X1900XTX 48 Pipelines???

[goodgameral]

I checked out this article, and found newegg had them in stock, now my question is that on the newegg site it said only 16 Pipes. How could the two be so different to write 48 then 16?

[Nitrous]

what article? which two could be different?
alittle info would be nice:feedback:

[imbusion]

I would bet that he's referring to this article (http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/01/24/ati_radeon_x1900_heats_up_with_48_pixel_pipelines/) that I read earlier today on Toms Hardware.

[goodgameral]

yeah, srry i was busy and frgt to post the link...

[RedRoseWolF]

I think I read somewhere(don't remember where) that ATI is actually only listing 16 pipelines, the way they are created, and the newer technology used makes it equivalent to an nVidia card with 48pipes...

[Retell]

I heard:
16 pipelines each sporting 3 pixels shaders = 48 shaders

[RedRoseWolF]

That might be it too...

[Exitialis]

something like that:

http://trustedreviews.com/article.aspx?page=5511&head=15

Therefore, it makes sense tofocus on pixel shader processing power rather than having a 50/50 split with texturing. What ATI has done then is to lay out 12 blocks of quad pixel shaders, giving a total of 48 pixel shader processors. There are still 16 texture units, eight vertex shaders and significantly, still 16 ROPs. Rather than simply increasing the ROPs, what ATI is trying to do is keep them as busy as much of the time as possible. ATI is claiming that by increasing the transistor count by 20 per cent, it has increased shader processing power by 200 per cent. Sounds like a good value deal to me.

http://trustedreviews.com/images/article/inline/2402-shaderengine.jpg

[shoe]

nice info, thanks!! now, what about the 7900gtx? :)

[imbusion]

*shrug*... it wont be out for a few months, and the x1900 xtx is here now. Of course ATI and Nvidia will be constantly one-upping each other. Currently, this new radeon is the fastest video card available.

[RedRoseWolF]

i'm really not worried about getting a new card until they start shipping out DX10 cards...thats when you want to upgrade...

[Retell]

I have a feeling that nvidia will be down and out for about 3 years, it used to be that nvidia was everywhere with the hit of SLI, but with this x1900, everybody that was nvidia exclusive now offers ATI, this means ATI is everywhere and more than nvidia. I forsee that the next time we see a one up is going to be on dual core, dual card, and AGP Express :D

[shoe]

gah, well ill probably stick with my 2 6800gs in sli for now :3

[Exitialis]

id rather not have AGP express personally, cant only have one graphics card with AGP. (Dont ask y cus i cant remember u just cant.)

[shoe]

it would probabally be called agp 8x/16x most likely, not agp express. and i thought agp was dead :WTF???:

[goodgameral]

and in only a month, it will change! How nice to know for the price-consous buyers... :D

[neon]

i cant wait for the 7900 to Own ati's arse yet again ^_^

the prices will come soaring down...im gona buy a vid card in may...prolly even go SLI! with the price drop maybe have 2 GTXs in SLI ROFL!

[Nitrous]

one of my friends ordered 2 7800 GTX 512s and had liquid cooling put on em and everything can you say "kick butt"?

[shoe]

i cant wait for the 7900 to Own ati's arse yet again ^_^

hell yea nvidia kills ati :thumbsup:

[Nitrous]

i cant wait for the 7900 to Own ati's arse yet again ^_^


and I cant wait for ATi to come out with yet another vid card that will kick nvidias butt

[neon]

ofcourse you cant wait...cuz its not worth waiting for cuz its neva gona happen...


PWNT

[Nitrous]

then how come the X1900XTX PWND the 7800 gtx 512?
so if they did it once they can do it again

[neon]

because the X1900 is rival to 7900 and not 7800... the x1800 was rival to the 7800 but since it had 512mb and still got pwnt by the gtx, the 512mb version came an An@L raped ati

[Nitrous]

and you know why that is? its because ATi comes out with one first and then nvidia knows what they have to beat

[shoe]

and they do a good job at it

[Nitrous]

and ATi does a good job at PWNING nvidias card when they come out

[imbusion]

crossfire is a lot more reasonable for upgrades than SLI. I could take my x800 pro from over a year ago, and make it crossfire by only buying 1 video card. You have to buy 2 of the EXACT same geforce's to get SLI.... same model/make/manufacturer/edition.

[Retell]

I can understand the need for 2 different types of mobos, but I really wish that dual video card setups were standard. I admit that there will be times that nvidia will have better stuff and the time, but I won't be able to use it, vice versa. Right now and for the last about 5 months, the radeon chipset has been pwning the nforce, I am glad that it now has a fit vidcard as companion.

[Nitrous]

Well now you can get the 975X chipset from intel which supports Crossfire:thumbsup:

[shoe]

yeah dual cards are the future man. i get more than 200 fps in unreal tournament 2004 (deatmatch) with 2 6800gs, and when i get 2 7800gs, ill get that many in 2007!!!! imagine 2 x1900xtx's vs 2 7900gtx 512mb all overclocked.
___________
son, overclocking can raise your monitors refresh rate.

[neon]

intel bites...

