All Aboard The PCI Express |
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Signaling their intention to offer a complete top-to-bottom PCI-Express product range, ATi have also released details of their forthcoming X600 and X300 graphics products. All the variants will feature full-on cinematic graphics though SMARTSHADER 2.0 DirectX9.0 shaders (not SM3.0), SMOOTHVISION 2.1 offering up to 16x antialiasing and HYPER Z III. |
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Both products will also offer full precision, DirectX9.0 class hardware and a PCI Express interface along with four pixel pipelines and two vertex pipes. They will all be offered with up to 256MB of onboard memory accessed through a 128-bit memory interface apart from the relatively lowly X300 SE which has the memory limit capped at 128MB and only a 64-bit interface. Naturally this halves the available bandwidth from 6.4GB/sec to just 3.2GB/sec.
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Being
available in both actively and passively cooled
versions and in both a full-height and half-height
format, the X300 is sure to be a huge hit with
OEM, SI, AIB & Retail X300 will also make the transition to a 0.11micron process and no doubt pave the way for future VPUs. There's been some speculation about which product would be making first use of a 0.11 micron VPU though I doubt many imagined it would be the X300 even though it makes perfect sense thanks to its reduced power requirements and heat production. You may recall NVIDIA also announced their plans to adopt TSMC's 0.11 micron technology back in February. |
2003 was a strange year in the graphics market in every sense of the word. We saw dominance change hands, we saw emerging technologies failing to deliver, we saw key games fail to arrive and we saw troubled transitions to new manufacturing processes. 2004 however seems to be more than making up for it, and with the pure power of the latest batch of VPUs and GPUs and the new technology finally settling in, I think we should be in line for some really great products in the year ahead of us.
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