ATI Confirms Next Generation PC GPU "Leverages XBOX 360 Design"

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ATI Confirms Next Generation "Leverages XBOX 360 Design"
22-Feb-2006, 21:54.59 Reporter : Dave Baumann

At a recent analyst session ATI's Senior VP of PC Business, Rick
Bergman, has confirmed that their next generation of PC graphics
products will feature much of the technology developed for "Xenos",
ATI's XBOX 360 graphics chip. We've surmised that this is likely be
the case previously, given that Xenos utilises a unified shader
architecture at the hardware level, with both Pixel Shaders and Vertex
shaders utilising the same ALU resources it becomes a ripe time to
implement it with DirectX10 unifying the vertex and pixel shader
programming capabilities in the API.

Vertex and pixel processing have previously always been separate
hardware functions, though vertex processing moved from a software
based solution to hardware with the introduction of NVIDIA's GeForce
256 and has subsequently got closer to the pixel processing capability
with each revision of DirectX Shader Model, to the point where
DirextX10 will should dictate the same programming capabilities across
both. Even with this being the case there is nothing to suggest that
the hardware has to be unified for processing as pixel operations
generally have to hide greater latencies than vertex operations thanks
to the greater use of texturing in the pipeline. However, Xenos's
design has attempted to remove the texture latency issues from shader
programmes by creating a highly threaded design that separates texture
instructions from ALU instructions, allowing multiple shader batches to
run concurrently, and so it comes as no surprise that ATI should adopt
this architecture for the PC, seeing as the investment has already been
made.
......................................................................................................................................

http://beyond3d.com/#news28611
 
.....................................................................................................................................
ATI Confirms Next Generation "Leverages XBOX 360 Design"
22-Feb-2006, 21:54.59 Reporter : Dave Baumann
Click to expand...

.... blah. blah, blah... (rest deleted)....

.....as reporter obviously regurgitates meaningless ATi marketing
blurb.

John Lewis
 
ATI Confirms Next Generation "Leverages XBOX 360 Design"
22-Feb-2006, 21:54.59 Reporter : Dave Baumann
Click to expand...

Translation (as I predicted when the ATI/MS deal was first announced):

ATI is gonna be devoting all their resources to the XBOX, so PC hardware and
drivers will only get whatever improvements trickle down from XBOX work :-).
--email: (e-mail address removed) icbm: Delray Beach, FL |
<URL:http://home.att.net/~Tom.Horsley> Free Software and Politics <<==+
 
Considering the tens of millions of Xbox 360s that are likely to sell
(eventually), can you blame ATI for being Xbox-centric? I doubt they
sell tens of millions of their $500 graphic cards for PCs.
 
Considering the tens of millions of Xbox 360s that are likely to sell
(eventually), can you blame ATI for being Xbox-centric? I doubt they
sell tens of millions of their $500 graphic cards for PCs.
Click to expand...

You say that like they're making $500/unit from the XBox 360. Its
probably a lot closer to $100-$150 per XBox. They probably make more
profit on a $500 video card than they do on 50 XBox 360s. At the same
time, though, they'll probably sell 1000 XBox 360's for every $500
video card (since only a few overly-wealthy geeks will blow that much
cash just to get 4% more FPS in Doom 3...)

Anyway, this announcement isn't anything particularly special:
they've developed a marginally faster product and are trying to hype
it (in this case, by tying it into the hype generated by the XBox 360
launch.) In other news, the sun rose today, and north is still in the
opposite direction of south.
 
You say that like they're making $500/unit from the XBox 360. Its
probably a lot closer to $100-$150 per XBox.
Click to expand...

More like $20-$30 max. per Xbox360. They have only licensed the
right to replicate the design, are not responsible for silicon
production at all. and no doubt have negotiated a per-unit license
fee with M$$.

M$$ finances, schedules and is entirely responsible for the
manufacturing builds of the GPU thru TSMC. ATi may be hauled in to
tweak the design if design-related yield problems appear, and they and
IBM probably have an upfront multimillion$$ monetary incentive to
re-cast the Xbox360 GPU and CPU designs in 65nm ASAP to reduce
the power-consumption.

The current version of the Xbox360 runs too hot internally for its
package size, with most of the heat being generated by the CPU
and GPU. Once the internal heat-sinks clog with household junk
(courtesy of the 2 internal fans) , the box will overheat - there is
no way of accessing these heat-sinks for cleaning without special
tools and voiding the M$$ warranty. The DVD-drive already runs too hot
and temporarily discolors discs after several hours of continuous
3D-gaming use of the Xbox360, since the stupid Xbox360 hardware
designers jammed the GPU and CPU heatsinks right up against the
DVD-drive.

