r520

[Mailman]

ATI's new GPU chip R520 is internally called "Fudo". The design has been ready for quite some time now. One source is telling us "the chip is working, now ATI is designing the boards, and after that they have to fix the boards to get them working [laughs]".

The chip is produced using a 90nm process at TSMC and will have 300 to 350 million transistors.

We have confirmed the 24 pipelines rumors from several independant sources. However, these 24 pipelines are not comparable to 24 of today's pipelines - multiply by 1.3. So the 24 pipelines will have the performance of 32 "normal" pipelines.
The result of this is that the R520 will be two times as fast as the currently fastest X850s.

ATI will most probably present the chip in June at Computex, Taiwan.

The most important architectural change is support for the Advanced Driver Model of WGF 1.0 (Windows Graphics Foundation). This is the successor to DirectX9, often called DirectX Next. WGF will be included as standard in Microsoft Longhorn.
WGF offers new exciting features for game developers like "unlimited" shader length, Geometry Shaders, Much lower overhead than DirectX9 and many more.

Existing hardware will support the Basic Model of WGF once the manufacturer writes a driver for it. Features like resource virtualization etc. will only be available when using the Advanced Driver Model. R520 is the first GPU we know of to support it.

Obviously ShaderModel 3.0 is supported by R520 as well.

Memory configurations will be 256-bit memory interface (definitely not 512-bit) with 256 MB and 512 MB GDDR3. The internal registers of R520 support even 1GB memory size. With current GDDR3 prices we will definitely not see a 1GB design at least not in the near future and not for gaming cards. However, this shows that ATI is planning for the future.

The boards will be available in PCI-Express only. When asked about an AGP version, one source said "most probably not". Please note that this is not a definite "no". My guess is that if the market really demands an AGP version, it will be implemented via the Rialto bridge chip.

In the S3 part of this report we talked about OmniChrome supporting 10-bit-per-color display depths, so does R520. HDTV and HDCP output will be supported as well.

Clocks are not finalized yet, but expect something around 700 MHz core and 800 MHz memory (1.25ns).

The first boards will be VERY expensive people are talking $600-$700 range. It all depends on how the graphics memory prices develop in the next months and if TSMC can get good yields out of the 90nm process.


ATI SLI
Not much is known on this topic. Some people say the name is AMR "ATI Multi Rendering", others say MVP "Multi Visual Processing".
Our information differs from source to source. MVP and "neither AMR nor MVP" being the most popular answers.

ATI's technology is superior to NVIDIA's SLI in several ways:

While NVIDIA SLI splits the screen into two parts and one GPU renders each half, ATI's solution breaks the screen into little squares. Remember the chessboard effect you had when pipelines were bad with the softmod?
That's how it is going to work, just on a bigger scale, called "Super Tiling". Any GPU from R300 and up supports Super Tiling in hardware and they can be mixed when in SLI mode.
However, ATI most probably will not enable SLI for GPUs other than the R4xx and R520 series.

ATI's SLI is also not limited to two video cards. There will be one master card which presents the rendered data to the screen and coordinates the slaves which transfer their rendered data into the master's framebuffer. A physical PCB to link the video cards is not required, everything is done via PCI-Express bus.

Pa nije loše....: nuts :

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Cebit2005/Day4/5

[Pantera-N]

yup, definitivno nije loše! tu si vjes odavno mogao nači na techpoweupu! ali ako je istina ovo sa 32 pajpa, nvidia je u qurcu!!!

[Mailman]

R520, "Fudo" is Longhorn WGF 1.0 compliant

To launch in June

By Fuad Abazovic: Monday 21 March 2005, 08:41
PRIOR TO ITS LAUNCH, expected in June, we have a few additional details about ATI's flagship R520 chip.

It turns out that R520 won't just have Shader Model 3.0 it will eventually have support for upcoming Longhorn WGF 1.0 specification. WGF does not stand for Which Graphic Freak, it's an abbreviation of Windows Graphic Foundation. This is what Microsoft has decided to call Direct3D in the future.

