ATI's Radeon X1800, R520 has eight shaders

[Alpine]

WE FINALLY learned that R520, now formally known as Radeon X1800 generation will have eight vertex Shader units. That was a big question that was very hard to answer. The Last generation had six vertex shaders but we learned that vertex data was never a big limitation. Only one "game" suffered from a vertex date limitation and this game is, believe it or not 3Dmark05. All the other games were always pixel performance limited.



We already said several times that R520 will have sixteen pipelines and ATI likes to say that it has sixteen pixel processors.

R520 generation will be able to process sixteen textures as it features sixteen texture units, and its possible to render sixteen Render back ends in a single clock.

The R520 can compare sixteen Z compare units, very important when you want to optimise Z information's.

As R520 is very programmable chip you will be able to process as much as 512 threads on this GPU, this means that two GPU together brings a nice number of 1024 threads and Intel and ATI believe that programming with threads in mind should get you to faster performance in dual setups. You should learn more about R520 next week when ATI presents it to the world. Hey I'm off to Ibiza!

The INQuirer