G71 Will have 32 Pipes and 16ROP's

maverik-sg1

New member
The Inq reports:

ATI BELIEVES that you need many more pixel operations per clock than the pixel itself. Nvidia disagrees. It believes in a totally different ratio. With the birth of the R580, ATI believes that you should have three to one ratio as R580 has 48 Shaders and 16 pixel pipelines. You don’t need much mathematics to figure out that ATI preaches a three to one ratio.

As the G71 will be able to process 32 pixels per clock, it will physically have 32 pipelines but will have just 16 ROPs. This is no surprise to us as Nvidia's G70, Geforce 7800 GTX actually has 24 pipelines and 16 ROPs.

This means that Nvidia and ATI will take completely new approaches, where Nvidia will try to convince everyone that you need more raw pixels than pixel operations.

The G70, Geforce 7800 GTX has 24 texture memory units and 16 ROPs and can theoretically draw eight pixels with each, having three textures per clock. G71 will be able to do even more pixels per clock - it's as simple as that.

ATI's R580, on the other hand, will still be able to push sixteen raw pixels per clock but will be able to render 48 pixel operations per clock. So ATI will insist on more per pixels operations before you actually draw the pixel. This kind of makes sense when you need more maps and calculations per pixels.

I would fear the very successful and expensive "The way it's meant to be played" program which Nvidia spent some $160+ million dollars on last year. With that kind of budget it's much easier to convince developers and publishers that Nvidia's marchitecture is the best. We can surely say that 2006 will be just as full of marchitecture wars as 2005 was.

Mav's 2p - The R580 is the core used on the Xbox 360 now and I guess it's working rather nicely so I guess the Nvidia unit is the one we will see in the PS3 - I would suspect the reason the R520 was released at all was purely because ATI had a contractual obligation to the XBOX that stipulated that at time of release the GPU in the XBOX had to be better than the desktop unit.

As I am useless at how these things are calculated - can someone do the math here and tell me which will theoretically be faster.

One thing was certain in the last round - the core clock had to be higher on the ATI unit to compete with Nividia unit - now that wafer sizes will be closer (90nm Nvidia Vs 80nm ATI) and Nvidia clocks will be closer to the R580 than they were to the R520 (G71 clocks will probably be 650/1800 Versus 695/1500 R580) compare that to (G70 430/1200 Vs R520 625/1500) It possible that the ATI card wins on the technolgy front but Nvidia's raw power see it grunt it's way to the top. The power consumption of the ATI card seem to be quite high too, it's being rumoured that Nvidia has got em licked in that dept.

Either way - The battle will no doubt be CPU limited before the full potential of either units are realised.............. Enter the physix chip??

Mav
 
I agree the ony limiting factor at the moment will be cpu.

In the past ATI had the edge but just recently Nvidia has gainrd the upper hand.This can only be good for the consumer:D .

I think it is going to be driven by a few things,price,availibility,release date and personal preference!
 
A little update

Nvidia scheduled its launch and world wide availability in stores for February 2006 but if all goes well it might actually launch at the same time as ATI, in the last week of January.
 
scorchio said:
A little update

Nvidia scheduled its launch and world wide availability in stores for February 2006 but if all goes well it might actually launch at the same time as ATI, in the last week of January.

Thats good news, Is this a paper launch or proper hardware will be available?
 
Not so...

No shops or OEM's have seen G71 Nvidia's cards not even a sample, which suggests that Nvidia is lagging somewhat behind ATI's agenda. There are still three more weeks till the end of January so the situation might change, but it's looking unlikely now.
 
name='maverik-sg1' said:
Hardware should ( as in all GTX launches last year) be available on time of release - review units are shipping now ;)

Release date for G71 was always going to be later than R580, End of February is the target release date (but may be brought forward a week or two) ;) Just as well, my wallet cannot take a double header of G71's and Fx60 in one month :O Talking fo which and a little OT - have not even seen any pre-order FX60's yet ???

name='scorchio' said:
No shops or OEM's have seen G71 Nvidia's cards not even a sample, which suggests that Nvidia is lagging somewhat behind ATI's agenda. There are still three more weeks till the end of January so the situation might change, but it's looking unlikely now.

OEM's?

Review samples have been shipped - not expected to be anywhere for another week or so at the very very earliest so my contact in Taiwan informs me ;)
 
I agree buying a CPU and and graphics in 1 month is a bit much :O .LOL i dont no how they are shipping units but its taken a week already.Do you have an actual date from your friend im Taiwan;) .

As mentioned before Nvidia and ATI have used different approaches,my personal view will be the the nvidia card will have the edge on its rival,but i'm sure the ATI card will be stronger in certain areas.Nobody knows for sure we will have to wait and see!

