Daily Reviews Summary 09/03/08

Reviews 52748 Published by Philipp Esselbach 0

ATI RV770 architecture analysis
bit-tech published an ATI RV770 architecture analysis

One of the biggest improvements has to be anti-aliasing performance -- it's nothing short of incredible and it takes AMD (or ATI of old) back to where it used to be. The Radeons always used to make more efficient use of AA than Nvidia's equivalent products and with the Radeon HD 4800 series, that has made a comeback in style.

Obviously there was a fairly low barrier for entry when it came to improving the situation, but AMD has gone well beyond improving it -- the architects have gone from zero to hero almost as quickly as you can say just that. Improving the render backend throughput in certain scenarios was a clever way to improve anti-aliasing performance and I'm sure that GDDR5 has had an influence as well.

That's not to say that the Radeon HD 4850 is starved of bandwidth though -- its anti-aliasing performance is better than anything Nvidia has to offer at the moment. The Radeon HD 4870 and 4870 X2, on the other hand, are just in a completely different league. Playing games at high resolution with 8xAA enabled is verging on plausible on a card that costs quite a bit less than £200 (including VAT). And with the Radeon HD 4870 X2, it's almost the default -- at anything less than 1,920 x 1,200 4xAA, there's simply no benefit to owning the card; it's all about cranking the image quality right up in today's games.

What's disappointing for me is that AMD sees a future of multiple 'small' GPUs to fill the high end market, when in actual fact we don't want to be greeted with the headaches associated with today's multi-GPU technology -- it just doesn't scale well enough across the board. I'd love to see a bigger chip derived from RV770 with well over 1,000 stream processors because at that point we'd be seeing some rather crazy and consistent performance gains.

With that said though, it's very clear that RV770 was all about architectural efficiency and on that front, AMD has really achieved. RV770 caught Nvidia by surprise and it wasn't until the company cut its prices that it became competitive again -- the GTX 260 is an attractive proposition, but it's still a little too expensive for my liking. It needs to be on price parity with the 4870 if it's going to steal back some market share from the big red rose in AMD's lineup.
ATI RV770 architecture analysis

Seagate Cheetah X15K.6 Hard Drive Review
HotHardware.com posted a review on the Seagate Cheetah X15K.6 Hard Drive

Traditional hard disk storage is living on borrowed time. We know it and storage manufacturers know it. Solid state drives, which use non-volatile memory chips instead of rotating metal discs for storing data, are simply a better medium in the long run. They consume less power, create nearly zero heat, and produce no noise - but best of all, there are no moving parts to wear out over time. The technology and prices aren't quite there yet, but it's only a matter of time. Take a quick look through any tech-oriented forum and you will likely run into folks proclaiming the death of traditional platter based storage. For the most part, they're right - but there is a twist to the story as platter based storage manufacturers are fighting back.

There is still plenty of life in traditional storage technologies, and Seagate is out to prove that with their newly launched Cheetah X15K.6 hard drives which feature 170 MB/s+ read / write speeds. Head on over to the site and check them out...
Seagate Cheetah X15K.6 Hard Drive Review

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