R600 is the coming graphics circuit from AMD ATI and there have been so many rumors circling the circuit we don’t where to begin. Some have said that it will be an incredibly power-hungry circuit, other have promised miracles. Now that XTReview have published what they call a review of R600. They test the card with modified drivers and compare it to GeForce 8800GTX. With crippling drivers R600 still manages to whip 8800GTX in almost all tests and in many of these it does it in a pretty grand style. The test system is among the best you can buy so any other bottlenecks can (almost) be removed from the discussion.
What does comes as little of a surprise is that R600 will in not use GDDR4 to
begin with, but will arrive first in March with GDDR4. the earlier GDDR3 version
will bring 900MHz memories, which is the same as 8800GTX, while the GDDR4
version will have 1100MHz such. But then R600 also has a 512-bit memory bus,
which leads to an enormous memory bandwidth.
We can see that many rumors have turned out to be true, and unfortunately one
of them is the hefty power consumption. XTReview now reports figures at 230W,
but whether these watts are hard tame or not, the article doesn’t say.
- 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 internal processing
- Hardware support for GPU clustering (any 2^n number, not limited to Dual
or Quad-GPU)
- Hardware DVI-HDCP support (High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection)
- Hardware Quad-DVI output support (Limited to workstation editions)
- 230W
All in all the card is looking very promising and from what it seems we
should be able to expect a launch of GDDR3 version on January 22.
Update:
The cards will come with 1024MB graphics memory
and be possible to run in CrossFire mode with 2, 4 or more cards (even
combinations), something CrossFire has always supported though.
Update 2:
Apparently XTReview copied the review from
another site. You can find the longer and far more extensive review here: Level
505
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