Thoughts
A couple of things should strike you if you managed to follow the guts of the analysis. The first is that ATI have designed, even in the slightly anaemic RV515, a more efficient architecture than they've ever had. Performance losses from texturing, shader issue and memory subsystem usage are all lower than before, comparatively speaking. Going forward until things change again with Vista and D3D10, the new R5-series family seems well placed to serve the PC gamer, from bottom to very top.The two R5-series architecture branches, which RV515 and RV530 serve to demonstrate to most (although it's a shame RV515 didn't get the same memory controller, although we can all understand why), do very well in D3D9-class, shader-biased games titles, in their respective price classes.
The second is that providing that bias gets even bigger, the merits of brute forcing your way to performance, and very broadly speaking you must understand, become less. Being smart with your silicon budget pays dividends. It's one thing to go wide everywhere and clock high, and it's another to go wide only where needed and to optimise the shit out of those functional blocks and the associated management logic.
Both can pay off, but one way seems inherently better, at least to this technologist. We went deeper in our analysis of these two products and the underlying chip technology than we did with R520, and hopefully the chatter about the batch performance and pixel thread scheduler in particular make some sense to you. Those things, effectively giving ATI more efficient control over their technology and how it performs in a granular, predictable sense, are where these new chips do their magic.
As for the SKUs themselves, we'll hold off absolute judgement until we've had the chance to do a comprehensive cross-IHV match-up on HEXUS.core with all the main contenders, but we're absolutely confident that X1300 PRO and especially X1600 XT, when you pair up the basics of those GPU setups with forward-looking features (that now actually work) like Avivo and the display options afforded by the board hardware, will hold their own when that match-up happens.
The only real downside seen in this analysis is found in the physical properties of the reference boards. The cooler is really terrible (sorry, ATI), so avoid it if you're looking to pick up a retail example.
The way ATI have built the cores of RV530, R520 and the forthcoming R580 mean that 3D graphics on the PC desktop remains an exciting one for you and me both. The comparison to NVIDIA's next few competing parts can't come soon enough, as we see how the pitched battle plays out before Windows Vista arrives.