John Lewis
 
Considering the tens of millions of Xbox 360s that are likely to sell
(eventually), can you blame ATI for being Xbox-centric? I doubt they
Click to expand...

XFLop only sold a little over 20 million over 5 years and the xflop
three-shitty is off to a slower start with no flag-rallying trademark
game so far and nothing on the horizon. The xflop three-shitty is
basically turning into a PC-alternative PC port-box which might not be
a good place to be in by next year.
sell tens of millions of their $500 graphic cards for PCs.
Click to expand...

http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/01/18/nvidia_sli_sales/
Nvidia sells 9 million SLI graphics processors
18 Jan 2006
 
Leverages to nothing. The X1900XL has the 48 shader processors and it
is just barely faster in a few benchmarks than the 7800GTX which has
been out since fall last year. The only game that is significantly
faster with the X1900XL is FEAR and there is a lot of speculation that
is just due to the shader coding used in FEAR. The 7900GTX with unified
pixel vertex pipes comes out in a few weeks and it will shove X1900XL
back to being just a contender again. The shader processor path
apporach is not proving to be any big advantage and looks like it might
be weaker in the months ahead.
 
Correct. But at least its a fairly major change unlike the short hops
ATI and NVIDIA seem to be making with PC GPU's at the moment. XBOX is
going to be a good thing for PC gaming.
 
AT LEAST ATI ARE TRYING NEW THINGS UNLIKE NVIDIA WHICH JUST INCREASES
CLOCK SPEED OR ADDS ANOTHER SHADER. EVENTUALLY NVIDIA WILL LAG FAR
BEHIND LIKE IT DID A FEW YEARS AGO. YOUR JUST A NVIDIA FAN BOY WITH NO
REAL FACTS ONLY HYPE.
 
I can just see Blig Jerk sitting in front of his PC, seeing the latest
Sony PS3 delays news with tears streaming down his face...

"Damn you Sony! You have forsaken me!"

I wonder if the PS3 was released was released last Nov and Xbox 360 was
delayed, would he show the same restraint about the news???
 
AT LEAST ATI ARE TRYING NEW THINGS UNLIKE NVIDIA WHICH JUST INCREASES
CLOCK SPEED OR ADDS ANOTHER SHADER. EVENTUALLY NVIDIA WILL LAG FAR
BEHIND LIKE IT DID A FEW YEARS AGO. YOUR JUST A NVIDIA FAN BOY WITH NO
REAL FACTS ONLY HYPE.
Click to expand...


Er, did you accidentally drop your beer-bottle on the Shift key ?
Or did you just misplace your spectacles ? Techno-twaddle anyway.

John Lewis
 
last year Microsoft said they're working on year-2 and year-3 versions
of Xbox 360.
I'll wait for the year-2 version to come out. hopefully 65nm chips and
re-arranged layout of the board & components will make it run
flawlessly and last.
I'm guessing the year-3 version will probably be a futher
cost-reduction of a near-perfected year-2 design. okay I am just
speculating on that. I'll be watching carefully for word of the year-2
console arrival.
 
...................................................................................................................................
ATI Confirms Next Generation "Leverages XBOX 360 Design"
22-Feb-2006, 21:54.59 Reporter : Dave Baumann
Click to expand...

Snip very so-so specs.

Wait until NVidia launches their new 9900XPSL GTS with twin vertex
real time gigashaders, intercooled redundent fast jacket polymer
coating, radiant revision real time dynamic flabbergasters and dual
exhausts.

Its so fast, they clocked it against reality and the graphics card was
faster.
 
Blig said:
Leverages to nothing. The X1900XL has the 48 shader processors and it
is just barely faster in a few benchmarks than the 7800GTX which has
been out since fall last year. The only game that is significantly
faster with the X1900XL is FEAR and there is a lot of speculation that
is just due to the shader coding used in FEAR. The 7900GTX with unified
pixel vertex pipes comes out in a few weeks and it will shove X1900XL
back to being just a contender again. The shader processor path
apporach is not proving to be any big advantage and looks like it might
be weaker in the months ahead.
Click to expand...

I have rarely seen such factual anamolies in a 9-line post.

There's no X1900XL. Not yet, any way. X1900XT and X1900XTX are both
512 meg cards with very impressive performance numbers. They chomp
down 7800GTX 256meg (in part because the 512meg is becoming some sort
of an advantage) and are also mostly ahead of the paper-launched
7800GTX-512 meg parts (that are selling for $750, if they can be found
anywhere). In comparison X1900XT is now available for $470-480 at
some places.