WGF 1.0 is actually Direct3D 9.0+ or just beyond the DirectX 9.0c specification. It's also called DX 9.L where L possibly stands for Longhorn.

We are not sure which kind of Shader support you need to be WGF 1.0 compliant, but we are quite sure that we are talking about Shader Model 3.0, as it's time for ATI to go down that road.

We also know that this chip is built on a 90 nanometre process and that even the R530 and RV515 will be based on the same marchitecture.

R520 is expected to perform twice as fast as the X800 generation, will have digital HDTV support, and will come in 256MB and 512MB variants.

I guess that WGF 1.0 support comes for all the developers who want to play with it prior to the launch of Longhorn, but be aware there is also a WGF 2.0 spec that is also known as DirectX 10 or DirectX Next, so that is going to be the real stuff.

Hardware supporting this feature comes in a year's time, in 2006, sometime before the Microsoft Longhorn launch. It might be called R620 but it's still too early to talk about that. µ

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21982

[Jelc]

Od kad su izjavili da je kodno ime Fudo-dobri stari Fuad se ne skida sa R500/520 spike

Vidjet ćemo kaj bu iz toga bilo, ATI je bio nekaj laprdao da više ne bi bilo specijaliziranih vertex i shader jedinica nego da će se koristiti jedna za sve:confused:

[Zvijerko]

Originally posted by Pantera-N
yup, definitivno nije loše! tu si vjes odavno mogao nači na techpoweupu! ali ako je istina ovo sa 32 pajpa, nvidia je u qurcu!!!

Jako lijepo. Nije mi jedino jasno zašt bi NVidija bila u kurcu jer bi uskoro (poslije r520,ali uskoro) trebao izaći G70 o kojemu se jako malo zna (NVidija dobro čuva informacije), ali bi trebao biti 32x1 dizajn

[Tr4f1ka]

jelc mislis unified shadere? to nece jos bit aktualno...

[stef]

Mislim da sam pročitao bio negdje da će to biti standard u DX-u za Longhorna, ne bi Ati bezveze tolko riskirao s novom arhitekturom.

[Sam Fischer]

Two times faster then X850's. Holy shit.
A i Nvidia nešto sprema.Mora.Il je najebala.

ZAkon.

[Tr4f1ka]

Originally posted by stef
Mislim da sam pročitao bio negdje da će to biti standard u DX-u za Longhorna, ne bi Ati bezveze tolko riskirao s novom arhitekturom.

za longhorna ce izaci WGF 1.0 umjesto dxa ( aka dx next )....

btw, ja sam malo skeptican prema onom " 24 pipea koja su brza paje to kao 32"... take gluposti su ceste kod izdavanja novih generacija.. al ok vidicemo

[damir1]

Ma izdaće i jedni i drugi,kao i uvijek do sada.Ne sekiram se ja za njih

[Konan]

Originally posted by Tr4f1ka
za longhorna ce izaci WGF 1.0 umjesto dxa ( aka dx next )....

btw, ja sam malo skeptican prema onom " 24 pipea koja su brza paje to kao 32"... take gluposti su ceste kod izdavanja novih generacija.. al ok vidicemo

A možda tih 24 radui na 700MHz, pa su brzi kao 32 na taktu X850XT.

[LuXor]

Ne bi se ATi zezo s ovakvim stvarima, pogotovo ako Microsoft za njega izrađuje "novi DirectX".

Ovo s 24*1 daje performanse 32*1 je sigurno, jer je arhitektura, kako navode izvori, radikalno poboljšana. To dokazuje i niži takt, iako je memorija 1.25ns.

Ovaj "Multi-super-ultra tiling-splitting" mi se sviđa više nego SLI: jedna grafa Primary a ostale Slaveovi, znači ograničenje postavlja samo chipset i broj PCI-Express lajni koje podržava.

Da skratim: ATi je postao opaka banda! :clap: :clap: :clap:

nVidijin CEO već kupuje sredstvo za umirenje!: giljotin