The deepest lung in the far east - well, our Willy D is of this parish but out east now with the HEXUS Dragon Tour 2006 - sends an electrionic emaily message from Taipei (they're all the rage, apparently) telling us the little birds have been twittering about the performance of ATi's much-delayed R600 graphic processor.
Seemingly, ATi has been aiming to achieve 11,000 3DMark scores at 750MHz. That's tasty and may mean the R600 offers a strong challenge to NVIDIA's G80 GPU given that, as we reported in HEXUS.Beanz a few hours ago, ATi's already got samples running at 1GHz and has higher targets in mind.
Currently, though, ATi has nothing approaching a challenger to the G80 and no silver bullets to immediately load to combat the Vista-readiness of NVIDIA's DirectX-10-compatible part.
So, for now, ATi's manufacturing partners - the AIBs who build its designs into final graphics cards - are left twiddling their thumbs (well, those that are ATi-only houses, anyway).
They're playing "wait and see" and aren't willing or able to chase hard for the high-end since there is no certainty in anyone's mind that ATi is onto a winner.
That might not seem so important when the volume and the sales war will be at the low-end and upwards to the mid-range - it's there, not in the rarefied atmosphere of the powerful and pricey, where the big money gets generated.
Trouble is, provably having the latest and greatest technology at any moment in time earns a maker Brownie points with its partners, distributors and resellers and also generates a positive impression with PC enthusiasts that carries over into boosted sales lower down the feeding chain.
Right now, all the positives are with NVIDIA. Things are going to stay that way until ATi gets round to delivering close-to-finished product into the hands of reviewers. And that's presuming that what ATi delivers does top out NVIDIA offerings.
But, between now and whenever ATi does get its act together, NVIDIA is going to be working away furiously to enhance its current performance leadership - hoping to take away some of whatever wind ATi has in its sails when R600 does finally hit the test benches.
With the G80, NVIDIA is majoring on texture units. The G80 pre-calculates loads of answers and stores them in a texture unit. This will be the best way for NVIDIA to overcome the G80's lack of maths power compared to R600 and we await with more than a little interest how well it can achieve that aim.
Oh, it's so very spicy down the back streets of Taipei!
