Cable Forum - View Single Post - So whose buying an Ati 5xxx gfx card when they are out :).

boroboi · 22-09-2009, 23:32

The only major change in architecture comes in the form of DX11 support and the features inherantly involved with it.

As i stated, the shader clusters have been reconfigured and have been optimised, but architecturally, the same hardware is being used in the 5xxx series except it's fabbed at 40nm.

Saying everything has been doubled may be simple, but it's what's actually happened.

Naturally there are going to be changes as they improve the card and it's features, but as a new architecture, it certainly isn't one.

Aside from the amount of "working" shaders increased in the clusters, the main power comes because a) Shaders have been increased by 100% (in theory you'll get more than that because they have more shaders in the cluster able to do the simple tasks b) TMUs doubled from 40 to 80 and c) ROPs doubled from 16 to 32

The hardware is already supported in the drivers, eyefinity has been supported now for a while in their drivers, the only things they'll really need to work on are the implementations of DX11 and a few tweaks and optimisations.

We shouldn't be seeing issues due to driver immaturity. Nvidia on the other hand, that is a new architecture for the most part and will have all of the problems that come with it.

22-09-2009, 23:32	#32
boroboi cf.geek Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: Middlesbrough [TS10] Age: 40 Services: TT Fibre Large 78mbit Posts: 967	Re: So whose buying an Ati 5xxx gfx card when they are out :). The only major change in architecture comes in the form of DX11 support and the features inherantly involved with it. As i stated, the shader clusters have been reconfigured and have been optimised, but architecturally, the same hardware is being used in the 5xxx series except it's fabbed at 40nm. Saying everything has been doubled may be simple, but it's what's actually happened. Naturally there are going to be changes as they improve the card and it's features, but as a new architecture, it certainly isn't one. Aside from the amount of "working" shaders increased in the clusters, the main power comes because a) Shaders have been increased by 100% (in theory you'll get more than that because they have more shaders in the cluster able to do the simple tasks b) TMUs doubled from 40 to 80 and c) ROPs doubled from 16 to 32 The hardware is already supported in the drivers, eyefinity has been supported now for a while in their drivers, the only things they'll really need to work on are the implementations of DX11 and a few tweaks and optimisations. We shouldn't be seeing issues due to driver immaturity. Nvidia on the other hand, that is a new architecture for the most part and will have all of the problems that come with it.