News ATI to introduce new GPUs early in '06

That just sounds dirty for some reason...

Anyways... well... let's see if they can get any cards to market, for a change. It can outperform laws of quantum physics for all I care, but it's pointless if you can't get it anywhere.

Even releasing this tidbit of info is honestly discouraging as far as paper launches go really. With the 7-series of the green boys, we (well I'm sure you did bigz) really didn't know anything about them until launch day... we were still speculating on the name to a certain extent. In any case with the way things are going, I'd bet nVidia will have a card that outperforms it available a week earlier.

 

In a way it kinda makes sense. The R580 and the R520 where designed/made by different teams. Had R520 made it to release when it was meant to (June iirc??) then there woulkd have been a 6 month gap between the 2 gen cards.
That's about right for a cycle. With the R520 being release late, and it not beating the 7800GTX's it makes even more sense for them to switch over to the R580 so soon after launching the X1x00 series. Why waste money marketing and selling you're top of the line graphics processor when its firstly slower than you're competitions, and secondly when you have a (much?) faster card ready to roll....

Having said that, ATI STILL need to support the X!x800 owners, seems theres still plenty of driver issues with the cards. The onboard voltage adjust isn't functioning correctly, and theres STILL no sign on the crossfire master cards floating about...

 

still running a 5900xt flashed to 5950ultra here

very poor directx 9.0 features implementation but it runs games with direct X8.0 features quite well.

I got it about £30 cheeper than the cheepest 9800pro at the time so it was good value for money.

 

I hope this is like the 9800pro was....

 

There's definitely more to come, but I can't confirm anything at the moment. Think 90nm, though. One thing I hope they do is improve the texture filtering.

I'm really looking forward to R580, I just hope games have enough shaders to make R580 significantly faster than R520.

 

By the way: Aren't we already at a point where gfx cards are limited by CPUs? 'Cause if so why release a new generation of gfx cards?

 

Not really, IMHO. Faster graphics cards are better at processing shaders - CPUs can't do that. Games like FEAR are not CPU limited a great deal, at least from a graphics point of view - there are so many shaders that it needs all of the shader power it can get.

 

Hey taunt me if I'm wrong, but ATI WTF are you doing?. Is the 580 a new arcitecture or just a little tweaked? but Trying to beat nVidia? Well I am looking forward to when nVidia releases a new arcitecture, as, correct me if i'm wrong, but arnt the 7 series based on a tweaked 6 series GPU? ATI's new arcitecture doesn't seem up to scratch.
Just my ramblings, its 4 in the morning so I may not be thinking straight, but at least I can see round corners

 

r580 is the same as r520 but with more pipes iirc :drool:
should be pretty awesome

 

Awesome like a ...paper...release..? Will truly be interesting to see if ATI finally manages to hardlaunch properly. When will Nvidia present their next gen? it's already time for it I think because 7800 series has been available for quite long already.

 

It's not more pipes in the strict sense of the term, just more pixel processors.

There are no additional texture units, and no additional pixel output engines, but there are three times the number of pixel processors. I don't know about vertex operations yet - might have 10 vertex shaders, but that's a wild stab in the dark.

 

Hm... yea iirc 7 series is like 6+ series cards. But ATI's new architecture basically is able to rock the market in my opinion. It simply isn't at the moment... maybe it will with R580. ATI already has a better SM 3.0 architecture as far as I know and nVidia are the ones to strike back at this point. BUT nVidia have the chance to keep their 6 months release rhythm and that kinda gives 'em an advantage. Maybe nVidia should take 1 or 2 months more and then hit the market with a technology bashing ATI into pieces (IF they are able to develope something to do so)... or they go for the fast money like AMD did when announcing to (way too late) jump on the DDR2 train to keep up with Intel instead of saying wtf who needs DDR2 as DDR3 will be standard at last '07? We should be right there to launch perfect stable and well organised boards when the time comes to show Intel how we felt when not being able to keep the pace with DDR2 boards.