Caporegime
- Joined
- 18 Oct 2002
- Posts
- 33,188
lol, most of the nvidia card is clocked significantly higher than the ati card, shader clocks(which do a majority of the work) are clocked at what, 1.6Ghz.
ati's architechture is incredibly good, but intended for shader heavy duty, but like many things needs coding. its main weakness is that despite the "320" stream processors. its actually 64 real stream processors that can do up to 5 calculations per clock. which means if you aren't leveraging the full 5 calcs per clock then you are effectively running a much lower number of processors. nvidia's is more the "brute force" method. frankly neither is bad, ati have some great tech but have been somewhat renouned for applying it a generation or two early. for instance the x1800 is mostly a x800 on shader based steroid injections, something that the 7800 lacked somewhat, then nvidia boost the shader power quite a bit on the 7900 a gen later, and a massive shader boost in the 8800 series. but they are, as you say, brute force uncomplicated 1.6Ghz + stream processors at work. ati's ring bus is also just a touch early, its something nvidia will simply have to head towards architechture wise. Nvidia will also drop hardware style AA of the past which ati has already done, again probably a generation to early(or it seems mostly on a over ambitious attempt to get the core working on a 60nm process way to early).
its very interesting to see the 2600xt doing so well, i can see nvidia drivers being able to boost performance, but i can't see it suddenly trashing the 2600xt. If ati can continue to "leverage" all those wasted clocks into action with driver updates well, you'll see how good the architecture was.
i'm under the impression that like the xbox360 was, i think the r600 was designed to be 60nm, and have the 4xaa edram on die working to give free AA. It sounds like maybe the new 55nm r600 replacement might well have this included onboard, and the removal of the edram could well account for the delay of the r600. If that is the case, had the 2900xt come at on 60nm it would have trounced the gtx.
