ain't the gospel y'know!
 
psychas said:
...and finish nvidia for good
Click to expand...

Erm... Yes. Did A64 finish Intel? Did R300 finish nVIDIA? These are big companies and they can take a battering. 3DFX showed it can happen but I can't see them going under any time soon. Plus do you really want a one horse GPU race?
 
Just wondering - given that the DX10.1 spec requires 4xAA - what if these cards have it at negligible performance cost?

Basically HD2900s needed 3 major improvements: heat/power, AA performance and DX10 performance. The first one's almost certainly addressed. Given that these are DX10.1, with a new shader model (hence architectural change) it's not beyond the realms of possibility that the latter two have been sorted. 4xAA could be sorted in a similar way to the xbox (as someone mentioned previously) and if they take the Xbox GPU's scaling features we can suddenly have none native resolutions looking half decent on TFTs.

If the 55nm process allows higher clocks to be reached we potentially have an absolute beast of a chip. Is the 256bit bus really a that much of a limitation? I'm not sure it is and if the R600 could be 'downgraded' to run on a 256 bit bus (HD2900GT) why shouldn't there be an RV670 with a 512bit bus at some point?
 
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