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AMD R600 Launch Party |
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Written by Zeljko Djuric
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Monday, 14 May 2007 |
As you probably already know, AMD postponed the launch of the R600 GPU from March 11th to April 23rd. The official explanation was that such a decision was made in order to perform “a simultaneous launch of full-range products”. We didn't find it difficult to travel to Tunisia in order to check out what AMD is cooking in the former ATI kitchen and verify whether they were telling the truth. Unfortunately, not entirely, it seems. Following the current schedule, HD 2900 is to appear on the market on May 16th, whereas slower cards (series 2600 and 2400) are supposed to come out late June or early July. In the dusk of April 23rd, the “assembly” were addressed by Mr. Richard Hardey. Those who knew nothing of him found his presentation a major surprise, whereas those who were already familiar with him saw an expectable inaugural with lots of spirit and no technical details at all. It was, in a word, an overture for the next two days full of events, while Richard had a much more technically-oriented story as soon as the following day.
During the first day the focus was on the introduction of the HD 2900XT, as well as its derivatives RV610 and RV630. As you may already know, HD 2900XT is the official label of R600, without the “X” prefix that was usual in previous generations (X800, X1900 etc.). Slower versions are entitled HD 2600 and HD 2400 (RV610 and RV630, respectively). Of course, the new series is fully DirectX 10 compatible, with support for PS (Pixel Shader) model 4.0, and is based on the Unified Shader Architecture as expected before. AMD claims that it has 320 Streaming Processors, but we will announce a deeper analysis of the architecture later on. The GPU itself is clocked at 742 MHz, with DDR3 memory clocked at 1650 MHz and an incredible 512-bit bus! GPU performance being as dependent on the bus width as it is, this is certainly great news.
The graphics chip was manufactured in the 80 nm process (RV610 and RV630 are being produced in 65 nm) and functions in connection with a total of 1 GB of graphics memory. Naturally, a chip with 700 million transistors manufactured in this sort of process consumes a lot of power, but peaking at no more than 210 W of power consumption by our esteem, so it isn't necessary to invest in a new PSU if you already have a decent 500W power supply unit. Speaking of consumption, AMD seems to be following its “performance per watt per dollar” motto accordingly. All of the new products from the HD 2000 series designed for the mobile market segment will have a few power-saving technologies implemented, something that is of special importance to battery life in mobile computers.
Beside the already seen methods of decreasing clock frequencies of the GPU and memory, the new GPUs will be able to simply switch off parts of the core not needed at the moment. What is truly important is that the proclaimed price of the top-notch model will be in the 400$ range, which is bound to strike the competition severely. These annunciations turned out to be true and AMD has stuck to their promises, which is definitely praiseworthy. In continuation of the presentation it was made clear that the new AMD player in the graphics card market has distinct new multimedia and HD video reproduction possibilities. The previous approach to video acceleration (Universal Video Acceleration, or UVA, where AMD used the 3D engine to accelerate two very important functions – motion compensation and in-loop deblocking) has now been replaced with a new one entitled “UVD” - Universal Video Decoding. This way, the video reproduction is separated from 3D acceleration, so that HD video can be reproduced on one output simultaneously with a high-end 3D game being rendered on the other, and all that with a relatively low performance impact.
Another thing, closely related to the first one, is that processor load has been decreased to the minimum, so, instead of the usual 70-80% processor load during HD video playback on the AMD AthlonX2 3800+ processor for example, one should expect a load no higher than a most impressive value of 7-8%. Of course, AMD didn't miss the chance to emphasise that their competition possesses absolutely no solutions of that kind implemented in their high-end graphics cards, although nVidia did present a new technology of decoding HD video in their latest mid-segment cards represented by GeForce 8600GTS. AMD has implemented UVD in the lower-class GPUs as well, so both RV610 and RV630 are also well able to play HD video. AMD also implemented yet another novelty – an HD Audio controller contained in the GPU itself. This way, HDMI signal has been fully integrated into the graphics card so that there is no need for an extra cable connecting the sound card with the HDMI interface.
As this is the first AMD's DirectX 10 chip, a significant part of the presentation was dedicated to gains in the visual experience provided by DirectX 10 and PS 4.0. Pictures of the DirectX 10 version of the game Call of Juarez (which relies on Chrome engine) were displayed, as well as a demo video that can serve as a benchmark too. According to developers' (Techland) announcements, the new version of the game, which will implement DirectX 10, is scheduled for release in June. Also played were a few videos showing soft shadows with much more detail and some improved bump-mapping effects, which really look great. DirectX 10 brings many enhancements, so besides the improved effects, we can also expect better performance compared to that of its predecessors. Of course, Unified Shader Architecture also played a significant role in this, with the “thread scheduler” shifting the same calculations block into pixel or vertex processing, thereby using the raw GPU resources to the maximum extent.
Valve used its part of the presentation to mention Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Team Fortress 2 and Portal (a logical game). We are sure that the Heavy Weapons Guy is going to bring you as much fun as he did to us. Most people were expecting to see photorealistic animation taken another step forward. The folks at Valve obviously thought different, so that characters are done in a comic strip fashion unlike those in HL2, but are nevertheless much more vivid than before. This was achieved by using a combination of morphing effects – to picture the progress made, let's just say that Alyx from HL2 had 44 facial morphing fields, whereas the new Heavy Weapons Guy from Team Fortress 2 has 663 of them! Valve had a much easier job now than a few years ago, as the calculations are now being performed on the GPU instead of the CPU, which is partially due to the new GPU architecture which enables 5 simultaneous operations on a single pixel or vertex shader.
Judging all the things shown here, it is clear that AMD invested a lot of effort and work into the HD 2000 series. The things we saw are promising, but we are unable to provide you with any further information and performance analysis until we test the new cards' behaviour in our test-lab. However, expect more details very soon. |
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