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ATI's R600 will run cooler, but DirectX 9.0 faster |
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Written by Mavke
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Thursday, 29 June 2006 |
The Inquirer has confirmation that ATI plans to do something about its rather criticised R520 and R580 cooler. It is efficient, but sometimes it can get rather noisy. NVIDIA's heatpipe G70 and G71 GTX cooler does a better job as it is not as noisy. We also learned that the upcoming red DirectX 10 ATI part also known as R600 might be the fastest card for the DirectX 9.0 titles as well. The point won't be to try to take the performance crown for the yet to come DirectX 10 titles, ATI rather wants to rule the current DirectX 9.0 market. ATI sort of listens to the market and so it plans to redesign the R600 cooler. However, we don't yet have details how this new stuff is supposed to look like.
 ATI's R600 will run cooler, but DirectX 9.0 faster
If you know that the R600 should be the biggest and warmest chip ever, we expect a very efficient cooler. It has to be better from the current R580 cooler as the present one has reached its limits. The upcoming one will just get hotter. The R600 will be designed to run DirectX 9.0 code just as fast as it is supposed to run DirectX 10 code. Unified shaders apparently can run code that gives a toss about pixel and vertex shader just as fast. There will be an abstraction layer that will decide whether the information is pixel, vertex or geometry, and it will be served by an adequate hardware pipe.
So we don't think that the DirectX 10 hardware should care that much about the DirectX 9.0 versus DirectX 10 code. If you take into account that the R600 will have a very high clock, fast memory and more pixel operation pipes than the current hardware it might be the winning combination. Just don't take the G80 for granted, as NVIDIA has surprised us many times before. NVIDIA is really tight lipped about its G80 cards and very few people actually know whether the chip is taped out of not. It has to be if the September is still the target but it's quite hard to confirm it at this point.
NVIDIA wants its partners to care about the current GeForce 7950 GX2 hardware as this is what the company can deliver, the G80 is still a few months away. The future does have some nice things coming,but how nice, good and fast these will be that's still to be seen. Somehow we do expect the G80 to hit us a bit sooner then the R600... But then again only time will tell who beats who.
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