Tuesday, May 26th 2009
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AMD to Unleash R800, RV870, RV840 and RV810 Within 2009
Graphics major AMD is set to unleash a near-complete lineup of DirectX 11 compliant 40 nm GPUs within 2009. The lineup begins with the entry-level RV810, all the way up to R800 (a supposedly dual-RV870 accelerator). Along the way are two of AMD's key GPUs at the start of its DirectX 11 conquest: the high-performance RV870, and mainstream-performance RV840. The two succeed RV770/RV790 and RV740 respectively. A full-range lineup also means that apart from the RV740, the company will be sourcing three more GPUs from its foundry partners.
Preliminary specifications of the RV870 point at it to have 1200 stream processors, and 143 GB/s of memory bandwidth. The GPU may feature in the Radeon HD 5800 series, and in a pair as R800, possibly Radeon HD 5870 X2. No specifications of the RV840 or RV810 GPUs surfaced from the sources.
Sources:
Hardware-Infos, Expreview
Preliminary specifications of the RV870 point at it to have 1200 stream processors, and 143 GB/s of memory bandwidth. The GPU may feature in the Radeon HD 5800 series, and in a pair as R800, possibly Radeon HD 5870 X2. No specifications of the RV840 or RV810 GPUs surfaced from the sources.
115 Comments on AMD to Unleash R800, RV870, RV840 and RV810 Within 2009
I'm greatly enjoying 2 X fired HD4770s right now. When July comes I'll be very tempted to snag some of the newer 40nm flavors but will probably wait till I get 64 bit W7.
I'm totally looking forward to these. :rockout:
all dx11 games will be compatible even with dx9 and 10 i'm sure
hardware is ahead of software always;all this is the war between manufacturer who want to show their superiority and people jump in buy but can they use it?
I don't buy it.
Games are becoming more and more shading and texturing reliant and impact of pixel fillrate and the rest of ROPs area of work is diminishing. Compare G200 to RV770, eg. RV770 has much more shading power but "only" 16RBEs with a fraction of z compare capabilities vs. G200's 32ROPs and huge z-rate. Yet, gaming performance... ;) And RV770's RBEs are already much beefier than those in RV670 for what comes to z-rate.
Then again, AMD's RBEs are tiny compared to G200's and doubling them might be possible as crazy high speed GDDR5 (ie. 7Gbps) might allow an efficient use of them...
But back to the topic. New cards from ATI, these should be interesting. Like always, we are all waiting to see what NVidia brings to the table. Hopefully both companies release cards that are right on par with each other so no price inflation happens. Made me laugh when the G200 series cards came out, then the RV770 based cards came out from ATI and NVidia dropped the prices on the G200's like it was diseased, lol.
Thanks ATI, thats how my GTX 260 became affordable!
I read an interesting article with Carmack awhile back where he stated from a business standpoint, it only became economically feasible to drop all support for Windows 98 in 2006, but that didn't limit them in gaming engines because Win98 could use DirectX 9. Even if the same model holds exact (could be better, or it could be worse because WinXP had five years to proliferate the market vs three years for Win98), then game developers will need to continue to support Windows XP through 2012, meaning that every game that comes out will need to be written for DirectX 9 with optional DX10/11 effects hacked into the engine.
Microsoft fucked up hard when they decided to not release DX10 on XP, thinking that would surely drive a massive upgrade to Vista.
For consoles they made a dx9 renderpath, but on PC it is the first dx10.x only development.
Anyway it is a crappy game :D
the best example of this is cryostasis, its a very good looking game that is a bitch to run because it uses many shading techniques ontop of physics.
It is all a matter of how the game developer writes the game, they can write it for DX10 then take features out to make it work with DX9, or they can write it for DX9 and add in features for DX10.
In the case of Half Life 2(or the source engine) it is a true DX9 engine, written for DX9 with features disabled in the DX8/7 rendering paths.
So I say again, just because a game has rendering paths for lower DX versions, that doesn't mean it isn't a true DX10/11 game.