This thread is for speculation on the R700, the dual or x2 card coming from ATI. This card holds much mystery, as it has a great potential to change the graphics market as we know it. This all may be rumor, but theres many people interested in this possibility of change. What we may have is my poor explanation of it but here I go. The R700 will have a PCI-e 2.0 bridge but also possibly an innercomunication bridge for the 2 cores. Whats this mean? If the 2 cores communicate together, the speeds, or diminishing returns we used to see in typical x2 or sli/cf would be dramatically reduced. How this communication is doen is the mystery. Also, we all know that it will bring with it the first use of GDDR5. This memory may have the ability to aid this cross communication between cores, as well as hugely widen thruput/bandwidth. This is a poor interpretation of what may be, but its what I understand as the potential of this card, tho with many holes and of course, no direct knowledge. Heres a link of the core http://gathering.tweakers.net/foru [...] e/30281951 If anyone has more to add, or any enlightenment, or corrections, please add them as needed

thats what I understand...

and I think the 4870 X2 may actually have 100% scaling... idk why but I do and that would mean that a 4870 X2 would be 1.4 - 1.5 times a 4850 crossfire... which would put its 1920 by 1200 crysis performance at very high at just over 30...

thats awesome... still no AA... but w/e

I'm still thinking these cards aren't needed... maybe in a year or two... but what game is there that a current card can't play? I mean besides crysis

Yer i hope the R700 core will change the market, the results as ive seen from the 4850 series seem promising and i hope the core will compare close to the GTX 280 or better.

ATi needs a come back, and what better than the R700? (Accept when they release and X2 version)

The GDDR5 should atleast give the core tht little extra "umph"

Ive got my eye set on one (or 2) of these cards, and i just hope ATi succeed! The pontential is there as Jaydeejohn said, its just grabbing the bull by the horns and delivering.

kkthanksbye

Currently, we see things like non compatible sli/cf games, where 2 cards simply wont work. This may change that. Another problem with multi card setups is micro stuttering, which causes delays between the cpu in a rhythm feeding to gpu in rhythm, which causes delays in the afr layout. One actually waiting for the next. If the OS sees this setup as 1 card, then that may be the solution to micro stuttering. This is important, as I said, because if this is successful, then multi core will be opened for the future, and the single core will quickly go the way of the dinosaur

I can see what your saying, has this been incorperated into the design of the cards? If it has then hands down to ATI, instead of just a small percentage increase of performance, they could be looking around 75-100% which would be a new era, soon we will be looking at synchronous quad graphics with 4k wattage PSU's. This would be an amazing jump in the graphic development!!!

I hope they pull that off!!!

kkthanksbye

gah! i forgot the link where i read this from...but i'll try to find it and post it up

but from what i've read, the 4870x2 aka R700 will NOT use a pci.e 2.0 bridge, it will communicate the two GPU chips through memory...

vaguely as that term is on the reading i read, to my knowledge, i dunno how this works nor do i think any of us do at this point

but i guess it suggest there is no pci.e 2.0 bridge like the pci.e 1.1 bridge of the 3870x2

and from what i remember, the article said there is no micro stuttering on the 4870x2 ... now to look for that article to post it

http://www.nordichardware.com/news,7845.html

that was the link i read...but elsewhere on the internet, you can goggle 4870x2 bridge or memory bridge.....and a lot of sites will pop up suggesting the same thing, that the R700 will communicate via memory thus eliminating micro stuttering yay

count me in for one... -feeds piggy bank-

Nice. If they can really pull this off like we're speculating I think it will really validate their current strategy of making small, cool chips that are slower than NVidia but x2 are much faster. I be it saves them a bundle on design and testing.

Same page, different article. The same rumor with a little more detail. Still a rumor though.

Link

The biggest saving will be manufacturing. Just look at intels mcm compared to amds monolithic design. They can throw away the defective chips, can pair up the good ones and can use a higher percentage of a wafer. The key is the scaling and a solid interconnect is the most important part for that. Given AMD is involved they should have solid experience at hand on that matter. Sadly, they will botch up the execution. Again.

if you look at here

http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/ [...] index.html


and here

http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/ [...] index.html

3d mark 06 the 4850 in crossfire scores 20923
and the gtx280 in sli scores 21269
this is at 1280x1024
going with these results is it safe to say that the 4870 in crossfire will beat 2x280 in sli

Just to help try and end the confusion, it'll likely use the following PXL bridge chip;
http://www.plxtech.com/pdf/product [...] 6Jun08.pdf

Which has the nice benefit of the 'Dual Cast'; and along with GDDR5 clamshell mode means that at both ends (bridge and memory) they have the ability for I/O sharing.

Im hoping its both ends...on to reading

Glancing at it dual cast looks nice , and not sure if this is right, but read pacing could help in elimating micro stutter?

Read pacing would only help bring down the fast frames not bring up those that make micro-stuttering noticeable. Really the way to avoid microstuttering is to improve performance and play at setting that don't dramatically drop a single frame.

It would act like v-sync in a way, but that may or may not smooth out framerate overall if it gives the next frame time to render. But when pushing the boundaries when Micro-stuttering would be most noticeable I don't think it would help on that frame that take noticeably longer (like 3-10x as long) to render than the previous frame.