ATI HD 2900 XT - Sounds and Physics Also?

Post by **Apoptosis** » Thu Apr 19, 2007 5:20 pm

From The Inq...

DAAMIT'S R600 SIMPLY can't be called a GPU anymore. GPU stands for Graphics Processing Unit, while R600 can be shortly described as GSPPU - Graphics, Sound and Physics Processing Unit.

It seems now that the System-on-a-Chip concept implemented in R600 was far beyond anything Graphzilla's rider Jen-Hsun ever talked about, and the roar of angry beast will be heard in city of Satan Clara.

We hear that Sound Physics has been buzzed for quite some time, and we are massaging our contacts to bring you as much detail as possible. It seems that R600 GPU will be less CPU-bound than it has been in the past, since a lot more parts of the scene will be calculated and rendered on the GPU itself.

R600 combines graphics with audio and physics process in a whole another way, and those 64 vect5D shader pipelines yield in 320 scalar units total, directly comparable to Nvidia's 128 scalar ones. Now, 128 scalar units at 1.35 GHz is still a tad more efficient that ATi's own 320 at 740 MHz, but ATi's pipeline is more complex than it was previously thought.

Who'd have thought that ATI would overtake Nvidia in a race to multi-purpose GPU and make consoles of today with their PowerPC CPUs look so 1990s? Perhaps R600 was really worth the wait after all.

wow... now that is news... Rumor has it the sound card chip is Realtek

ViPeR.Ja · Post by **ViPeR.Ja** » Thu Apr 19, 2007 5:38 pm

wow with all that wonder how much it will cost?

Post by **Apoptosis** » Fri Apr 20, 2007 6:54 am

At 800 core / 1600 MHz memory-

Radeon HD 2900 XT has much better memory bandwidth then any card before including G80GTX. With it 512 bit memory interface and 1600 MHz GDDR3 memory it can score 102.4 GB/s. Nvidia's G80 with its odd 384 bit memory controller scores 86.4 GB/s.

The new R600XTX with GDDR 4 clocked at 2200 MHz as originally planned can score the cunning 140.8 GB/s. Both cards have twice or close to twice more memory bandwidth from its Radeon X1950XTX card. This card was limited to now modest 64GB/s.

So with 102.4 GB/second you wont get much performance penalty at least on some FSAA settings and lower resolutions. The R600XT can work out 518GFlops and that is only with the Shader units

Zertz · Post by **Zertz** » Mon Apr 23, 2007 9:58 am

Can't wait to see some benchmarks

HONkUS · Post by **HONkUS** » Mon Apr 23, 2007 10:33 am

Rumor has it the sound card chip is Realtek

So let me get this straight, I spent over $100 dollars on my X-Fi and now DAAMIT wants me to spend 600+ dollars on a vid card that will make that X-Fi obsolete so it can be replaced by a Realtek chip? And all so I can be HDCP compliant? Anyone else see something wrong with this picture?

How much cheaper could they sell this thing for without the physics and sound capabilities? (ala without HDCP) Their physics capabilities better blow Ageia out of the water thats all ill say.

Does it not make more sense to make your low profile, HTPC cards HDCP compliant rather then your monster plus sized flagship card?