ATI R600 Details Leaked
January 3rd, 2007 by Tobias Dahl in Hardware, PC, Rumor, Technology
Tech site Level 5 claims to have access to leaked information about ATI’s R600, the next-gen GPU set to compete with Nvidia’s 8800 series. While R600 is expected to be released at the end of this month, there are no official hardware specs. The technical specs are:
- 64 4-Way SIMD Unified Shaders, 128 Shader Operations/Cycle
- 32 TMUs, 16 ROPs
- 512 bit Memory Controller, full 32 bit per chip connection
- GDDR3 at 900 MHz clock speed (January)
- GDDR4 at 1.1 GHz clock speed (March, revised edition)
- Total bandwidth 115 GB/s on GDDR3
- Total bandwidth 140 GB/s on GDDR4
- Consumer memory support 1024 MB
- DX10 full compatibility with draft DX10.1 vendor-specific cap removal (unified programming)
- 32FP [sic] internal processing
- Hardware support for GPU clustering (any x^2 [sic] number, not limited to Dual or Quad-GPU)
- Hardware DVI-HDCP support (High Definition Copy Protocol)
- Hardware Quad-DVI output support (Limited to workstation editions)
- 230W TDP PCI-SIG compliant
According to these specs, the biggest advantage the R600 will have over the 8800 is its full 512 bit memory controller, while the 8800 GTX only supports 380 bits. Also, a massive 1 GB of video memory, as opposed to some 750 MB in Nvidia’s 8800 GTX. Early benchmarks show the R600 ahead of 8800 GTX by anywhere from 8% to 42%.
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Tags: Hardware, PC, Rumor, Technology
January 3rd, 2007 at 7:09 pm
oooh better than the 8800. this will probably be 8-42% more expensive than the 8800, god it sucks being relatively poor.
January 3rd, 2007 at 8:06 pm
Well we know that soon there will be either an 8900 GTX or a 9000 GTX from Nvidia which will be even better … it always happens … I will stick with Nvidia though … they are my brand of choice when it comes to GPUs for the PC.
January 3rd, 2007 at 8:45 pm
ppl r dumb to always buy the latestand greatest im sorry insult but its true.you have the nerds that do this,u dont even need that power.Man the 7900 will max out crysis on dx9 and the 8800 should be good for 2-3 years.I always by the last gen cuz its still kick ass in this gen.
There s no need to always buy the latest and greatest.
January 3rd, 2007 at 8:50 pm
wickerman, there is no way your 7900 will run crysis even at medium settings. And you need DX10 hardware for it to look great.
I think the R600 will beat 8800 GTX, but the main battle is the DX10 mid range cards, which are going to rock both perfomace and price-wise. Don’t expect any to hit the market until March or April.
January 3rd, 2007 at 9:11 pm
Well I do think that a 7900 GTX and a 7950 GX2 will be able to do everything at medium settings in Crysis and even have some things enabled at High depending on the other parts of the equation. Like a multi-core CPU, fast RAM, fast HD for loading levels, and even a PPU. This is of course in the DX9 mode which Crytek has already been showing off with either a 7900 GTX or the X1950 xt from ATI. Now if you want the ABSOLUTE best looking graphics using DX10 then you will need a DX10 GPU but you’ll still the rest of what I mentioned to run things at their highest capabilities. Still I am now going to pass on the 8800 GTX and wait for the 9000 series from Nvidia. Also I want to see if they are going to have a dual GPU card akin to the 7950 for the DX10 generation.
January 3rd, 2007 at 10:30 pm
Mayyybee… I’ll wait buying my pc untill it all becomes worth it. The big tech leaps have still to be made for both graphic card developers holding back on purpose (look at sys specs of newest consoles which were 2 years old)
Untill that time I’ll just turn all the stupid effects off and stick with diablo2:P
January 3rd, 2007 at 11:56 pm
Nvidia will probably release an updated 80nm version later this year, and name it 8900, just like when they went from 7800 to 7900.
January 4th, 2007 at 1:26 am
Yeh Gods, its a monster! I will need a mini nuclear reactor to power it!
January 4th, 2007 at 3:35 am
I am pretty sure that by the end of the year Nvidia will be shipping a 9000 series DX10 Uber card. Just a prediction though … I could be wrong. But this will come in response to something that AMD/ATI will bring to the table I am pretty certain about that.
January 4th, 2007 at 8:10 am
I have always been soured with Nvidia since purchasing a Nvidia GeForce 4 MX440 … It was hard to believe that it wasn’t much better than my ATI Rage Fury 32MB card. I recently went back to ATI and will stay that way. Screw Nvidia.
