Ati has a ddr2 board running why do we think nv30 won't?

[odin20]

Just watched the last episode of the screen savers on techtv and they had"Joe Macri"- Director of technology for ati on the show. What they also had on the show was a first time look at a 9700pro working with ddr2, the guy had the board in his hands and specifically stated the board was running ddr2 and was showing demos. So i think if nvidia has no ddr2 on the nv30 methinks ati may be coming out very soon with a ddr2 board, though nvidia probably has their boards running it too.
Safe to say ati is getting mighty aggressive, me likey!
Means good competition and lower prices on better cards.
I still want a nv30 but if Ati is comin out with somethin faster right after nv30 i may just have to go ati for the first time in 3 years.
Later

[StealthHawk]

maybe because NV30 is coming out first(certainty?) and we won't be seeing an advanced form of R9700 until around March(probable)


Means good competition and lower prices on better cards.
ATIs initial prices have been on the rise...nvidia's see no sign of decreasing either.

[Bigus Dickus]

True, but when the 9500 lineup gets here the GF4 Ti series will probably fall quite a bit. That will be cool... having a few good performing choices in the $200 range! :cool:

[thcdru2k]

i'd be most interested in the overclockability of the 9500pro. could it reach possibly default r9700 pro speeds.

[StealthHawk]

Originally posted by Bigus Dickus
True, but when the 9500 lineup gets here the GF4 Ti series will probably fall quite a bit. That will be cool... having a few good performing choices in the $200 range! :cool:

agreed. a $200 DX9 card is very tempting. the raw performance of 9500 is exactly what i expected, it will be interesting to see AF and FSAA scores.

think about it, by the time Doom 3 makes it out the door the R9700Pro might be found for $200 :D

[borntosoul]

the graphic card market hasnt been this interesting since the days of the 3dfx vs nvidia battles :)................................................

[Bigus Dickus]

Originally posted by thcdru2k
i'd be most interested in the overclockability of the 9500pro. could it reach possibly default r9700 pro speeds.

I think I'm more interested in the overclockability of the 9700 non-pro, since it is functionally the same as the 9700 pro - wherase the 9500 pro has a 128-bit memory controller.

Of course, the price is quite a bit higher as well. I'm most interested I guess in seeing performance comparisons of the 9500 pro and 9700 non-pro, to see just how much of the 9700 Pro's speed comes from the insane memory bandwidth, and how much of it is core effeciency.

[StealthHawk]

Originally posted by Bigus Dickus
Of course, the price is quite a bit higher as well. I'm most interested I guess in seeing performance comparisons of the 9500 pro and 9700 non-pro, to see just how much of the 9700 Pro's speed comes from the insane memory bandwidth, and how much of it is core effeciency.

just compare the R9500Pro scores and R9700 scores "available." they have the same clocks, so the R9700 has double the bandwidth. of course we only have 3dmark scores, if those are even to be trusted :p

[Bigus Dickus]

Yeah, but it's at high resolutions, or with max AA/AF on that will show the difference most clearly. At 1024 x 768 in 3dMark, even the GF4 and 9700 Pro are not that much different. Turn up the settings though...

[StealthHawk]

Originally posted by Bigus Dickus
Yeah, but it's at high resolutions, or with max AA/AF on that will show the difference most clearly. At 1024 x 768 in 3dMark, even the GF4 and 9700 Pro are not that much different. Turn up the settings though...

yeah, i guess you're right. still, i'm not expecting any miracles with the R9500 series.

[Bigus Dickus]

Oh, perhaps I was not real clear. I don't expect miracles with the 9500 series either. Sure, the 9500 looks like a great budget card for the money, probably competing head to head with the Ti4400/4600 with AA and/or AF, and the 9500 Pro looks to be a GF4 killer at similar price, but I don't expect anything quite as dramatic as the 9700's performance lead was.

What I expect is to see that, contrary to some people's opinion, much of the 9700's speed is the memory bandwidth, and you'll see this in the 9500 Pro at high resolutions or AA/AF settings where it begins to falter a bit (relative to the 9700, of course).

[Lezmaka]

I would expect the 9500's to be faster than any GF4 when both AA and AF are being used since ati now uses MSAA and it's faster AF method.

And like the big ole dick, I'm looking forward to see how well it performs with it's bandwidth more than halved.

[StealthHawk]

maybe i wasn't clear either :p i don't expect any miracles with FSAA or AF on the R9500 line.

the reason? MSAA is memory bandwidth dependant, so i would expect the 9500 to have significantly lower scores than GF4. also, the new "quality AF" feature of R9700 also seems to have more of a performance impact than the R8500 method of AF. i expect some balancing with FSAA/AF, so that the R9500 might be just a little bit faster than GF4, but not much. ie, maybe 30% in some situations?

[RipItup]

I see on ThInquirer that they are claiming that the nv30 will run 128 bit width DDR2 at 1GHz.

Before anyone says " I don't trust what TheInquirer says " please note that is a rumour and so in the Rumor Mill :)

I'm not quite sure what to make of this, is that going to be better than 256 bit memory working at 600-700 speeds ? It sounds more expensive to buy, as it's new, but then maybe they save on the lower width memory bus ?

Maybe it's a mute point anyway as more and more the action is passing from the memry as the bottleneck to the gpu/vpu and seemingly to the cpu as well. though of course 1280x1024 fully AA's and filtered up without worrying about it is nice.

No doubt someone will be running an nv30 with their PIII 650MHz though :)

[Quinn1981]

with DDR-II being mostly just a timing change, i wonder if there is any core changes that have to be made in order to use it? im thinking that if ATI wants to slap DDR-II on their boards, then it wont take long to get those out of the factories.

as far as the Inquirer goes... i always get this bad feeling when i hear the name. you never know if they are correct or totally BSin' everyone.

they did say...The fastest NV 30 will work on the nice round number of 1000MHz, bringing graphics memory to a 1GHz speed for the first time in history...DDR II memory at 1000MHz -- almost 400 MHz faster than the memory used on the Radeon 9700 PRO -- are key elements of the NV30's architecture that Nvidia expects will help it blow ATi's offering out of the water.
the last line just makes me think its nothing but a turd of a rumor.

[StealthHawk]

lol, wasn't it a week ago that the Inquirer said NV30 wouldn't use ddrII :rolleyes:

[Fotis]

They also said radeon 9500 was going to be released today!:rolleyes:

[StealthHawk]

Originally posted by Fotis
They also said radeon 9500 was going to be released today!:rolleyes:

i think not. the latest leaked info from a German(?) site said either 21st or 23rd or something like that.

but i guess the day isn't over yet, we might still be surprised.