NV70 not a new design...

[LiViNgL@RgE]

I found an artical HERE , it says that the NV70 is just a tweaked NV40 with some addon's....

 

[Alanore]

Theres not much point in building a new chip from scratch when the chip that your building is pretty much going to be very similar to the one its replacing.

Its not like its just a NV40 with more pixels quads and vertex shaders. As they have changed the Pixel pipelines so their more efficent pipelines as well as tweeking the vertex unit. Which is pretty major stuff, not just a nip tuck. Also theres the whole thing about the delta between the geometric and core speeds as well as the non linear performance Vs core clock as the ROP multiplier only raise after every 27MHz increase. Which isnt the case in the NV40.

 

[K404]

Yup. Seen it. Technically...no new product is totally new... most complex transistor based things are made of discrete blocks which are designed in a way that they can be used again in other projects with minimal tweaking.

Say the 7800 has 300million transistors... do you really think that was started from a blank piece of paper? If that was how it was desinged, we would be expecting the FX5600 in about 4 years time..... and I would be buying the 7800 as a retirement present to myself

I dont mean this as a put down, but why do ppl seem surprised by this? Any successful design will have elements used in the successor.

I think the 7800 tag is maybe inappropriate... 6800LE...8/3, 6800 12/3, 6800GT/Ultra 16/6, 7800 24/8 its not that big a jump...NVidia just found a way of adding more pixel/vertex address lines while keeping the card stable..

 

[Master_G]

With the numbers it gives im not really complaining, though you could pretty much guess from the fact that there wasnt a huge difference between it and the existing generation, which there tends to be when the design is completely new.

7800 tag is just marketing like all naming systems, they just want to show they have a new line of cards out and ATI dont.

G

 

[Grov]

What does it matter?

The X800XT PE was basically very similar to a R300, still owns though.

 

[maverik-sg1]

Of course we have to remember the transistor count has risen and the fact that it's gone from 130nm to 110nm.

The efficiency drive of what was available made the unit cooler and clock for clock faster than anything else.

Anyone remember pre AthlonXP when they made the same upgrade to the Athlon range.

Always best to get the most out of what you've got before you move on to new designs - Intel made that mistake when tehy released the Pentium 4, before really finishing off Pentium 3, which has now made a comeback as Pentium M.

Who cares - it's that fastest thing out there now and I got two of em LOL.

Mav

 

[Grov]

Even Athlon 64's aren't that much different to Athlon XP's. Just the on die memory controller and extra cache here and there, well the early A64's anyways.