Faster And Prettier Gaming

We buy 3D graphics cards to play games, to save humanity from a variety of digital aliens and terrorists. We use these expensive, majestic beasts so that we can pound our pretty digital enemies into pixel dust! When we do that, we like it to render their virtual deaths in beautiful sceneries. I'm not afrait to admit that I'm a really big fan of great graphics rendering. So, what does the R600 bring to the table in terms of 3D graphics?

Well, the R600 brings with it a new 512-bit external memory interface. This gives it about a third more bandwidth per clock cycle than even NVIDIA's vaunted GeForce 8800 GTX. Coupled with the ring bus system they implemented in the R520, the R600's memory bandwidth should scale very well.

When it comes to the heart of the card itself, the R600 VPU, well, ATI made the most logical move and went the way of their Xbox 360 graphics processor. Although current reports say that the R600 weighs in with 320 scalar processors, I believe that's pretty vague at best. The best of assumptions claims it has 64 vector units with a 4+1 configuration, although the preliminary benchmark results are less than impressive.

For a card that is more than 6 months late, its performance was pretty limpy. Will it truly be able to give the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX a good trashing, like ATI promised? Perhaps their drivers have not been properly optimized, even after such a long delay. It wouldn't be surprising, after what we saw with the new ATI Radeon X1950 GT.

Now, we need to give ATI and AMD the benefit of the doubt. ATI has a track record of gambling on newer and fancier architectures. I believe that in the long run, the R600 has a lot more potential going for it. As DirectX 10 games are released, ATI's shader versus texture gamble will probably start paying off.

For those who are not aware of what I'm talking about, here's a short refresher on the issue. During the R5xx days, ATI took a gamble. Instead of going the traditional way and increasing texture processing power, ATI chose to increase shader processing power instead. So far however, the R600's performance has been unimpressive. But what about image quality?

Well, anti aliasing has been improved. There's no way of telling if there has been any improvements in anisotropic filtering although I personally feel that ATI's high-quality angle-independent anisotropic filtering is already pretty good. Reliable sources indicate that ATI's Super AA has been significantly modified for better performance, and that the R600 will also come with a special 24X Custom AA mode for CrossFire configurations.

Also part of the package of enhancements in the R600 is 128-bit HDR rendering. This is quite an improvement over the FP16 blend-based rendering used in the R5XX VPUs. At least in HDR rendering, the R600 should be able to hold its own against the NVIDIA G80 GPU.

What Does This Mean To Us?

Well, as far as I can see, the R600 will beat the G80 from a pricing standpoint by a comfortable margin of 20%. This is not exactly amazing, since it's coming out so late. But it will bring in more memory bandwidth than ever which is great for games with loads of textures. It also beat the G80 in the image quality department.

Prima facie, the R600 doesn't seem as fast as it should be, but I honestly believe that only time will show us what its true performance is. It's just like what the R5XX was before Oblivion came along.

Your Local Power Company Will Be Happy

Encountering numerous problems right from the start and coupling that with promises of high clock rates didn't help ATI or AMD at all. So, they decided to go with the same game plan they used last time. Larger and better yield silicons capable of higher clocks will be used in their higher-end cards, while smaller, poorer yield silicons with slower clock speeds will be used to build their mid-range and lower-end cards.

They will probably use the experience and time brought by using the newer and smaller process on their mid-range and low-end chips, so that in the future they can use them for their higher performance chips. It's very much like the R520. It was built upon the larger 130nm process, while the R580 and its derivatives made use of the smaller 90nm process once ATI perfected that process technology.

Although this has become an acceptable practice in the chip business. it becomes less acceptable when leakage current forces the chip to use more than 200 watts of power. With its 80nm high-speed silicon, the R600 will still be a beast that will suck your power supply dry, and make your local power company very happy and very rich.

Do note that the same doesn't apply for the RV600 and its derivatives. As far as I can see, ATI's RV630 (the Radeon HD2600) will not need an external 6-pin power connector. This means it can be supplied solely by the PCI Express slot. Well, that's a bit of relief, isn't it? But enthusiasts who want to get the higher-end cards will definitely have to invest in a new PSU. Get one with the new-fangled 8-pin PCI Express power cables. You will need them.

What Does This Mean To Us?

The power requirement of the R600 and its derivatives is going to be far worse than that of current ATI and NVIDIA graphics cards. Be prepared to buy a more powerful PSU.