anybody gunna buy the ATI r520?

[jseber1982]

Been reading all over the net. The ATI r520 is supposed to come out in may. Here are the specs that pretty much every webpage has.
24 "Pipelines"
32 Texture Units
96 Arithmetic Logic Units (ALU)
192 Shader Operations per Cycle
700MHz Core
134.4 Billion Shader Operations per Second (at 700MHz)
256-bit 512MB 1.8GHz GDDR3 Memory
57.6 GB/sec Bandwidth (at 1.8GHz)
300-350 Million Transistors
90nm Manufacturing
Shader Model 3.0
ATI HyperMemory
ATI Multi Rendering Technology (AMR)
Launch: Q2 2005
Performance: Over 3x Radeon X800 XT !!! (for single R520)
16x stochastic FSAA
FP32 blending, texturing
Programmable Primitive Processor/Tesselator


I dunno if this is BS or not, but man, that is gunna be one expensive beast if its comming out in the spring, with the x800 series stuff still being high end.

 

[beedubaya]

As great as the specs on the R520 are, it wont be any good if ATI can't write some decent drivers.

I will more than likely go Nvidia this next round, because of better drivers and also the fact that more games are optimized for Nvidia.

 

[jseber1982]

yea im thinkin about it too. i see you have an x800pro also like me. How much of a performance difference does the x850 xt offer? if you know or not

 

[beedubaya]

I wouldn't waste my money on another ATI. I payed $450 for less performance than I could have gotten for $200 if I would have went Nvidia. Going ATI is a big gamble. Just because you pay for high end doesn't mean you are going to get it.

Get the eVGA GeForce 6800 GT. We are talking 90+ average fps in Doom 3 at 4x AA vs. 30-40 with the X800 Pro. I imagine EQ2 would run like a dream also on the 6800 GT. There is virtually no complaints about this card.

 

[Spartan 1394]

Honestly, I don't know why people complain about ATi's drivers. I have not had any problems with them. The only problem I've had from drivers related to ATi products is the Omega drivers. Other than that I am completely satified with ATi's products.

 

[Regulus]

Can someone clear up the whole "pipeline" thing. I mean, what are they exactly? Stupid question I know.

 

[Harper]

I will more than likely go Nvidia this next round, because of better drivers and also the fact that more games are optimized for Nvidia.

One of the reasons why i stuck with nVIDIA all these years too

 

[Alex81388]

Can someone clear up the whole "pipeline" thing. I mean, what are they exactly? Stupid question I know.

Think of it as a highway, and the Cars are packets of data.

The more lanes you have, the more cars you can put on, and the faster traffic moves. Thus the faster your card.

 

[Regulus]

Ok, so like 24 "lanes"? Wow, that is fast. Thanks for the explanation.

 

[horndude]

Ok, so like 24 "lanes"? Wow, that is fast. Thanks for the explanation.

You still need to compare the throughput of the PC its running on and what the software itself is capable of otherwise its a waste........not uncommon for vid cards to be pretty far ahead of the software writers, then there's the above mentioned driver issues, which I must say have gotten way better since the days of win98, thats for certain.I can remember having 3 vid cards so I could play all the games I had, especially the microsoft games.......

Comparing some of these new gaming cards to the highend graphics workstation cards there's not that much difference anymore, prices are still outrageous LOL.