Joe Cool
11-21-02, 06:50 PM
This is some of what FiringSquad's Comdex 2002 coverage went into - go there for the full thing. Note I'm intentionally not quoting too much, I don't want to get into trouble for that.
1. ATI believes the GeForceFX is an unbalanced solution, relative to the 9700 Pro. Apparently they think the Nvidia card won't be able to get acceptable frame rates for many of the features it's boasting about.
2. The example given was about the FX's pixel and vertex shaders - apparently (see FS for details) the particular way it's done on the FX means that if it's running "very long shaders," the card will spend too much of it's time "in geometry," bringing down the frame rates too much.
By comparision ATI claimed the 9700 Pro has multi-pass capability to make up for that, with its ability to loop back to pull off those long shader operations.
There was another interesting comment about why ATI supposedly hasn't claimed effective bandwidths the same way Nvidia has with the FX - apparently if they'd done so, the number would be so high, nobody would believe them anyways...
Now here to me is the most interesting part to quote:
"One other clarification is in regards to DDR2 memory support. Late last week rumors were floating around that ATI’s DDR2 demonstration wasn’t actually running as DDR2 memory. ATI reiterated that the RADEON 9700 memory controller does indeed support DDR2 and that was the memory type used in the demonstration board."
Hey Pelly.
I told you so.
1. ATI believes the GeForceFX is an unbalanced solution, relative to the 9700 Pro. Apparently they think the Nvidia card won't be able to get acceptable frame rates for many of the features it's boasting about.
2. The example given was about the FX's pixel and vertex shaders - apparently (see FS for details) the particular way it's done on the FX means that if it's running "very long shaders," the card will spend too much of it's time "in geometry," bringing down the frame rates too much.
By comparision ATI claimed the 9700 Pro has multi-pass capability to make up for that, with its ability to loop back to pull off those long shader operations.
There was another interesting comment about why ATI supposedly hasn't claimed effective bandwidths the same way Nvidia has with the FX - apparently if they'd done so, the number would be so high, nobody would believe them anyways...
Now here to me is the most interesting part to quote:
"One other clarification is in regards to DDR2 memory support. Late last week rumors were floating around that ATI’s DDR2 demonstration wasn’t actually running as DDR2 memory. ATI reiterated that the RADEON 9700 memory controller does indeed support DDR2 and that was the memory type used in the demonstration board."
Hey Pelly.
I told you so.