FX5900 vs Radeon9800Pro
Distinctions between R350 and R300
Having seen a lot of nVidia's miseries in migrating to the 0.13 mk process technology, ATI has put off its technology breakthrough and stayed as before at the 0.15 bar.
Basically, the 0.13 mk process allows reducing the die area and place more active elements on the wafer, reduce the power voltage and thus power consumption with heat emission. But that is only in theory. In practice, all is quite the contrary - the coarse and expensive process technology sharply reduces the chip yield ratio per wafer, but nVidia has failed to reduce the core voltage, so in the end NV30 video cards held a new record for the industry at heat emission levels and noise, whereas ATI even in its latest cards recommends to use absolutely standard coolers.
Gigabyte Radeon 9800Pro 256Mb So, ATI stayed at 0.15, and what's curious, in the R350 chip (9800Pro) as compared to the R300 ( 9700Pro) top model the number of active elements (transistors) has also not gone up but stayed at 110 mln as before.
So what's new in the R350 chip as compared to R300? Putting it straight, not much.
- The core speed has succeeded to be raised from previous 325 MHz (in R300) to 380 MHz (in R350), and the memory operating frequency has been pushed up from 310 MHz to 340 MHz, which gave a rise for the peak memory bandwidth to 21, 8 GB/s (versus 16.0 GB/s in NV30).
- SmartShader 2.1 - the F-buffer has been added. In fact, the competitor to nVidia's CineFX engine allows executing the code of shader programs of unlimited length.
- SmoothVision 2.1 - the quality of FSAA & AF execution has been improved.
- HyperZ III+ - optimized Z-buffer cache which is now tuned for better shader processing.
These changes can be frankly regarded as "cosmetic" but as the benchmarking will show, this ordinary overclocking has sufficed to withstand decent competition with NV35.
Distinctions between NV30 and NV35
At that, things are more comical. The only thing that has undergone alteration is the memory interface. Expensive and scarce DDR-II with narrower 128-bit memory bus used in NV30 has been replaced with more accessible DDR that offers the 256-bit bus, which allowed raising the memory bandwidth to 25-27 GB/s depending on the frequency (variable between 400 and 450 MHz). No doubt the move is absolutely correct. In the design terms, this allows getting rid of huge cooling systems required for DDR-II running at 500 MHz as well as today's 400 MHz - they are not rare and they also need to be cooled.
Another matter is that manufacturers skilled at research of cooling systems in developing NV30 cards came across this task already fully armed and were able to create virtually noiseless cards.
ASUS V9950 128Mb (GF5900)
Preliminary findings on the chips:
Neither R350 nor NV35 are "revolutionary" solutions. The revolution occurred just before the release of 9700Pro(R300) and FX5800(NV30).
In the end, R350 proved to be a modification to R300, and NV35 is a brushed up version of NV30 chip, first in the FX line. Calling NV30 "unsuccessful", we mean primarily its consumer qualities like price, noise, bulk and temperatures. The first, second and third didn't fit within any bounds (there aren't many amateurs of the extreme in this world, nor they have the key role), and the performance wasn't worth such expensive tricks.
It's impossible to release new architecture of the graphic chip every 6 months. Nor does it make sense taking this 'modification' as a time of erroneous expectations. This is more likely a time of releasing mature and interesting solutions where all the mistakes made (inevitable in revolutions) have been taken into account, and the programmers at both companies had enough time to optimize the driver compilers for better performance.
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