The Clash of the Titans - AMD's R600 preview - Guess what - more history!
Author: Vedran Dakic
Date: 22 Apr 2007

While people were still scratching their heads with ultimate questions - Should I buy 1800, 1900, 7800, 7900 or just go insane - NVIDIA came out with another concept - 7900GX2 and 7950GX2. The first ones didn't see a lot of daylight, they were running quite hot, were very long which made installing these things in a case close to Mission Impossible - 7950GX2 turned out to be quite hot thingys. Running two PCB's with two chips connected via SLI bridge helped to make a popular term - Quad SLI (when running two of these cards). Although there was some kind of "don't test two cards" thing going on within NVIDIA and partners back in those 7950GX2 days, we managed to get two of them and some "cracked" drivers and tested them like hell. Be sure to check that one out - here. We were able to test a very cool and, driver-wise, a bit undevelopped thing - it was able to squeeze out 32xAA and 16xAF combination , the cards were "fat" as today's 8800's, and pretty power-hungry. But they looked really awesome in a machine, like two crazy beasts ready to digest whatever you might throw their way. The main thing that was really great with this concept was the fact that there weren't such huge performance drops when "killed" with high resolutions and AA/AF settings. With a couple of driver problems, of course, we have to repeat that. It wasn't twice as fast, nowhere near that limit, but it was really cool. In a way, this reminded us of the infamous Crossfire Master card, with the cut-down clocks and everything, but it was still SLI-able.

Software-wise, things got even more complicated. NVIDIA's Control Panel and ATi's Control Center both had pros and cons, but they became much more then regular "drivers" - they became applications that made the "control" possible, in the most direct way possible. Wether if it's a GPU overclocking, settings change (AA, AF), it's all done there. NVIDIA took that concept a bit further with their 6xx motherboard series, and all of the reference-design motherboards actually have nTune and all of the necessary applications to check out your BIOS settings directly from Windows. Awesome. While 6xx chipsets were slowly taking the market, we had a chance to test AMD's RD600 chipset, one of the most underrated products ever. Highly configurable, with very good overclocking options, it was supposed to be The Product. Well, history wanted it differently. Let's leave it at that.

The "history" term here could be translated to - AMD's acquisition of ATi for the sum of 5,4 bilion dolars. The deal was offically announced on July 24th 2006, the day that could turn out to be a very important date in IT industry. We heard various rumours back in January and February, but we patiently waited for The Announcement that came almost half a year later. And then - we were all waiting. And waiting. R600 should've been out back in those days, actually. It seems reasonable to conclude that the whole merging process had something to do with the delay, but it was also down to technology, which we'll talk about a bit later.

Looking at the market last year, there are a few things that are really worth mentioning. The merger should make a couple of things possible - ATi should be able to deliver the best supporting products for AMD's CPU's and overall platforms. This should happen in the not-so-distant future. Intel and NVIDIA didn't really sit still while this was happening - Intel introduced the Core architecture, the first "Netburst-free" architecture, that drove AMD's revenues to a bit lower level. There were various other changes - especially in the mobile computer business, mobile devices business, server business, and other things. We think that, in a way, Intel actually indirectly helped NVIDIA by launching Core architecture and by starting a small price war with AMD, which all made NVIDIA's position a bit more relaxed and NVIDIA responded by firing from all cannons. 6xx series chipsets and 8-series of GPU's are on the market since November last year, with mainstream parts announced last week. And a couple of other products - 680i, 680i LT, 650i and 650i Ultra. All of this brings us to one very important moment in time - actually, today. The "surroundings" being Microsoft Vista, DirectX 10 and 10.1, Vista/DirectX compliant hardware, dual and quad core CPU's, extremely fast DDR2 memory while DDR3 memory is just around the block, new CPU's and chipsets - the same thing. So, pretty turbulent period. The battle just goes on, mercylessly. So, let's have all of these facts close and go into the R600 land. While keeping an eye on technology, all the time.