The things were adding transistors faster than Moore’s Law allows, so physical chip sizes were rising like crude oil prices.
That’s one big chip, and it was part of a growing trend in GPUs-or shall I say, a trend of growing GPUs. The R600 itself was manufactured on a 80nm fab process, and it packed roughly 700 million transistors into a die area of 408 mm². The subject of our attention today is the RV670 graphics processor, which is basically a revised version of the R600 that’s been converted to a smaller chip fabrication process and tweaked in numerous ways. If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to start out with the chip geekery, and then we can move on to the graphics cards themselves. Here’s the question: is this progress sufficient to allow AMD to catch up with Nvidia’s just-introduced and dauntingly formidable GeForce 8800 GT? Have the AMD guys engineered an even better stocking stuffer? Perhaps.
#Mb amd radeon hd 3870 amzon Pc
That’s progress on all the right fronts, and it sets up PC gamers beautifully at a time when we’re seeing more good games released at once than, well, maybe ever. Better still, the new graphics cards based on this chip, the Radeon HD 38, look to be very affordable. Today is one such opportunity, as AMD pulls the curtain back on its latest creation: a chip modeled on the R600 architecture that promises similar clock-for-clock performance, yet is under half the size and draws a fraction of the power. Worse yet, the gaping hole between the $149 and $399 price points in the Radeon HD lineup left many enthusiasts wanting more.įortunately, graphics chips have relatively short lifespans, and the regular introductions of new chips bring ample opportunity for redemption. When it arrived, it was fairly power-hungry and simply couldn’t match up to the performance of Nvidia’s top GeForce 8800 GPUs. The chip brought big gains in performance, features, and image quality, but it was late to market. As you may know if you follow these things, AMD’s Radeon HD 2900 XT graphics processor, also known as the R600, wasn’t exactly a rousing success in all areas.
0 kommentar(er)
