Instructions per clock performance comparison. Those metrics reflect only the hardware capabilities and are not necessarily indicators for real world performance.
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| ATI R360 / RV360 and the new Generation of RADEON Evolution and SOI | |
| (Review by MS, September 30, 2003) |
Theoretical Performance
Overall, the main emphasis has been on the pixel shader engines with ATI claiming an overall performance advantage over the nVidia nV35 and later series of up to 550%. For real world performance this translates to up to twice the performance of the RADEON 9800 XT compared to the GeForce FX5900 Ultra. These numbers are to be taken with a certain grain of salt, since the benchmark charts provided by ATI had no disclosure regarding the nVidia driver revision, for all we know, those could have been the original Detonator drivers.
Instructions per clock performance comparison. Those metrics reflect only the hardware capabilities and are not necessarily indicators for real world performance.
What is interesting about the 9800 XT series is that DDR-II or, to that effect, GDR-3 appears to have completely disappeared from ATI's roadmap. When we asked, we were informed that the original move to DDR-II was initiated by the higher attainable clock speed of DDR-II compared to the original DDR. However, DRAM technology has caught up and current DDR-I is capable of delivering similar clock speed as DDR-II at much better granularity and lower latencies. For the texture space within the local frame buffer, latencies may be of subordinate importance, for anything pertaining to the Z-Buffer, latencies are synonymous with performance penalities. Overall, contemplating each and every aspect of the different memory architectures, DDR delivers better performance at lower cost and is therefore the solution of choice for the next generation of graphics card.
(we have seen the same trend happening at nVidia, therefore the developments at ATI come as no big surprise. For details regarding the advantages and disadvantages of DDR-II compared to DDR-I please check our DDR-II article from the beginning of this year.)
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