ATI R300 details out

Neo

Neo

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ATI WILL TAKE Nvidia on big time by introducing an R300 that will have DirectX 9 support.
The card is an NV25 killer while ATI's lower market model the RV 250 which many assumed to be an NV17 killer now has large speed advantages over Nvidia's offering.

While clock speeds are still under waraps, the RV250 will be spawned from the R200, currently branded as the Radeon 8500.

Whle Nvidia is readying its cards for launch in the next fortnight or so, as revealed on Friday, it is still to finish its work to take advantage of DirectX 9.

Samples of the R300 will go to ATI partners in the next two weeks and R&D teams are preparing their card designs.

ATI is positioning SnoBIT 2002 at Hangover, Germany, as the venue for some big introductions including the R300, the INQUIRER learns.

The R300 is being developed by the ArtX team and we can expect a design and price performance much more competitive than NV25.

Nvidia finds itself between the horns of a dilemma because our source claimed that Nvidia will have some problems following up the current graphic offerings swaddled in NDAs, but which we've told you about.

The ATI R300 will be faster and cheaper than NV25, also known as GeForce 4.

R200 is the platform ATI is using for DirectX 9 but it's still unclear how it will be implemented
 
Neo

Neo

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ATI trying to take nVidia out of the limelight
With the release of the GeForce4 expected within the next two weeks, it seems our friends at ATI may have a problem on their hands. Having just signed a huge deal with Hercules, it seemed like everything was starting to go their way. But alas, after only a few months at the top with their Radeon 8500, ATI will be once again cast into the shadows of second place. With the faster core and memory speeds of the GeForce4, the Radeon 8500 will have no chance of competing. But that’s ok, ATI is happy being second - or are they? It seems like ATI has been waiting for a chance to deal a massive blow to their archrivals over at nVidia for a while, and what better time then at the launch of nVidia’s new flagship model.

ATI announced earlier today that their R300 is going to be released in a rather short period of time, and gamers everywhere couldn’t be happier. The new card will sport DirectX 9 support, as will the GeForce4. Rumours also have it that the card will support AGP 8x and 128MB of DDR RAM, again the same as the GeForce4. Nothing special yet, but that’s because we haven’t got to the clock speeds. ATI is doing their best to keep this info under wraps, but there are reports already leaking information that the card will be host to a 350MHz core with 400MHz DDR memory, making it effectively 800MHz. The chip is also expected to have 8 pixel pipelines with 4 textures units each. Rumours have also arisen that the card is expected to be able to output at a peak 150M Polygons per second. While nVidia does not officially release polygon/second reates, it did release operations per second. To put everything into retrospect, the GeForce3 performs about 800Billion operations per second compared to the Xbox, which does slightly over 1000Billion/second, the Xbox also has a theoretical polygon count of 60M/second. Those numbers should help you grasp the power of the R300. While that is impressive, you must remember that ATI has been constantly plagued with driver problems, which keep their cards from even coming close to their maximum power.

While most of the information above is still rumours, there are some things which we are certain of. We know that the R300 will be made using a .15 um fabrication process. This means we can all be sure of one thing; this is going to be one hot chip. This could cause problems with overclockers trying to tweak these already hot cards. Their only hope now seems to be Hercules who in the past have made cards which are quite happy running above their listed speeds. Why didn’t ATI move to .13 um? Probably to keep cost down, which leads us to our next and most important point, the price. The card is expected to not only be faster then the GeForce4 but also to cost considerably less. Could this the card to put ATI back on top? So far everything looks good, all that could stop ATI is poor driver support.
 
Neo

Neo

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Perhaps the reason why the R300 seems so interesting is the fact that it is expected to be a "GeForce4 killer," like some sources already call the part. It was known that the future Radeon will have eight pipelines and bring support to DirectX 9.

Many refuse to risk guessing other more important specs such as clock and memory speeds (although it was reported some time ago in the media that it would work at 350-400Mhz frequency). Even so, this week, VR-Zone linked to a Chinese website which said these are the specs for the R300:

0.15- micron

350MHz Core

8 rendering pipelines

4 textures processed per pipeline ( 2 for RV300 )

800MHz DDR (12.6 GB/sec)

2 TruForm Engine

HydraVision

DirectX 9 (PixelShader 2.0)

HyperZ 3

Pixel fillrate 2.8M

Texel fillrate 8.4M
 
Neo

Neo

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I got this from anands
While the first day of Computex was stolen by AMD's Hammer announcements today's events were spread out much more evenly among a handful of companies. Through the sweltering heat while drowning in humidity in Taipei we managed to grab photos of ATI's R300, NVIDIA's nForce2 and learn even more about the omnipresent Hammer platform from AMD.
We provided an exclusive look at Intel's Springdale chipset to our Newsletter Subscribers earlier today and now we're offering the same information from that piece in our Day 2 wrap up coverage as well. If you'd like to receive these exclusive looks first you'll want to sign up for our free Newsletter here.

VIA Demonstrates ATI's R300
While in VIA's suite we noticed a couple of demos running, one of which happened to be a test of AGP 8X functionality on the KT400 chipset. Although VIA's AGP 8X controller still has issues with SiS' Xabre 400 core, VIA wanted to prove that the chipset did in fact support AGP 8X so they displayed it running with the only other AGP 8X graphics card they had access to - ATI's R300.

Just a few weeks ago we were in Toronto visiting ATI and they were very tight lipped about anything R300 related; it will be interesting to see if VIA was supposed to be publicly running this R300 in their suite.

There wasn't much we could gather from seeing the R300 run demo loops over and over again; benchmarking it was out of the question. The card was stable and as you can probably guess by now, this was the card that was running Doom 3 at E3 a couple weeks ago. The reason id Software was demonstrating Doom 3 on the R300 is simply because ATI has the fastest GPU that is in a stable enough form to actually run for any appreciable period of time. ATI's release schedule has always given them the ability to beat NVIDIA to the punch when it comes down to their Fall product releases. ATI usually releases in the Summer and NVIDIA follows in the Fall. The development of R300 has placed it in a very healthy state today and we are expecting to hear an announcement from ATI in the July/August timeframe.

Given that the chip is already up and running and production is due soon we are beginning to wonder if the R300 will be made on a 0.13-micron process or if it will be 0.15-micron like its predecessor. If it is indeed a 0.15-micron chip then there is the question of whether ATI will make it a DX9 compliant part with full floating point pipelines. Assuming ATI does make the R300 as feature rich as NVIDIA's NV30 currently appears on paper, then there's the question of yield and clock speeds. It will be interesting to see the design choices ATI made with the R300 and how that effects competition with the NV30 later this year.

The one thing that we could gather from the card that VIA was running is an idea of memory clock speeds. The DDR SDRAM chips used on the 128MB R300 card were 2.86ns parts rated at 350MHz, thus you can assume an effective memory clock of 700MHz. It is also safe to assume that the R300 has a 256-bit memory bus much like the Parhelia-512 and 3DLabs P10 GPUs resulting in 22.4GB/s of raw memory bandwidth without taking any sort of occlusion culling technology into consideration. Granted that this isn't an indication of final shipping clock speeds but it should give you a ballpark figure to expect from R300. With ATI providing boards for E3 and VIA's AGP 8X test, it will only be a matter of time before we see cards in reviewers' hands and eventually on store shelves.
 
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