This is wonderful news about the R600, I hope to hear official press release soon.
January 4th, 2007 at 10:13 am
I lost complete faith in ATI after my 9800 purchase … and after seeing that the Nvidia drivers worked much better than my ATI drivers ever did so I say screw ATI. When I switched back to Nvidia I made up my mind to trust them from then on and after gaming with my 7800 GTX and now my 7950 GX2 I am very pleased with the decision I made. Sure it may look good now for ATI but so what … that is nothing new … I remember how people were jumping up and down when Crossfire technology was announced but then came SLI and everyone saw that it was superior so again I will stick to Nvidia for the forseeable future.
I can’t wait until Nvidia blows ATI away yet again with an even better DX10 card … and at least Nvidia was first too market … they didn’t wait to see what ATI had because they DO NOT fear that company in the least. If they did they would have allowed themselves to be bought out like ATI did. But no way … they have enough confidence in their products and future technologies that they are willing to go it alone. I like and admire that trait in a company. Nvidia for life.
January 16th, 2007 at 7:03 am
You can bet your ass that Nvidia will ruin the r600 launch by dropping the 8900GTX bomb. Go ahead and stay ATI you’ll just have an inferior product.
January 16th, 2007 at 8:48 am
eh, you must have been lucky with those nVidia drivers, I’ve probably had more problems with nVidia drivers than ATi ones. I think driver quality has been improving alot lately though. With this ATi card, I’ve only had 1 problem (which is good for a new card), and that was with 6.9, GRAW’s textures would get corrupt. Been great since 6.10 though.
It must be hard getting graphics drivers to work properly, they always have random issues.
Anyway, I’m no ATi fan, in fact this is my first ATi card, and I’m more than happy with it. I had a GeForce 2, a GeForce 4 Ti, an FX 5900, and a 7800GS. I was most impressed with the 4Ti, it lasted ages, and it wasn’t that expensive either. The FX sucked, I should have got an ATi 9800Pro, and the 7800GS was very nice, but got a little limited by the rest of my system at the time.
January 16th, 2007 at 8:51 am
Oh when I say “I’ve probably had more problems with nVidia drivers than ATi ones” I’m talking about not only my computer, but several other PC’s that I’ve built also. Thought I’d better say that since I’ve only owned 1 ATi card.
January 19th, 2007 at 10:28 am
The Ati card will be best graphic performance until now./
But both ati R600 and nVIDIA G80 was very power hungry, I think it is good that the energy efficient graphics come to market like the cpu’s today. then we can the advantage of this graphics such as silent operation, less power consumes and simpler design.
January 19th, 2007 at 10:34 am
They always release a more energy efficiant, slower, cheaper version about a month or two after they release a beast like the r600/g80. Won’t be long before you will see a GF 8500…
January 19th, 2007 at 11:38 am
Always been ATI for pure blood sucking power, but they have never been into great driver development. Hopefully that will change now that they are owned by AMD!
The other thing that sets Nvidia appart, along with the top driver development is the feature set. ATI has never been able to match it and prefer brute force horse power to the incredible quality display properties that Nvidia is known for.
But be prepared for things to change over the next few generations when ATI first socket fits it’s graphics chip right next to the CPU in a dual socket motherboard. Then fit’s a Dual Core CPU with a ATI GPU core as well together as one. That will be a monster running through Hypertransport on 45nm die.
Now with IBM’s SOI coming to AMD chips, expect both AMD and ATI chips to run as cool as Sony’s Cell CPU with far less power usuage! This is the very thing that has Intel sweating bullets over the buy out of ATI!
January 29th, 2007 at 10:56 pm
I have seen a lot of people freaking out at people who buy the latest and most powerful GPUs citing that it is all wasted power and there is no point in spending so much money. This is not always correct. If you are running 17 or 19 inch display, you probably don’t need an 8800 GTX. However, if you are running a larger display, say a 30 inch with a max resolution of 2560×1600, I can tell you from experience that a $200, $300 or even a $400 card will not do the trick. I have this 30 inch monitor and I have two 7950GX2s running in SLI, and until recently, this was one of the best cards available. These two cards can not run Oblivion at max resolution with the settings even just halfway up. The fps is just horrid and the game is unplayable. I had to lower the resolution just to be able to play the game. I am in the process of researching to find the best card for my needs because of this. So before bashing those of us who “spend too much on cards” (note to The Wickerman), think for a second if that is possible for you to do.