14 DAY TRIAL // Rumors inside Ati have confirmed that the early R600 samples running at 750MHz have produced a score of 11,000 points when running Futuremark's 3DMark 2006. While this statement remains to be proven when the final product will be available on the market, several voices also said that Ati is already pre-testing some of its samples at a whopping 1GHz speed.
Various reports coming from Ati (again this is not an official statement) suggested that the postponing of the launch had a lot to do with the fact that the cooling system cannot sustain the heavy temperature dissipation especially when the GPU is running at high speeds. I kind of doubt that R600 will actually come out on the market running at a full 1GHz, but it will surely be clocked higher than G80. And if you keep in mind that maybe 80% of the buyers will overclock the card as much as they can, this becomes a real bottleneck.
At the moment, G80 is the way to go. Ati still has a lot of things to take care of, especially problems regarding high clock speeds and the integration of GDDR4 into the PCB. The G80 pre-calculates loads of answers and stores them in its texture units (G80 has plenty of those). Ati has more computing power but less pre-load design so it's hard to say which will be the winner. Anyhow, it's good to see that the architectures of the two giants seem to differ a lot.
ATi is curiously targeting February the 14th as the actual launch date. Yep, it's Valentine's Day and this time it will coincide with the R600 release. Give or take a few bucks, it's a "perfect" gift for your girlfriend. As illogical as it may be, the launch comes at the perfect time for CEBIT which will start on March 15 and last until to March 21. Whether R600 will be the new king at CEBIT is really hard to say especially since it seems that Nvidia has 3 months of silence ahead. And I doubt they're going to rest their brains all that time. Several voices from Nvidia have already pointed out that the company is preparing a tweaked 80nm part which will perform better than G80. The chip is called G81 and is expected to come out just in time to meet R600.