ATI R300 out in the summer???

SuperCheetah · Apr 1, 2002

I've been seeing this on a few sites and was wondering what some of you guys thought of it.

By Fuad Abazovic, 29/03/2002 10:32:07 BST
http://www.theinquirer.net/29030207.htm

A FEW DAYS BACK we talked about what we knew about R300 and now it seems our Chinese friends have a few more details to show the world.
The site agrees with us that R300 is intended to compete with the next Nvidia part, NV30, but have added some interesting notes about the spec of the card.

The site reckons the card will be produced using 0.15 micron technology which is realistic since you cannot get volumes of 0.13 micron process quite yet, but as soon as TSMC and UMC get going on this process, the R300 will shift to this for faster chipolatos.

PC Pop claims that the frequency will be 350MHz and as I previously reported, R250 will have the same frequency so this looks quite realistic with R300 technology as well.

With 0.13 technology, ATI will be able to have 400MHz chips but I would guess that this will be kept for its annual spring refresh.

As I said there will be eight rendering pipelines and it is still unclear how many texture units chip will support -- two or four. The memory should run at 800MHz and for this you will need 2.5 nanosecond memory, which is not yet available.

The 2.6ns memory should be available in less than a month, so 2.5ns should be available in the next quarter or so, when this card starts to become more reality than chimera.

The chip will be able to address 256 MB of memory.

As for DirectX support, the PC Poppers said as we did that the card will have support for DirectX 9 but not clarifying whether it supports DX 9.0 or 9.1.

The site claimes the chip will have two Truform units but this does not make any sense to me. Truform should not be relevant in most future games. As for memory optimisation ATI will have improved HyperZ 3 and they claim 12.6 GB/s bandwidth.

The chip is not taped out yet but it should be pretty soon now and introduced this summer.

And from www.warp2search.com

Posted by: Rancho*.
Monday, April 01 @ 21:35:57 CEST

Specifications Radeon 9500:

AGP 4x/8x
128 MB of DDR-SDRAM 425 MHz
Maximum bandwidth of 13.2 GB/s (thanks also to the adoption of Hyper-Z 3)
ATI Rage Theater 2 chip for MPEG2 decoding
450Mhz RAMDAC for maximum resolutions of 2048x1536 @ 100Hz

Specifications R300 GPU:

Core: 0.13 Âµm process clocked at 425 MHz | 90 million transistors integrated
Max. Memory: 256MB DDR-SDRAM
8 rendering pipelines with 4 texture units
Fillrate: 3.4 MPixels/s, 13.6 MTextures/s
160 million triangles/s
Full support for DirectX 9.1 (PixelShader 2.0, displacement mapping...) (Oh really?)
Hyper-Z 3
2 TruForm units for the rendering of surfaces of 3D objects (Pixel Tapestry 3)
2 SmartShader units each equipped with 1 Vertex and 1 PixelShader unit (Charisma Engine 3)
SmoothVision 2: FSAA with moderate loss of performance also running at high resolutions

Just pretty promising to me, but I'm sure Nvidia has something up their sleeve to match this offering from our friends over at ATI.

svtcobra · Apr 1, 2002

The successor to the Geforce 4 will be out in the fall..

Vehementi · Apr 2, 2002

Whatever happened to the x500 series?

I've been waiting for the new Radeon I hope it's coming out, I'll buy one, I can't wait!

GeForce4 Ultra?

SuperCheetah · Apr 2, 2002

Check out this post I had earlier.

http://www.3dspotlight.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=875&pagenumber=4

It seems the R300 is the 10000 in the x500 series. So I hope that answers your question. As for the GeForce 4 Ultra I wouldn't count on it, because both Nvidia and ATI are releasing their next generation cards in the fall. The ATI card is the 10000 while Nvidia is going to be going to all new architecture and dropping the GeForce name. For more info. on the future of graphics card I would take a look at this thread:

http://www.3dspotlight.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=945

TechSpot

ATI R300 out in the summer???

SuperCheetah Newcomer, in training

svtcobra TechSpot Paladin

Vehementi TechSpot Paladin

SuperCheetah Newcomer, in training