Sunday, September 7th 2008
ATI Plans to Take on GeForce 9800 GT, RV770LE in the Works
Earlier this year, the unthinkable happened when ATI brought in stiff competition with NVIDIA in almost all segments to snatch the performance crown. All NVIDIA could do as a retaliation was to hurry up with a transition to the 55nm silicon fabrication technology and price cuts among all its segments. The latter is of more importance since price cuts for NVIDIA's products have been huge, in many cases, as much as 40%. While Radeon HD 4850 in its 512 MB and 1 GB avatars took on GeForce 9800 GTX/GTX+, the GeForce 9800 GT slipped in from nowhere. Technically at launch the GeForce 9800 GT isn't much more than 8800 GT except a few features that only nForce chipset users could benefit from, among other changes. Indications are that this product isn't faring bad in the market and to retaliate ATI is devising a new graphics core, the RV770LE.
Simply put, the RV770LE is a toned down variant of the RV770 core that will position below the RV770 Pro (Radeon HD 4850). It features lower clock speeds than the RV770 Pro and more importantly, a 192 bit memory bus and 480 Stream Processors. This also affects the TMU and ROP counts with the new core having 12 ROPs and 24 TMUs. Memory configurations would be affected as well. While some sources indicate that it would be branded as Radeon HD 4830, others say it's likely to be branded as the Radeon HD 4750 and is slated for release in October.
Sources:
ChipHell, Hardware Infos
Simply put, the RV770LE is a toned down variant of the RV770 core that will position below the RV770 Pro (Radeon HD 4850). It features lower clock speeds than the RV770 Pro and more importantly, a 192 bit memory bus and 480 Stream Processors. This also affects the TMU and ROP counts with the new core having 12 ROPs and 24 TMUs. Memory configurations would be affected as well. While some sources indicate that it would be branded as Radeon HD 4830, others say it's likely to be branded as the Radeon HD 4750 and is slated for release in October.
19 Comments on ATI Plans to Take on GeForce 9800 GT, RV770LE in the Works
Think about it twice before falling for Demerjian's ilusions of a no profitable Nvidia. Because you must be influenced by him, otherwise I don't know where you came from to ensure Nvidia has not a healthy profit.
Besides the gross of the market is in the $75-$150 segment (because you don't really need anything faster to play anything out there yet) and Nvidia right now is king there: 9600GT, 9/8800GT, GS variants, etc. That's why Ati is releasing this card.
There's always been a strong fanbase for nVidia.
Even if ATi continue to bring out affordable killer cards many nVidia fans are reluctant to switch.
There's also another reason to consider. People are forgetting that Nvidia's profits went UP A LOT with G92. Nvidia's economical situation went up a lot from the profits that made them Company Of The Year. With all that into account, I would say Nvidia's profits are around the same levels or even better than before G80. They are just not so good as in the past 2 years, that's all.
EDIT: Anyway, back on topic. I'm reluctant to believe those specs. Ati with RV770 uses the same "modular" architecture as Nvidia, meaning that they have TMUs included in the SP arrays now (10 TMU/SP clusters) and 4 ROP clusters with 64bit memory controler each). Unless they have anormally low yields, IMO there's no reason they couldn't make the card with 640 SP and 32 TMUs, two of those 10 clusters dissabled. Two dissabled TMU clusters and one ROP cluster are enough to enconpass most of "defective" chips IMO. It works wonders for Nvidia, I don't see why it wouldn't work for Ati, unless they have very low yields. We don't have words on low yields so I don't understand. Also 24 TMUs seem too low to compete.
but i do remember when having a 6800LE and unlocked mine to 16x6 instead of 8x4 in the days of agp with rivatuner good old times... didnt quiet make the mustard of a full 6800gt but hey you get what you pay for and take that chance