iXBT heeft een uitgebreid artikel neer gemikt rond ATi's next-generation Rage6 graphics accelerator. De belangrijkste specificaties van de Rage6 zijn: dubbele rendering pipeline met 3 texturing units, 200-400MHz core kloksnelheid en 200MHz memory bus. De fillrate bedraagt bij multi-texturing met een 200MHz core 800MTex/s. Bij een 400MHz core en tripple texturing stijgt de fillrate tot 2400 MTex/s. Volgens iXBT is het design van de Rage6 beter geschikt voor hoge kloksnelheden dan het complexe quad pipeline ontwerp van de GeForce:
GeForce's 256bit core is made up due to 4 64bit units working in parallel and connected to one and the same internal bus. As a result, the mutual electromagnetic influence (and to be more exact - mutual signal fronts' influence) is so high that the core working frequency and performance get significantly lower. To combat this unpleasant effect NVIDIA had to cut down the core frequency of its GeForce 256 to 120MHz so that it worked more stable. Even the use of 0.22 micron technology doesn't affect so greatly the general performance as the architectural peculiarities. Of course, this is a relatively primitive explanation: we didn't touch upon a number of other factors. However, it seems to be enough to give you an idea of what we were talking about.Rage6 can boast a much finer realization. Primitively speaking, instead of four 64bit units there are two 128bit ones connected in parallel to the internal bus via special buffer, which positively tells on the performance. Therefore, even when working at equal clock frequencies, Rage6 will perform about 1.5 times faster than GeForce 256. Nevertheless, we think that Rage6 owes this performance to internal chip architecture intended for higher clock frequencies. They can be achieved due to the use of a rendering pipeline requiring a greater amount of simpler stages (compared to GeForce 256). Since 3D graphics algorithms are more regular and a large number of pipeline stages doesn't cause any serious delays in case pipeline restarting is needed. We will be able to check if our expectations are true as soon as we get a working Rage6 based card. And for the time being all the info is just the info: no proven facts.
De eerste Rage6 kaarten, met kloksnelheden tussen de 200 en 250MHz, komen volgens iXBT in mei op de markt. Een Rage6 met 32MB DDR SGRAM zou ongeveer 250 dollar gaan kosten.
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