R420 has 16 Pipelines!!!

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good, that should keep it competative with the NV40, (competition= lower prices)
 
It is on the front page, in the news.

And yes! Its a beautiful thing. I so can't wait for more "leaks". NDA be damned!
 
awesome, although i still want to see if the nv40 does infact have hardware MPEG2/4 Encoding. looks like both cards are going to be great.
 
I'm so freaking excited now!!! :D :D :D

At least we know SOMETHING about the damn card, ATI's doing a good job of keeping it under wraps.....for the most part.
 
Does this mean that all 16 pipes will be in use? Or a portion will be disabled for some unknown reason?

Note to mod: can I remove the 'FX' part of my screen name?
 
Originally posted by ScourggeFX
Does this mean that all 16 pipes will be in use? Or a portion will be disabled for some unknown reason?

Note to mod: can I remove the 'FX' part of my screen name?
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I'm assuming that it means it'll have a TRUE, FULL 16x1 pipeline. Hopefully not like some of that stuff nvidia was pulling with the FX's where they're not ALWAYS all in use. :rolleyes:
 
anyone else see this?

http://www.tech-report.com/onearticle.x/6551


i don't know very much about how gpus are made, but being able to add pipelines a month before a gpu is released sounds suspicious to me. If pipelines were that easy to add, why hasn't someone made a gpu with 24-32 pipe lines or something ridiculous...
 
Originally posted by mcryptic
anyone else see this?

http://www.tech-report.com/onearticle.x/6551


i don't know very much about how gpus are made, but being able to add pipelines a month before a gpu is released sounds suspicious to me. If pipelines were that easy to add, why hasn't someone made a gpu with 24-32 pipe lines or something ridiculous...
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I'll let someone else field this one 'cus I've gotta ditch here and I wasn't going to make it a 5 second post. ;)
 
Pretty exciting news. I'm still rooting for ATI but the winner of my $$$ is the fastest card with the best IQ. Whoever balances that will get my bucks. I'm ready to buy, bring on the cards!
 
ATYT hasnt been releasing any information about their card at all.

I bet a lot of people are going to be surprised. the ATI engineers have been putting out some really high quality products the last year and a half.

great news.

edit: ATYT is ATI's stock symbol, lol. my bad. been daytrading a little too much lately..
 
Originally posted by mcryptic
anyone else see this?

http://www.tech-report.com/onearticle.x/6551


i don't know very much about how gpus are made, but being able to add pipelines a month before a gpu is released sounds suspicious to me. If pipelines were that easy to add, why hasn't someone made a gpu with 24-32 pipe lines or something ridiculous...
Click to expand...

You can have as many pipe lines as your design can handle, if your design says we can use 32 pipelines then you can use it, or you can use 16 if you want or even 1... This is how the 9200se was made by cutting pipelines and ram speed and being tossed on the market. However, that report from tech report doesn't mean anything, they might have just been speculating.

However we can trust hardocp to give us real facts, not speculation when they say it's a fact.

~Adam
 
well, now that it has been confirmed i think that the R420 will whoop the NV40 (judging from the past records)
 
hmm my only question is .. isn't kyle under the same NDA as everyone else? How did he manage to release this without getting in trouble? Not that i'm not happy, hell now i'm more excited, can;''t wait to buy the better of these two cards.

PS: Thank you AMD stock for making this possible :)
 
Originally posted by HiTech-Hate
PS: Thank you AMD stock for making this possible :) [/B]
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lol. i just made a little off AMD also. atyt stock went up about 20% last 3 weeks, so I sold a little off, planning to use it to buy their nextgen card too, lol.
 
I would venture to bet that these "leaks" are being steered by ATI to curve enthusiasm over the nv40. ATI wants to steal some thunder from nivida and since they have prepared to go 16 pipes as well, seems like a good time to drop this out as a trial balloon. It's called Marketing.

If true, it was a good time to drop it. People are talking about n40 a lot and it's in ATI's interest to calm the enthusuiats community down a bit and give them something else to think about other than April 16th and nvidias "coming out" party.

Good move on ATI's part. Of course I'm just speculating out loud.
 
Originally posted by HiTech-Hate
hmm my only question is .. isn't kyle under the same NDA as everyone else? How did he manage to release this without getting in trouble? Not that i'm not happy, hell now i'm more excited, can;''t wait to buy the better of these two cards.

PS: Thank you AMD stock for making this possible :)
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I beleave even with an nda all bets are off if you get the information from a source other than the one that made you sign it in the first place. Of course the nda still applies for everything else but the info that has become public. Am I right?
 
rofl this is too funny. not to long ago when the rumor was the nv40 had 16 pipelines and the r420 didnt, everybody was saying that it might be a good thing for ati not to have 16.

lol now its a good thing to have 16.
god i love fanboyism.

just pick the best card and be happy.
 
