ATi's weakness

[wyz135]

After comparing some Graphic Card over here, I realise that ATi's card always has lesser Vertex Pipline, Raster Operator than nvidia's card, I really hope ATi can improve on that because I am a ATi supporter all the way...:)

[Radiator]

Currently , ATI's weakness in the R600 is a flawed core ( really low antialiasing performance ) .
And it's weakness in the mid-end cards are the low number of TMUs and ROPs .
Also , the really inefficient architecture , which needs really efficient drivers to work properly .

[MrWizard6600]

Currently , ATI's weakness in the R600 is a flawed core ( really low antialiasing performance ) .
And it's weakness in the mid-end cards are the low number of TMUs and ROPs .
Also , the really inefficient architecture , which needs really efficient drivers to work properly .

Ok I have complaints and agreeances with your logic...

yes, there isn't too many ROPS or TMUs but they're hella clocked. 800Mhz core? Thats decent. The texture mapping power is ok, for best results on the UT3/Crytek2 engines, youll need medium or lower texture density, but that should still be pretty good looking.

So my beef is not with the TMUs, its with the ROPs:

You've already got a broken AA (which is done by the ROPs when Z is in progress) architecture, so limiting the ROPs has got to be a bad idea. Add that to the fact that the best this thing can do is 3.2Gpixels/sec and you have problems. I know this card will be fine for 1000X700, but I'm going to create a thread addessing 1200 X 1000 or 1440 X 700. The upside is the GDDR3/4 memory architecture. I'm hoping, when GDDR4 becomes a little more readily available, we'll see 1.0 or .9ns GDDR 4 which (fingers crossed) should push 3GHz. So the GDDR4 version of this card has a memory subsistem that can help AA because it'l subsidize the loss (hopefully). For 1.1ns GDDR3 varient on the other hand, the memory sub-systems gonna take the same AA hit as every other memory GDDR3 1.1ns memory sub-system.

Long story short: this card, even with the GDDR4 512mb card, will file many complaints if asked to perform 1600 X 1000 or 1600 X 1200, as well as 1440 X 700, or possibly even less, when coupled with AA.

[Radiator]

I was talking about the HD 2900 XT . That card has 16 TMUs and 16 ROPs , but it still looses 24% of performance when applying 4xAA . The X1900/X1950 cards ( save for the X1950 Pro and X1900/X1950 GT ) had 16 ROPs and 16TMUs aswell , but they beat nVidia's AA performance .

As for the HD 2600/HD 2400 series , the proportions are just plain stupid .
So you can only dream of decent AA performance ( funny thing is , that I loose maybe 1-2 FPS when applying 2xAA with my X1600 pro , which has 4 ROPs aswell ) . So add the flawed R6** core with the 4 ROPs = HD 2600's .