DailyTech - ATI "RV560" Details Unveiled

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Hardware ATI "RV560" Details Unveiled
Anh Tuan Huynh (Blog) - October 23, 2006 4:13 PM

23 comment(s) - last by Pino.. on Oct 25 at 7:38 AM

Another 80nm product joins the lineup

ATI previously released its 80nm RV570 Radeon X1950 Pro mid-range graphics card catered towards the $199 MSRP market. Joining the Radeon X1950 Pro will be a second 80nm product known as RV560.

The RV560 Radeon X1650XT is expected to launch next week with a core clock 575 MHz unlike the previously reported 450 MHz. It appears ATI is getting better yields than previously expected, although the Radeon X1650XT was originally expected for an end of August or beginning of September launch. Radeon X1650XT graphics cards will feature 256MB of GDDR3 clocked at 675 MHz on a 128-bit memory interface. The Radeon X1650XT is expected to have 24 pixel-shaders, 12 pipelines and 8 vertex shaders. Similar to the Radeon X1950 Pro, the X1650XT will also feature an internal connection for CrossFire.

There will be a variety of output configurations for Radeon X1650XT cards. These output configurations include dual dual-link DVI and S-Video, dual single-link DVI and S-Video and lastly dual-link DVI, VGA and S-Video. HDCP will be enabled on Radeon X1650XT graphics cards as well. It’s also theoretically possible to integrate an HDMI output, though that will be up to the graphics card manufacturers.

Radeon X1650XT is expected to launch next week with an MSRP of $149 to take on NVIDIA's 7600GT.

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RE: yup

By Sharky974 on 10/24/2006 6:35:26 PM , Rating: 2

They only suck in the midrange as a consequence of purposely crippling their chips by TMU limiting them.

This leads to extremely huge chips not getting much performance per sqaure mm, which can work though it's not ideal at the high end, but has real problems at mid-range.

Best example of this was the X1600XT, which originally was intended to compete with the 7600GT, both having 12 pixel pipes. In the past an ATI Pixel pipe was always a good match for an Nvidia pixel pipe, but with the X1600 ATI crippled it by giving it only 4 TMU's. This made it a awful performer, and they've been borked in mid-range basically ever since.

This X1650 has 8 (some say 12 but I believe 8) TMU's, so it will perform much better than the X1600. The amount of pixel pipes doesn't matter to ATI, they are only TMU crippled. To prove it, consider the X1800XT which is a 16 pixel pipe card. So why will it likely dust this upcoming X1650XT (which has 24 pixel pipes, or 50% more)? Because the difference is the X1800 has 16 TMU's.

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