I'm not sure if anyone else spotted this: AMD Eyefinity Multi-Display Technology In Action I'm not so excited about the prospect of 6 monitors off a single card - I'm more interested in the power driving them. I thought AMD was supposed to be announcing their new cards today. Some of the comments there are pretty interesting:

Quote: I also played L4D across three 30" panels, and it was perfect. When we're able to release the specs and performance of the next-gen Radeons, you'll see why its possible to game at these insane resolutions. 2.15 billion transistors, 2.72 T/FLOPs of compute power, in a single GPU.

The possibility of running things on multiple monitors at high resolutions and decent framerates has me slightly excited. I've been holding off on upgrading from my Radeon 4350, mostly because I was curious to know what AMD/ATi would be coming out with. Thoughts?

The event the other day was only launching Eyefinity, the NDA for the cards themselves is still on until Sept 23 or 24th iirc.

Based on the leaks however they do look impressive and all the more impressive for the reported ~26W idle and 190W load for the HD5870, which is going to be pushing HD4870 X2 type speeds apprently.

What I find most intresting however is the amount of stuff coming out of NV about their DX11 offering... ie next to nothing that I've heard. There is also a comment from them saying that their current $199 cards are going to be faster than the HD5 series because they can accelerate PhysX and thus are better [lol]

Quote: Original post by phantom
What I find most intresting however is the amount of stuff coming out of NV about their DX11 offering... ie next to nothing that I've heard. There is also a comment from them saying that their current $199 cards are going to be faster than the HD5 series because they can accelerate PhysX and thus are better [lol]

Havok on OpenCL ought to be enough to combat those claims.

Although from what I can tell, ATI is curiously quiet on the subject of OpenCL: NVidia has drivers in public beta, Apple has production drivers, and AMD's CPU division have released x86 drivers - but ATI's drivers appear to still be in tightly controlled, corporate-partners-only distribution.

Well, there is a Beta release of the Stream SDK which uses OpenCL apprently.

I can't test it atm as I'm on my old NV card after coming to the conculsion my HD4870 X2 was faulty [sad]

Quote: Original post by phantom
Well, there is a Beta release of the Stream SDK which uses OpenCL apprently.

Huh, I didn't see that. I believe the original ATI Stream SDK used a proprietary programming language (much like CUDA).

Quote: I can't test it atm as I'm on my old NV card after coming to the conculsion my HD4870 X2 was faulty [sad]

I dropped my machine while moving house - it runs fine, but the 4870 was toast [sad].

I was going to replace it, but looks like I will be better off waiting for the 5000's to land (and hopefully face competition from NVidia, leading to a drop in price)...

Quote: Original post by swiftcoder
Huh, I didn't see that. I believe the original ATI Stream SDK used a proprietary programming language (much like CUDA).

Yeah, a bit deal hasn't really been made about it, but then it is still beta *shrugs*
I did have a look at the ATI take on it a few years back, it was called 'CTM' or 'close to the metal' and was basically 'assembler' level vs CUDA's C level.

OpenCL, combined with what looks like Brook+ would seem a sane direction to head in instead as no one wants to deal with that level any more.

Quote: I dropped my machine while moving house - it runs fine, but the 4870 was toast [sad].

I was going to replace it, but looks like I will be better off waiting for the 5000's to land (and hopefully face competition from NVidia, leading to a drop in price)...

That sucks [sad]

I think it's probably worth holding out for the HD5, yeah... although NV's cards could still be a few months out, at least in any volume and for decent prices (ie not super expensive 'fastest card edition'). Although given the quote re:PhysX I'm starting to suspect NV might well be caught on the hop this round. Something to keep in mind;
- 44nm process is something AMD have already tackled with a part very like the one they had
- GDDR5 is something they know how to work
- HD4 series cards were already pretty close to D3D11 in the hardware (the programmable tesselator for example has been in hardware for a few generations, even if it is only 1/3 of the D3D11 feature).

With the experiance and the hardware already in place it is no wonder there are whisperings of another 9700Pro abound, and if they are improving on an already damn good hardware design in the HD4 series then I can see it as possible.

Of course, NV could very well have a card on route which can compete in cost, power usage and speed. Who knows... the next couple of months could prove intresting and I look forward to whatever party spoiler NV try to pull on AMD's NDA lift day (because without a product they are going to have to do something to draw some attention away from this card).

Quote: Original post by phantom
The event the other day was only launching Eyefinity, the NDA for the cards themselves is still on until Sept 23 or 24th iirc.

Dang. I think at this point I'm definitely going to hold off on buying a new card until then.

Quote: Original post by phantom
Of course, NV could very well have a card on route which can compete in cost, power usage and speed. Who knows... the next couple of months could prove intresting and I look forward to whatever party spoiler NV try to pull on AMD's NDA lift day (because without a product they are going to have to do something to draw some attention away from this card).

Yeah, I'm quite curious as well. I haven't heard so much of a whisper of a rumour from NVidia.

Quote: Original post by phantom
The event the other day was only launching Eyefinity, the NDA for the cards themselves is still on until Sept 23 or 24th iirc.

Dang. I think at this point I'm definitely going to hold off on buying a new card until then.

Quote: Original post by phantom
Of course, NV could very well have a card on route which can compete in cost, power usage and speed. Who knows... the next couple of months could prove intresting and I look forward to whatever party spoiler NV try to pull on AMD's NDA lift day (because without a product they are going to have to do something to draw some attention away from this card).

Yeah, I'm quite curious as well. I haven't heard so much of a whisper of a rumour from NVidia.