The State of 3D

NVIDIA and ATI, 1H 2005

by Josh Walrath

            The R480 and R430 series of cards were supposed to be hitting the shelves by the end of December, 2004.  This of course did not happen, and these cards were not sighted until well towards the end of January.  As of February though, supplies of the X850 XT PE can be seen as “good”, but the price premium was well into the $600 range.  The new X800 XL finally started to hit retail in good numbers at the beginning of March, but there was a hefty price premium for this part.  Users initially were paying upwards of $430 for this $299 part.  As of the end of March, these prices have finally reached the $299 point (and below).  As with any new technology, there will always be a sharp drop in price after about a month post-introduction.

            Currently ATI’s position is still very solid, and with the recent release of the Rialto bridge chip, we will see the AGP side of their products gain a much needed refresh.  While NVIDIA’s HSI chip may be slightly more advanced (it can bridge both ways) and was out nearly a year before Rialto, ATI’s part is very solid and it does the job it was intended to do.  Until this point, ATI’s midrange has been addressed by older 9800 Pro boards in either 128 bit or 256 bit memory formats.  It is not exactly cost effective to sell these parts at those price points (especially the 256 bit boards).  Getting the X300, X600, and X700 to the AGP side is a much needed move for ATI to counter the products that NVIDIA has, as AGP is still a very important market.  While ATI was the first to have quite a few native offerings for the PCI-E market, they have let the low end and midrange AGP market stagnate.  Hopefully this will change soon, as many users (especially in the retail market) are not yet ready to make the jump to PCI-E.

            The future for ATI appears to be a bit more well known as compared to NVIDIA.  The Xenon chip (X-box 2) is the R500, which appears to be a totally new architecture for ATI.  It will definitely support SM 3.0+ rendering, and rumors have it that it supports unified vertex and pixel shaders, as well as encompassing many extra features that Microsoft wanted implemented in the X-box 2.  This core is based on TSMC’s 90 nm Low-K process, and this chip has been seen in the recently released X-box 2 developer boxes.  No one from the press has had a chance to look at this developer box, and apparently the developers that have received this technology have been keeping it under strict lock and key.  Few real details are known about this product, but at E3 Microsoft is supposed to release more specifications and some possible working prototypes (or at least showing off one of the developer boxes running some demos).

            Due to the complexity of this part, as well as TSMC’s relative newness to the 90 nm process, I do not expect to see large numbers of these products hit the shelves initially.  The products that do will most likely be well over $600.  Early summer is when most agree that we will see this part, and it will probably only come out in PCI-E form with 512 MB of GDDR-3.  This product will be rare as hen’s teeth until about 5 months after its release.  At that point, we will see the introduction of other R5x0 parts that will address the high end and midrange markets.  Eventually ATI will transition their entire lineup to R5x0 parts, and will support SM 3.0 from top to bottom.  From rumblings about the web, the R520 taped out in February, so ATI is very close to getting their first samples back (if they haven’t already).  Modifications will be made, as a 300 million transistor chip will show issues at first (no matter who designs it).  But with many of the new tools available to the IHV’s, the process is not nearly as painful as one would imagine.  There is no word if Intrinsity’s Fast-14 technology was used to help design the R5x0 series of chips.

Next: NVIDIA

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