Nice to see AMD put PCF now in there hardware for easy soft shadows. They also one upped NVidia with a tessellator unit on hardware!!! Nice. It's a power hungry pig also, 348 watts at load, 187 idle. So who is getting one.

ah poo... with the whole dissertation handing in lark I kinda forgot this was out today...

Time to go read on the arch and check out the reviews... granted, if I can still get my 40% discount on ATI hardware you can count on me getting one [grin]

More comments when I have more facts...

Sure looks nice.

I would get one of these cards just for the tessellator unit, I would like to try that out. I hope games start using this feature soon rather than later, for sure when it comes to human figures, like faces, and hands could look more better, when you throw some displacement mapping over the tessellated mesh. Sounds interesting.

The only thing I would like to know about is the IQ with filtering, I can't get any info on that front, vs. G80's new filtering which is better than ATI or old Nivida cards filtering. It look crisp and less muddy.

ok, so I'm part way thought Beyond3D's arch. review, however I'm going out so I can't finish reading it until later [sad]

That said; while I wouldn't mind playing with the tessellator unit myself it's an iffy thing; ATI already tried this with Truform, so unless it is REALLY easy to use or NV introduce something like it sooner rather than later it could die [sad] On the upside, I half wonder if they could reuse the old pn_triangles extension in OGL to expose the functionality there [grin]

The point about the TU is also mirrored by a slight worry about the GS; currently NV's G80 GS performance tanks out totally even with a null shader. I haven't seen 'proper' testing of AMD's yet, however the pre-NDA expiery stuff had the R600 over 50% faster than the G80 in some GS related DX10 tests (it was also slightly faster in others, before anyone yells 'bias' the DX9 tests showed the G80 beating the R600). The reason this is a worry is for much the same reason as the TU, if NV's GS is really that poor devs are going to stay away from it which is kinda sad because the GS is one of the cooler bits of tech the G80 has (the R600's TU trumps it imo over all for 'coolness').

The working theory is it is a driver issue, apprently the driver drops the max in flight threads on the G80 whenever a GS is used, so I really hope that NV sort it sooner rather than later... however, given the recent cluster fuck which has been their driver dev of late I'm less than enfused at the prospect.

Right, more R600 related stuffs much later, either when I get home or when my brain starts working again tomorrow...

*salutes*

Phantom, the r600 has a GS and a tessellator unit, which is not apart of the GS. So it shouldn't be linked to the GS performance. Or I wouldn't think so...

Quote:Original post by MindWipe
Performance wise it looks very poor compared to the 8800gtx and it also drains lots more power. So my choice is made for my next gfx card. And yes, this card should be compared to the 8800gts, but one review also found the gts better and cheaper. But I want a high end card for my next rig.

/MindWipe

You may want to look at the Pny overclocked version of the GTX it's a beast and supposed to be faster than the Ultra for only $550US. It's core speed is like 620mhz?

www.pcper.com uses Vista64 for there reviews now, and IIRC they didn't say anything about crashes...