ATI Radeon HD 4000 Series discussion

[perkam]

That are just mouth full of lies .... 800SP is just kiddy talk. There are some "shoots of the chip" and they talk about 220mm2 so that could keep themselves (ATi) from market failure they done last year with enormously extra large R600 core. In the end its only 480SPs more TMUs (32) and only 16ROPs again so that the only radical performer will be gang member RV770x2 (R700)

btw. in most games old R600 underclocked @500M is pretty monsterous, so if you kept yourself away from crappy Crysis and Clones stuff you don't really need even that mainstream monster of RV770.

I imagine the 800SP talk came form the X2 itself, which will ultimately comprise of 960 SPs if the 480 number is true. When you think about it though, the increase in shaders alone is enough to bring out a theoretical 50% (closer to only 20% in reality due to diminishing returns) increase in performance in games, and that is if they left it at 480/16/16. The doubling of the TMUs only adds to performance and to my belief that ATI doesn't need 32 ROPs at the moment, even with the GT-200, as it can mass produce the 4870s on 16 ROPs with similar architecture to the 3870s, keep its costs low and under cut the GT-200.

Remember that your argument of prior generation sufficiency works both ways. If most people will never need more than a 500mhz core RV670, then they will never need a GT-200 if the RV770 or RV770 X2 ends up cheaper, which in my experience is very likely as, if it ends up on the same architecture as the HD 3800 series, their costs, even for the X2, will be lower than Nvidia's brand new architecture.

With that said, I am a firm believer that people at XS will buy the card with the best performance, irrespective of the price, so there's little doubt that ATI will need a more powerful high end, considering their past record against new Nvidia cards (7800 vs R500, 8800 vs R600).

Perkam