Who knows I might be wrong :p
 
Units were shipped this week from Taiwan to various areas (non-specific) you know yourself that delivery times from overseas vary from a week to 4 weeks (depending on method used and possible delays at customs).

Knowing that the units will not be stocked and ready to sell before mid feb - I can't see nvidia DHL'ing them (or other 48hr air freight service), most lilkely use an economy 7-10 day transport and Taiwan is a quite far away from anywhere I believe.

My friend at OCWorkbench is normally pretty good at supplying reliable information - got no reason to doubt what he says this time.

Scorchio - what are OEM's?

It's all give and take in the GPU market - but for the first time both have taken a different approach to what will provide the speed (one uses more vertex the other uses more pixel pipes) - but for me the grabber will be the one that runs the coolest and uses the least amount of power.

It's been a long time since ATI topped the ORB I am sure they are hungry enough to get there again - I hope they do as the monopoly that Nvidia have right now is not good for the market.

I'd much prefer to see ATI be quickest (or right on the button with a 50/50 performance split) so that Nvidia is forced to sell its kit at a less painfully expensive price.
 
Short for original equipment manufacturer, which is a misleading term for a company that has a special relationship with computer producers. OEMs buy computers in bulk and customize them for a particular application. They then sell the customized computer under their own name. ;)
 
The reason I ask is because Nvidia are making all the reference designed PCB (as in 100% of the first release of G71's) themselves (via 1st tier manufacturing) - so the likes of Asus, BFG, XFX, Leadtek these are classed as Partners, they all receive complete 'white boxed' product and then re-package them and ship them out. These unit are en-route

OEM's in this case are people like DELL, Alienware, Falcon etc.... no cards have been shipped to them yet. In fact, they are 2nd on this list to the partners, having already saturated them with 7800GTX (256MB) they are in no rush to place stock orders at time of launch and so close the the end of their financial year.

The first batch of cards have been pre-shipped for estimated delivery in 7-10 days - the partners have to then re-package to suit their market (software bundles, fancy boxes) and then ship to the launch partners - the more I think about that part of it the more I am convinced of an END of FEB release date to any other date, thus ensuring that the launch stores have stock on the day.

Mav
 
Very interesting read. It makes me wonder what was the point in the 512MB 7800GTX, when they only released a handful; and now they release its superior?! :?

Do you have any idea of the price tag for this fella?
 
simple marketing - release a product thats the market best and thats all average joe will remeber when he goes to pc world.... :D
 
Whenever I have been to PC World they never actually stock the best or the latest cards. I could go in there now and they'd probably show me an X700 as their flag card! :rolleyes:
 
Yea I agree stocky, but then again in a years time someone working at PC World would show you an X700 as the flag card aswell. They know nothing and I have tested that but won't go into it now.

Interesting read mav, keep it coming.
 
Well this isn'y the first time they have produced a 512mb version of the same card luckily its a bit better than there last one,but at over £400 a piece they should be.

I am so glad i didn't upgrade to one of these,i think we have all learnt something by this.
 
Saying that though, the 7800GTX does out perform all the others when only using one - so for people only willing to buy one card I suppose it would have been good if they were actaully available to buy! 8)

Hmmm, I'm very interested to know what the prices (and performance) will be - as I'm thinking of probably grabbing one when they are released.
 
maverik-sg1 said:
TI would fear the very successful and expensive "The way it's meant to be played" program which Nvidia spent some $160+ million dollars on last year. With that kind of budget it's much easier to convince developers and publishers that Nvidia's marchitecture is the best. We can surely say that 2006 will be just as full of marchitecture wars as 2005 was.

I think this is the most important point. There seem to be simulairtys between the intel vs amd war and the ati vs nvidia war:

Intel going for long pipelines that benefit from reapeat opertations per clock cycle.

Amd going for shorter pipelines letting the cpu 'accelerate everything' better

If MMX and specific instruction sets had really taken off a few years ago perhaps intel chips 'clock for clock' would be faster than amd in games. 3D accel came along though and changed the whole rendering process for PC's

So if nvidia manages to coerce developers whole hartedly into optomiseing all the games around for their next gen cards it wont matter that ati's is doing it the best in the easiest / most logical way possible.
 
Update:

G71, now the 7900, the GTX model will have a clockspeed in the range 700-750MHz GPU and 1600-1800MHz GDDR3 memory.

This leaves us with the new generation shaping up like this:

Radeon X1900 with 48 pixel shader processors, 16 TMUs and 16 ROPs clocked at up to 650MHz or GeForce 7900 with 32 pixel processors, 32 TMUs and 16 ROPs clocked at up to 750MHz.



G
 
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