Okay, so first nVidia 'borrows' 3Dfx tech...
(translation - 'steals')

Then ATI 'copies' 3Dfx design...

...methinks I see a pattern in the industry!

In short - we all knew that 3Dfx designs were YEARS ahead of their time!

History repeats itself - and it still looks L33T! 8)

well from what I have read from my dutch source is that the retail model shall use 240 watts and the OEM model the big 32CM card that one will use 270 watts, that's under full load.

but hay do remmeber that a single R600 has about double the memory bandwidth of a single 8800GTX so its' no wonder that such a powerfull card may need so much power, doesn't a single 8800GTX use something like 212 watts?
an 8800GTX does 87,6 GB per sec max RAM bandwidth a X2800 XTX does 153,4GB per sec max bandwidth heh see there is a large difference, personally I think that the X2800 XTX will even crush a SLI setup of 2 8800 GTX cards in DX10 mode with all eye candy enabled, since it's ram bandwidth is allmost the same, where as ATi cards allways triumphed with max eye candy settings

Anyways all waht we can do is wait and see.

So for ATi's sake with a card that allmost doubs the NV card qua max memory bandwith I find it quite neat that it only needs 240 watts for the retail board, don't understand why the OEM card uses more though, I will ask my resources that.

But still 240 watts is rather wacko, I just hope it will be something like 170 watts, Since our R580 use something like 140 to 160 watts?

Dunno what my R580+ uses, I think abit less than the R580, since it has a smaller die afaik.

Also something very interesting here some updates about the new Catalyst drivers for the R600 and other ATi cards before and after it

the article come from PC perspective:
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=367

"One thing that NVIDIA had to deal with in their driver development that ATI didn't have to publicly is support DX10. Because none of the currently available ATI hardware can run DX10, the Catalyst driver development is on-going at the company. Thanks to NDA's in place on the next generation R600 hardware that will undoubtedly support DX10 and Vista, ATI wasn't able to share a whole lot on the status of Catalyst software for DX10, but they were very up-beat about it.

The ATI Catalyst DX10 driver was developed by a separate, but parallel, team of software engineers that started work sometime after the DX9 Vista driver team began their work. ATI would like us to trust in their software development cycle by indicating their Vista driver was ready on time and that so will their DX10 Vista driver.

While I can't say much about the upcoming R600 hardware itself, there is little hiding that the products are coming soon and with a big trade event coming up in the March time frame, it might be a good time to release a new GPU. Maybe. But in any event, ATI's Makedon says that if any DX10 titles are available with the R600 launches that his team will be ready with a driver for the R600 for them. ATI even kind of gave NVIDIA the benefit of the doubt by saying that without DX10 titles for gamers, there really wasn't much point in harping on them about their lack of a DX10-ready driver. Man, how often do you see that??"

heh I like what AMD says about NV drivers, it is the truth imho.

"Catalyst 7.2 - February
Coming in the next week or so, this release will offer some significant OpenGL optimizations to help fix some performance issues that we saw in our initial performance article under Vista. We will also the addition of the new Catalyst software installer appliction to the XP release of Catalyst 7.2

Catalyst 7.3 - March
This release will bring CrossFire support back to OpenGL applications running under Vista as well as additional OpenGL performance optimizations. This release should also see the introduction of support for Blu-ray and HD-DVD playback under 64-bit versions of Windows Vista.

Catalyst 7.4 - April
The Linux Catalyst Control Center is set to be released in this update.

Catalyst 7.5 - May
The new MSAA adaptive anti-aliasing is scheduled to be put into the May Catalyst release. This feature will bring their AA options on-par or beyond what NVIDIA currently offers on the G80 graphics cards. This feature timeline is a target, and not yet a commitment from AMD at this time."

So here comes the interesting part, if you look @ Cat. 7.5 drivers they will support MSAA Adaptive FSAA hey!! that's nice it kinda remembers me that 3dfx used for their Rampage design , a good 6,5 years ago check:
http://www.thedodgegarage.com/3dfx/rampage.htm

Rampage rasteriser:

· Rampage Texture computer with "loopback"
· 3dfx M-Buffer (Multi-Sample Buffer)
· 2x/4x RGMS Full Scene AntiAlising aka Rotated Grid Multi Sample Full Scene Anti-Aliasing
· Up to 128Tap anisotropic filtering
· 52bit Internal Color rendering precision / 0 - 16.0 Color luminosity range
· FXT1/DXT1 Texture compression · 3D textures support
· True PhotoShop filter effects in hardware
· Non-Photorealistic rendering
· Cube Environment Maps/EMBM/Dot3 BM
· YUV Texture formats
· 1/2/4 chip scalability
· Fully programmable DirectX8 1.1compiant Pixel Shaders with additional features (DX9)

ATi is kinda using old 3dfx tech for their newer drivers, damn I like that idea, since MSAA is the same idea as MSRG FSAA, comes to the same principles, the obly extra added to thattype of FSAA is the Adaptive part which we all know from the X1K series.

Personally I think that this new mic of 3dfx MSRG FSAA & ATi Adaptive AA is gonna make the FSAA idea even nicer, but how far can they really go at that part?
why no changes to the Anisotropic Filtering as well like AF x32 Hight Quallity? should be possible right?

hmm got some more info from VR-Zone
http://www.vr-zone.com/?i=4672

"[It's Official. R600 is Radeon X2900 Series]"

heh they are saying it's official, then I'm like how can they be sure it's so uhm official?

since VR-Zone is like The Inquierer, it's gossip site like many others, so imho that if a Gossip site says that the R600 series  carrie the X2900 nametag as it's official name, how real that it all sounds, we can't state that as true evidence of the card's real official name, since that there has been no name release from the host aka AMD.ATi themselves

So I still see it as gossip than true info.

WHOA - HEATSINKAGE!

You'd end up losing two PCI slots next to the thing!!!

yeah this card is really gonna kick some NV arse, in most cases it's even faster than a 7900GTX just amazing how fast AGP cards really are, to me the PCUI-E thing is morely done for the marketing part, since that in most cases AGP x8 cards of the same type beat their PCI-E x16 counterparts, so funny and stuff LoooL

hmm maybe dal AGP slot's was impossible for the SLI as CrossFire setups just qua instabillity factors and speed performance wise?

Just a deep thought there

Quote:



If you decide you have to have the XT I would be interested in your old Pro 8)