[shoe]

yeah because intel has to have a southbride (which has to have a noisy little fan) that generates more heat, AND its more expensive, has low l1 cache, and poor gaming performence. intel trys to fool their customers with ghz, like the 3.2ghz celeron d. baisically, get intel if you play NO pc games or dont do any multimedia type things, get it only if you do nothing but multitask the internet.
and lets stop fighting about the graphics cards, if you love ati, then get ati, same with nvidia. but then again, ALL graphics cards suck when linked to intel :D

[neon]

amen...atintel sucks

[Exitialis]

fan boys suck, intel is best at everything other than gaming, end of.

[shoe]

dude i used to use only intel. after i bought my first amd (a64) my entire opinion about processors changed. i went from a 3ghz pentium4 to a 2ghz athlon64. everything seems faster and it doesnt feel like my pc is stressing.

[Retell]

The Facts:

CPUmag (http://www.computerpoweruser.com/editorial/article.asp?article=articles%2Farchive%2Fc0603%2F0 6c03%2F06c03%2Easp&articleid=29932&guid=F33FDFCB12C04C0AAC5B3725C0D33DB9&searchtype=0&WordList=&bJumpTo=True)


ATI Radeon X1900 CrossFire
$599
ATI
(905) 882-2600
www.ati.com
CPU Rating: 4.5

Is the Radeon X1900 XT still a foreign name to you? In case you missed the recent launch, ATI refreshed its top-shelf offering with even more power than before. The Radeon X1900 XT is an adaptation of the Radeon X1800 XT, modified for much greater shader performance. In fact, whereas the older R520 GPU leveraged 16 pixel shading engines, this new R580 core wields no less than 48.

The rest of the chip’s specifications remain the same. You get the same programmable memory controller, 16 texture units, eight vertex shading engines, and so on. Such an asynchronous architecture is somewhat reminiscent of the original Radeon core, which boasted two pixel pipelines with a total of six texture units. If you remember back, that design didn’t fare so well against Nvidia’s GeForce2. Thus, we asked ATI why it thought R580’s layout would be better. Apparently, games never really utilized the Radeon’s extra texture units. However, ATI representatives are convinced that tomorrow’s titles will make gratuitous use of shader math, even more so than today’s. Per ATI’s estimation, 100% of new 3D games will use pixel shaders by year’s end. So for every benchmark the Radeon X1900 XT dominates now, it’ll purportedly do even better in those to come.

In all other aspects, the Radeon X1900 XT is very much like its predecessor. You can’t even tell the two boards apart, actually. Dual-slot cooler, auxiliary power input, gentle howl at boot-up—it’s all there. The high-end card still sports 512MB of memory clocked at 725MHz. The core still runs at 625MHz, too, though that is a much bigger accomplishment considering it plays host to no less than 380 million transistors.

Display output support persists through the Avivo pipeline. Only now, several months after Avivo was launched, the driver support is much better, and ATI can actually claim dominance in video decoding compared to Nvidia’s PureVideo solution. At long last, H.264 acceleration is part of the package. Plus, you get the Multimedia Center suite when you buy a built-by-ATI X1900 XT.

If anything takes Radeon X1900 XT off your shopping list, it’ll be the price. A standalone card sells for $549, and the CrossFire edition goes for $599. That’s more than a grand in graphics. It gets even worse if your first card is the flagship Radeon X1900 XTX, a $649 board. Good thing the motherboards don’t cost much, right?

To ATI’s credit, performance with a pair of Radeon X1900s is nothing short of spectacular. It was noticeably faster than the Radeon X1800 CrossFire setup in all my tests, and that’s exclusively due to the tripling of pixel shading horsepower. The most telling result is clearly F.E.A.R at 1,600 x 1,200 with 4X anti-aliasing and 8X anisotropic filtering, which scores 25% faster than the X1800 CrossFire configuration. At 1,024 x 768 the performance delta is even larger at 60%. ATI obviously found a bottleneck in today’s shader-heavy games and squelched it.

As with the Radeon X1800 CrossFire launch, ATI reps are again claiming immediate availability. I’ll refrain from commenting this time around, just in case some “unforeseen supply issue” keeps the card from appearing on store shelves right away. With that said, a ready supply would give ATI a leg-up on Nvidia’s hard-to-find 512MB GeForce 7800 GTX.

Then again, Nvidia is said to have some real heat rearing for exposure. Initial guesstimates suggest it will appear a couple of months after ATI’s advance. But in case you hadn’t noticed, ATI still lacks a Platinum Edition at its high end. Maybe there’s room for a retaliatory punch. Only time will tell. Until then, ATI’s Radeon X1900 CrossFire is the card to buy. It is, for all intents and purposes, what I had hoped R520 would be.

[shoe]

does the non crossfire version work with nforce4? (not sli or ultra) im thinking of building another box, and i want to stick with my nforce roots :D that and how much of a performence difference will it be from my 6800gs sli setup? (2gig corsair xms ram, athlon64 3200+ same EVERYTHING exept motherboard) (epox 754 sli & ecs nforce4-a754) both socket 754.