Graphics Card Tidbits Part V - Update

Today in a week we will be enlightened on what NVIDIA was working on during the last few months. Will there be a GeForce 8800 Ultra or a 8850 GTX or a dual GPU card very likely named 8850 GX2? The names put aside, NVIDIA will give AMD/ATI again a run for their money, though things could change very likely another week later. It's all over town already that Tunisia will be the birthplace for AMD's first product troika (K10 CPUs, RD790 Chipset and R6x0 GPU family) on April 23rd. The invited crowd, most of them being journalists, will among other things, get shown Techdemo which Fuad got a screenshot from. He's got a second file as well, probably out of an official Powerpoint presentation, that finally solves the naming scheme riddle of the R600 high end cards. AMD's upcoming high end boards will be called X2900-Series.There was some sort of a mistake lately in AMD's Knowledge base. The latest Catalyst Control Center disappeared when run on Windows XP 64bit and a X1900 card. Someone at AMD wrote 'X2900' instead of 'X1900' and that led to people taking that false 'X2900' naming for real. The Knowledgebase entry was deleted, and corrected, a few hours after the incident.Meanwhile, we learned a bit more about R600's multimedia features. In order to be compatible to Microsoft's Vista and HDCP encryption over HDMI its got a multi channel sound chip made by Realtek integrated into it. So you don't need to fiddle around with a cable coming from your sound card; but remember, this sound solution is not that advanced. It can cope with HD content, but most likely will fail to deliver any EAX features.
The video decoding part however sounds rock solid. Blu-ray, HD-DVD, any other H.264 content, the UVD chip (Dedicated Universal Video Decoder called Xilleon) will process and decode it. There is even possibe support for two independent video streams, which is needed for 'picture in picture' modes. That sounds like the R600 is more advanced then specialized standalone players that struggle when faced with the upcoming new BD format Blu-ray Disc Java.

Back to the more basic stuff, prices. We had a report regarding the whole R6x0 pricing here at TPU! which was short but interesting. It later came to my attention that Kyle Bennett, HardOCP Editor-in-Chief, disagreed with what Boot Daily told before. So don't think you will have a X2900XTX for a mere 500 US$!

Update: The R600 will be replaced by the R650 (65nm) very soon after its release. That was, what Kyle Bennett meant with its R580 hint...Don't miss the first parts of the Graphics Card Tidbits: Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV.