R600 information explosion due

Tunisia, Africa - of all places - 23rd to 24th April.

Everyone attending has to sign NDA's that forbids them to divulge information for several weeks. However, we know some of them will blabber like a singing badger.

I want to know how much better it is than the 8800 GTX - not in terms of speed, but in terms of features.

Am I supposed to know what an R600 is?

Yup.

Oh

It's about £45, at the current exchange rate ;-)

65 process?

Expected to be 65 and 80 exist.

Why not 45... smaller... faster... cooler...

You mean this R600?



Neat!

45 due in 2008.

This is a 45. They've been out for years, though.

I would buy this gfx card! :O)

It's a bit round. Where do I plug it in?

DVD Player (Slot-In) like gfx slot?

WTF is going on?

Puki wants a record player, I think.

Or

A

motor

bike

Large!

heh, the is derived from the 360 GPU. Very Watt hungry at about 230 watts for one card last time I looked, Supports DX10 so basicly the same features as 8800 cards but 10 - 50% faster.

I'm not that keen on ATI though, Nvidia seems a lot more reliable with high end GL drivers. Allthough I must say, all my 3D apps are better in D3D now.

The new Max 9 booster pack has full DX10 in vista, 32bit or 64bit :)

puki: give me all your media at once, and I shall investigate what an R600 is. It's prolly large.

What, you don't think that, maybe, in the year plus since the 360 was released, the card's process has been shrinked (it has) and the performance has increased?

Well, one of the last developer blogs I read (Insomniac actually, sticking up for PS3) said that the 360 actually had an edge graphically. If there's a parallel to be drawn between Nnidia (Sony) and ATI (MS) it would seem ATI have the upper hand. But of course the chip in the PS3 was only supposed to deliver the power of two 6800 cards sooo...

Yes the 360 does have an edge graphically, quite a substantial one - the PS3's chip is basically an overclocked 7800 GTX. The XBox 360 is also significantly easier to develop for. All PS3 has is a CPU that theoretically has more processing power.

If I recall Sony weren't going to have video hardware originaly, it was all going to be done on the CELL. About 6 months before they released specs they surprised everyone and Picked up what Nvidia had to offer. I guess the 7800 was what they were working on at the time.

Yeah that's right - kind of crazy. The Cell is powerful, sure, but it's nothing compared to graphics cards. 128 stream processors on the 8800 and 320 on the R600, apparently.

230watts for one card.... the desginers must have shares in the leccky companies.

How do you reckon that?

Quirky Cell CPU + Custom graphics API versus nice standard 3 core PowerPC/DirectX. DirectX might be a nightmare to develop for, but so will Sony's API, and DirectX has to be done for the PC port of the game (if one exists) anyway.

Programming the XBox and XBox 360 is essentially the same as programming a PC. Say what you will about DirectX but it's a lot better than the alteratives and console developers love it.

I don't see how programming for the Cell is going to be different than coding for the PowerPC - for the programmer it doesn't really matter how many cores there are above one.

That's not what I've heard from the people I know who develop for them, but I can't really comment personally since I've only ever worked on Amiga and N64 games on any significant scale, and that was at least 10 years ago, so I'm sure it's not particularly relevant any more.

I've read from an Factor5 interview that there's a lot of a difference writing a game for the PS3 compared to a XBox360 due to the cell. Was quite interesting...

taumel: do you have any information on that? A link, maybe? I'd be interested in what they said.

Nice way to reduce the difference between two totally different types of processor to 'number of cores'. Info on it is readily available on the Wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_microprocessor

Note:


And



i.e. Cell is so complex that they had to create a course on programming the thing because nobody could figure it out.

If we are going to start dropping names, then this is what John Carmack thinks about 360 vs PS3:

http://arstechnica.com/journals/thumbs.ars/2005/10/18/1556

Sony has always been a decent hardware company, but lousy at software. I know we all hate Microsoft etc, but they have primarily been a Software company, and with the original Xbox SDK this really showed.

Especialy when compared to SONY. I have been away from the console dev for a number of years, but I do recall the PS2 in 2003 and it was abysmal to develop on with most developers using SDK tools and libs that were t versions behind just to have a fairly stable working environment, meanwhile Xbox was a dream.

I imagine that things have improved with PS3, but I will be very surprised if they have caught up with microsoft where their tools and libraries are concerned.

I seem to recall the compiler being a complete mess for PS3, and sony dropping their team and starting from scratch with hired help only a month or so before the thing was suposed to be released. One of the many things that delayed the launch date of the PS3.

Rubbish. There are plenty of courses on programming the Intel x86 chips as well. Not because no-one can figure it out, but because it's the most convenient way to learn about low-level programming. One of my clients just got an IBM blade server that is powered by Cell processors, and while I realize it's not quite the same as the PS3, all we had to do to get the old programs up and running, was run them through IBMs C compiler. That's the wonder of using high-level languages, the underlying architecture is abstracted away.

Sure, I've also heard that Sonys SDKs are traditionally much worse than their competitors. That's not the fault of the hardware tho'. It's just because Sony suck at developing simple, compact and consistent APIs, and/or adapting someone else's.

Sure, you can just compile for the Cell, because its controller core is just a single core cut down PowerPC compatible. Getting code to execute on it isn't a problem at all. The problem is:





But whatever you want to believe. I'm sure it's fun under that rock.

@Storm8191
Sorry i stumbled over this. Hmm if i remember it i'll post it but the main things Julian Eggenbrecht said were that from the experience they made doing a game for the PS3, it's a lot easier converting from PS3 to XBox360 than the other way around, that the GPU in the PS3 is straight foward to use but the Cell part could have been optimized on and on and that it's quite different and new.

I think the Bottom line is the R600 will run Blitz(3D,Max,Plus)FAST. A Motorbike can get you to work, and a record will give you something nice to listen to provided you can find a turntable.

I've heard the PS3 and X360 have Magical Gnomes on the inside and it doesn't make their games any better. The graphics do melt my eyes, but for 95% of the games it's more fun playing with an empty cardboard box, as it can be adapted easily to multiplayer and become a fort.

Well, I know this guy named Mark that said he had the Best Development Tools. Game On People.

John~