FEAR is a 'The way it's meant to be played' game. The fact that it
works well on X1900XT cards has a lot to do with its higher ALU:Tex
ratio (something, which most new games will employ, including Oblivion)
X1900XT are designed to make use of situations where the math
operations in shaders far outweigh the texture usage.

The 7900GTX is not based on unified architecture. It's very likely that
even G80 (the next-gen nVidia chip) is also not unified. It doesn't
mean that it'd be a bad performer or that the unified architecture is
absolutely necessary. I am just correcting another mistake in the
original post.

Finally here are some comparison numbers between X1900XT, 7800GTX-256
and 7800GTX-512 respectively.. 1600x1200 4xaa 16xaf

HL2:Lost Coast 80.2 65.2 78.9
Battlefield 2 109.7 68.6 89.4
Quake 4 72.8 65.2 85.3
FEAR 49 27 37
CoD2 34.9 26.4 32.3
Serious Sam 2 69.5 47.7 75.1
Far Cry HDR 84.5 64.3 84.2

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/ati_radeon_x1900_xt_preview/

When you add in features like FP-Blending+AA (which 7800GTX can't
do and 7900GTX won't either), angle-independent AF and of course
the forward looking shader:texture ratio, X1900XT at $480 is the best
graphic card one can find in the $350+ range.
 
Air said:
.....................................................................................................................................
ATI Confirms Next Generation "Leverages XBOX 360 Design"
22-Feb-2006, 21:54.59 Reporter : Dave Baumann

At a recent analyst session ATI's Senior VP of PC Business, Rick
Bergman, has confirmed that their next generation of PC graphics
products will feature much of the technology developed for "Xenos",
ATI's XBOX 360 graphics chip. We've surmised that this is likely be
the case previously, given that Xenos utilises a unified shader
architecture at the hardware level, with both Pixel Shaders and Vertex
shaders utilising the same ALU resources it becomes a ripe time to
implement it with DirectX10 unifying the vertex and pixel shader
programming capabilities in the API.

Vertex and pixel processing have previously always been separate
hardware functions, though vertex processing moved from a software
based solution to hardware with the introduction of NVIDIA's GeForce
256 and has subsequently got closer to the pixel processing capability
with each revision of DirectX Shader Model, to the point where
DirextX10 will should dictate the same programming capabilities across
both. Even with this being the case there is nothing to suggest that
the hardware has to be unified for processing as pixel operations
generally have to hide greater latencies than vertex operations thanks
to the greater use of texturing in the pipeline. However, Xenos's
design has attempted to remove the texture latency issues from shader
programmes by creating a highly threaded design that separates texture
instructions from ALU instructions, allowing multiple shader batches to
run concurrently, and so it comes as no surprise that ATI should adopt
this architecture for the PC, seeing as the investment has already been
made.
.....................................................................................................................................

http://beyond3d.com/#news28611
Click to expand...

big deal - they price their r&d into the xb360 design budget.
 
noman said:
I have rarely seen such factual anamolies in a 9-line post.

There's no X1900XL. Not yet, any way. X1900XT and X1900XTX are both
512 meg cards with very impressive performance numbers. They chomp
down 7800GTX 256meg (in part because the 512meg is becoming some sort
of an advantage) and are also mostly ahead of the paper-launched
7800GTX-512 meg parts (that are selling for $750, if they can be found
anywhere). In comparison X1900XT is now available for $470-480 at
some places.

FEAR is a 'The way it's meant to be played' game. The fact that it
works well on X1900XT cards has a lot to do with its higher ALU:Tex
ratio (something, which most new games will employ, including Oblivion)
X1900XT are designed to make use of situations where the math
operations in shaders far outweigh the texture usage.

The 7900GTX is not based on unified architecture. It's very likely that
even G80 (the next-gen nVidia chip) is also not unified. It doesn't
mean that it'd be a bad performer or that the unified architecture is
absolutely necessary. I am just correcting another mistake in the
original post.

Finally here are some comparison numbers between X1900XT, 7800GTX-256
and 7800GTX-512 respectively.. 1600x1200 4xaa 16xaf

HL2:Lost Coast 80.2 65.2 78.9
Battlefield 2 109.7 68.6 89.4
Quake 4 72.8 65.2 85.3
FEAR 49 27 37
CoD2 34.9 26.4 32.3
Serious Sam 2 69.5 47.7 75.1
Far Cry HDR 84.5 64.3 84.2

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/ati_radeon_x1900_xt_preview/

When you add in features like FP-Blending+AA (which 7800GTX can't
do and 7900GTX won't either), angle-independent AF and of course
the forward looking shader:texture ratio, X1900XT at $480 is the best
graphic card one can find in the $350+ range.
Click to expand...