Originally posted by Bad_Boy
god i love fanboyism.

just pick the best card and be happy.
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Watch yourself, we're not all fanboys in here.....it's just easy to get excited about some things. The rest of us can't help it if there are some people around here who think they know what's best for either company, and we leave them to their "work". ;)

I DO just go with the best card....but there are also other things that effect my decisions. For me, the 9800XT is the best thing on the market right now, and I wouldn't trade it for a 5950, even if someone offered to do a clean swap.

That's not being a fanboy, it's knowing what's best for YOUR needs.....and not following the masses.
 
Originally posted by Bad_Boy
.......everybody was saying that it might be a good thing for ati not to have 16.
......
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Ummm, who ever said that? Certaintly it wasn't "everybody". I hate over-generalizations.
 
Whaaa???

I specifically heard from boi-wonder (anand) that it was 8 regular Fixed Function with 6 Vertex (up from 4 in the 9800)

Of course the Inq had their own estimates too.

Someone has to be right.
 
Originally posted by ZenOps
Whaaa???

I specifically heard from boi-wonder (anand) that it was 8 regular Fixed Function with 6 Vertex (up from 4 in the 9800)

Of course the Inq had their own estimates too.

Someone has to be right.
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I'm trusing [H]ard|OCP for now.....they've never let me down yet. :cool:

Ummm, who ever said that? Certaintly it wasn't "everybody". I hate over-generalizations.
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Ditto.
 
Well...16 pipelines isn't the greatest thing ever.

It will allow more 'predictions' to occur and higher information exchange, but won't it have to 'flush' the pipes...and when it does that it will take longer than an 8 pipelines GPU. Especially because games aren't yet designed for a 16 pipeline GPU.
 
no, it just means that more pixels can be processed at the same time, the game or api is irrelevant. it isn't like a cpu architecture's smp, graphics are designed to be processed in paralell, that is why more pipes is better, because more can be processed in the same time.
 
I don't understand how games can be designed for the number of gpu pipelines, if they are all equal- to me it appears to be parallelism, where addming more just makes it that much faster. Anyone else have something to say about this, I know I'm really just speculating here.
 
Yup, more pipelines is better as long as you combine them all back together efficiently. It does not matter if the software is optimized for them or not IF in a 16x1 arrangement. If it is in a 8x2 or a 4x4, then the software must support multitexturing or the performance benefit will be lost.

There is always a risk with too many pipes that the clockspeed might have to be lowered so that it works properly (Nvidia or ATi, or Intel or AMD for that matter.)

Its pretty well assumed that these are fixed function pipelines (for DX 7 & 8 )

I'm wondering how ATi managed to fit 16 pipes and some vertex shader (any arrangement) into 160 million transistors... It can be done, but seems awfully close to the minimum.
 
well they save transistors by using 24 bit registers instead of nvidia's 32 bit ones, plus they save a bunch by using shortcuts in their AF technique that cut IQ slightly.
 
I have to say Ati has done a very good job of hiding the details of the R420, probably fooled Nvidia into thinking they had the upperhand. Well one thing looks good, the R420 on needs one molex and doesnt need 2 seperate rails. I wonder wats the watts usage on the NV40, if you play enough games, there might noticeable jump on the powerbills.
 
16 pipes for both !, sounds like massive fillrate to me, but I thought the bottle neck was moving more towards pixel shaders. Should help for games like ut2k4 though
 
Sadly enough, all we can say at this point is things like "should" and "might" 'cus nobody knows until we know.....and not before. It'll take until both cards are launched for anyone to be able to make any educated decisions judgements but that doesn't mean you won't hearing people "making" them before that. ;)
 
8 pipelines yay!
12 pipelines yay!
16 pipelines yay!
You say it
Yaaay!
Yaaay!
Yaaay!
16 pipelines yay!
Yay!


Nerds. :rolleyes:




















:D 16 pipelines yay!
 
Originally posted by IYIENACE
8 pipelines yay!
12 pipelines yay!
16 pipelines yay!
You say it
Yaaay!
Yaaay!
Yaaay!
16 pipelines yay!
Yay!


Nerds. :rolleyes:




















:D 16 pipelines yay!
Click to expand...

:cool:
 
Hey, maybe ATI did the 16x1 and left out any support for PS and VS 3.0? PS/VS 2.0 on a 16x1 GPU would be more than plenty for the games we are waiting for: Doom 3 and HL2 or whatever comes out this year.

Oops. Sorry. Too many MAYBE's in there. :D Seriously. Forgetting about PS/VS 3.0 would not cost ATI anything that I could see, especially if the R500(PS/VS 3.0 included) is do out around X-mas or earlier.;)
 
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