PoopyTheJ

So I was thinking that perhaps we could start a thread dedicated to the upcoming cards from Nvidia and ATi. Perhpas we can put what we know here. thoughts on performance and comparisons, obviously it's way before the fact but those cards will be my next vid card upgrade probably so I figured I'd see what everyone thought about it. What I have seen so far is....
NV40
Description: New high-end graphics processor, succeeding NV35 (GeForce 5900) built with a 130 nm process. To be launched in 03-Q4 or Q1 of 2004, with the latest news pointing towards the latter date. Likely to include Pixel Shader 3.0 and Vertex Shader 3.0 to support DirectX 9.1 and to include 8 "real" pipelines instead of the 4x2 architecture used previously. According to a recent report it should have 300 M transistors (not likely), run at 600 MHz and use DDR-II RAM or GDDR3.
Endian.net is reporting more likely 150 Million transistors which would put it in line with the R420. Interestingly X-bit labs reports that samsung has already supplied Nvidia with around 10thousand GDDR chips at 1600Mhz for the nv40 suggesting the card has been taped out already.

R420
Geek.com reports
DigiTimes has more details on ATI's upcoming R420 GPU. The R420, codenamed Loki, will be a .13 micron part, and may contain 150 million transistors. It should go into volume production by the end of Q1, which means that consumers might not be able to get their hands on this GPU for another 5 months. According to The Inquirer, the R420 will be launched at CeBIT in March. nVidia will launch its NV40 GPU at approximately the same time, but it is unlikely that both companies would decide to unveil their next-generation GPUs at the same event. It isn't clear how different the R420 is from the Radeon 9800. ATI originally had bold plans to introduce the R400 GPU last summer. The R400 was to be an entirely new core, vastly superior to any current GPUs in either ATI or nVidia's arsenal. Unfortunately, due to R&D cutbacks, the R400 was canceled, or turned into the R500. It isn't clear whether the R420 is conceptually more similar to the R400 or the R300. The shift from a .15 micron to .13 micron process won't by itself provide huge performance gains, so a .13 micron version of the R350 would need other enhancements in order to compete with the NV40. Both the NV40 and the R420 will be AGP 8X-compatible, but neither should support PCI Express.
Interestingly memory specs etc are pretty hard to come by, however I'm gonna guess at either DDR-II or GDDR, I'm leaning towards DDR-II as it's been around a while longer and ATI seems hesitant to jump on the new stuff quite as fast as Nvidia. I'll figure DDR-II at 800-1000Mhz. I'm probably wrong but that seems reasonable to me.

So what does everyone else think? BTW if the mods need to move this feel free as I was unsure what forum this should go in.

__________________

craig588

well, I have very early DDR-II ram on my r9800 256M, and its not to impressive. Only 380MHz out of it, while some people are pushing 500MHz with regular DDR.

PoopyTheJ

500? Where? I can only get about 335 ish on my 9800NP. I don't really think that ATI would go for plain jane DDR when you'd need some serious heatsinkage to push it to 500. You could be right though. Figure these new cards will only be 256MB versions I don't think we'll see any 128MB versions anytime. Plus apparently the first revision of both cards R420 and NV40 will be AGP 8x with PCI-express as a souped up version ala R423/nv45.

__________________

craig588

The r9800XT uses regular DDR ram. Most people can push 400MHz out of it on stock cooling, and I have seen a few articles where they have vmodded the card and super cooled the ram to get to 500MHz.

Considering how hot the ram gets at stock volts I dont think it will take much of a voltage bump to kill it.

PoopyTheJ

but in order to push the memory speeds to something more competitive with the possible 52Gb/s of the NV40 specs we have now, real or not they'd have to go with DDR-II or GDDR3.

__________________

PoopyTheJ

From Neoseeker.net, nothing really new but some more info...
GDDR3 memory supporting GPU launching early next year?

Word of ATI's upcoming 0.13-nanometer R420 GPU has been around for quite some time (see info here), and now DigiTimes learns that the GPU may be ready to enter mass production as early as the end of the first quarter, next year.


"The R420 will be fabricated at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) using a low-k process technology. The graphics chip core is expected to boast 160 million transistors and support an AGP 8x bus and GDDR3 memory architecture. The product name is currently unknown."

Of equal interest is the RV423 that is revealed in the table included with the article. This PCI-Express supporting GPU is also a 130 nanometer offering, featuring performance that's supposedly double that of the current Radeon 9800 series (RV350). Nvidia's NV45 is expected to challenge it.

__________________