Thank you for this post. You saved me a lot of writing :)

Tony
 
I have rarely seen such factual anamolies in a 9-line post.

There's no X1900XL. Not yet, any way. X1900XT and X1900XTX are both
512 meg cards with very impressive performance numbers. They chomp
down 7800GTX 256meg (in part because the 512meg is becoming some sort
of an advantage) and are also mostly ahead of the paper-launched
7800GTX-512 meg parts (that are selling for $750, if they can be found
anywhere). In comparison X1900XT is now available for $470-480 at
some places.

FEAR is a 'The way it's meant to be played' game. The fact that it
works well on X1900XT cards has a lot to do with its higher ALU:Tex
ratio (something, which most new games will employ, including Oblivion)
Click to expand...

Regurgitated techno-babble....
X1900XT are designed to make use of situations where the math
operations in shaders far outweigh the texture usage.
Click to expand...

More t-b.
The 7900GTX is not based on unified architecture. It's very likely that
even G80 (the next-gen nVidia chip) is also not unified. It doesn't
mean that it'd be a bad performer or that the unified architecture is
absolutely necessary.
Click to expand...

However, the way you have phrased the last few sentences
you are trying to imply otherwise............ Anyway, maybe you
should also repeat David Kirk's words on this particular subject,
just to show that you are totally unbiased.
I am just correcting another mistake in the
original post.

Finally here are some comparison numbers between X1900XT, 7800GTX-256
and 7800GTX-512 respectively.. 1600x1200 4xaa 16xaf
Click to expand...

Do you run all your games in this mode ? Must have your nose pressed
to the screen counting the perfectly-aliased pixels - kinda cramps the
shooting-style. Probably running on an LCD too. Hope you like the
lag-smear.
HL2:Lost Coast 80.2 65.2 78.9
Battlefield 2 109.7 68.6 89.4
Quake 4 72.8 65.2 85.3
FEAR 49 27 37
CoD2 34.9 26.4 32.3
Serious Sam 2 69.5 47.7 75.1
Far Cry HDR 84.5 64.3 84.2

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/ati_radeon_x1900_xt_preview/

When you add in features like FP-Blending+AA (which 7800GTX can't
do and 7900GTX won't either), angle-independent AF and of course
the forward looking shader:texture ratio, X1900XT at $480 is the best
graphic card one can find in the $350+ range.
Click to expand...

You could have saved up this exercise until after the 7900GT/GTX cards

are released. Seems like a regurgitation of selected review material
and ATi marketing blurb. However, no need to waste your time any
further when I can refer to the in-depth technical reviews on
Anandtech and other sites with professionally-qualified technical
contributors to help formulate my opinions (and occasional
purchase-decisions) on computer hardware.

John Lewis
 
Regurgitated techno-babble....
Click to expand...

It's a techno-babble which explains the performance discrepancies
between X1900XT and 7800GTX class cards for a game that oddly
proclaims the nVidia TWIMTBP slogan.
However, the way you have phrased the last few sentences
you are trying to imply otherwise............ Anyway, maybe you
should also repeat David Kirk's words on this particular subject,
just to show that you are totally unbiased.
Click to expand...

I am not implying anything, except that 7900GTX will not have unified
architecture (and very likely G80 won't either).

To debate which architecture is better is outside the scope of this
thread.
Do you run all your games in this mode ? Must have your nose pressed
to the screen counting the perfectly-aliased pixels - kinda cramps the
shooting-style. Probably running on an LCD too. Hope you like the
lag-smear.
Click to expand...

Normally, if you buy a $400+ card, it's to handle such resolutions.
What would be the point of running these cards at 1024x768 ? Besides
that, when you are comparing graphic cards, you have to pick scenarios
which stress the GPU and make CPU as little of a factor as it can be.

By the way, I do have 20" Dell 2000FPW screen and it's absolutely
wonderful. My next graphic card will be one which can perform great at
1680x1050 level.
You could have saved up this exercise until after the 7900GT/GTX cards
are released. Seems like a regurgitation of selected review material
and ATi marketing blurb. However, no need to waste your time any
further when I can refer to the in-depth technical reviews on
Click to expand...

If you were the sole reader of this newsgroup, I'd never post here.
Fortunately that's not the case.

I replied to the post which had completely incorrect information about
both ATI and nVidia graphic cards.
 
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