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December 17, 2009

Power Consumption

Filed under: undefined — Tags: , , , — admin @ 08:42

 

In the presentation ATI gave on its Radeon HD 4890 pre-launch, it admitted that the board’s load power would be up as a result of the higher clock speeds, to the tune of roughly 30 W. Idle power, however, was said to be down 30 W from 90 to 60 W.

 

That was a much more significant number in our eyes, since the card would spend a majority of its time in that lower-power state and, as a percentage, the drop from 90 to 60 W was much larger than the load increase from 160 W to 190 W.

 

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Nevertheless, our system power measurements do not reflect the idle power consumption improvements. Our load numbers do jump 25 W, which is close to the 30 that ATI cites. But the idle power sitting on the Vista desktop is actually 2 W higher than the Radeon HD 4870 1 GB. The 512 MB card is higher than both, strangely enough. This was one of the original card samples, so it’s entirely possible that it isn’t optimized for power as the retail boards being tested alongside it.

 

The GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 trumps the entire ATI lineup, both in idle and load power consumption. The 55 nm GTX 285 turns in even better idle results, though its load consumption jumps in response to its increased complexity.

The Relevance Of DirectX 10.1

Filed under: Placi Video — Tags: , , , — admin @ 08:29

The performance differences between ATI and Nvidia graphics cards are currently fairly tight and well-segmented—in other words, it’s easy for an enthusiast to hit a site like newegg.com with a budget in mind and, all else being equal, find the best card for the money. Case in point: you tell me you have $160, I’ll tell you to get a GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 and cash in on the rebates. You tell me you can spend $180, I could tell you to grab a Radeon HD 4870 with 1 GB.

 

But all else is not equal, so recommendations aren’t quite that cut and dry. Nvidia preaches the gospels of PhysX and CUDA, with an occasional verse about GeForce 3D Vision. ATI sings the hymns of DirectX 10.1 and Stream. Depending on which company you put your faith in, one of those two messages is going to sound a little sweeter.

 

Right now, the two are in full-scale conversion mode, trying to get everyone they can to pitch in their tithing for a little gaming salvation. Just as PhysX and CUDA are starting to take hold with high-profile titles enabling support, so too are software developers paying more attention to DirectX 10.1.

 

As a superset of DirectX 10, DirectX 10.1 includes a handful of quality-enhancing features that, in some cases, will run on DirectX 10 hardware, but at a performance hit. For instance, the Gather4 function fetches four samples (2×2) where a DirectX 10 part would only be able to fetch one. The result should be more realistic shadow maps and better performance. The Stalker: Clear Sky demo lets us test that theory with a toggled check-box to enable or disable DirectX 10.1.

 

 

Our first test pits all of the Radeon HD 4800-series cards in this story against each other, without MSAA for alpha-tested objects enabled. At 1920×1200, performance is fairly similar across the board, with all test cases except the Radeon HD 4870 X2 demonstrating small gains by moving to DirectX 10.1.

 

 

We then turned on 4x MSAA for alpha-tested objects and re-ran the numbers, this time at 1680×1050, in an attempt to maintain somewhat reasonable frame rates. This time, a majority of the test cases show DirectX 10.1 incurring a small performance hit. Is the performance tradeoff worthwhile? For that, we’ll need to make an image quality comparison from within the game itself.

 

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Up top you’ll find the screen capture provided by ATI, right up against a wall, demonstrating that the DirectX 10.1 shadows are softer and arguably more realistic. I ran all over the opening area of the game trying to find a clear example of the difference made by DirectX 10.1 shadows and just couldn’t come up with an indisputable best-case scenario. Even by reloading saved points, it was impossible to generate the exact same scene twice. Nevertheless, given the option of enabling DirectX 10.1 and not seeing a significant performance hit, you might as well turn the feature on.

 

 

 

 

 

With the Game Developer’s Conference recently past, ATI had a handful of DX 10.1 titles to discuss during its briefing, besides Stalker. Tom Clancy’s HAWX looks like a fun title with DX 10.1 screen space ambient occlusion and accelerated Gaussian shadows. There were two other lesser-known titles, plus the UNiGiNE game engine, on which several upcoming titles are purportedly based.

 

As of right now, DirectX 10.1 isn’t making a huge impact, but because it will become a subset of DirectX 11, you can expect the extra features being enabled right now to work moving forward in Windows 7. The same couldn’t be said for the disruptive shift from DirectX 9/XP to DirectX 10/Vista.

DirectX 10.1DirectX 10.1 DirectX 10DirectX 10
DirectX 10.1 DirectX 10
Spurce:http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-4890,2262-3.html

Building A Radeon HD 4890

Filed under: Placi Video — Tags: , — admin @ 08:24

 Architecturally, the RV790 graphics processor is identical to RV770. The vital specs haven’t changed one bit. It’s still a 55 nm component, though transistor count is up just slightly to approximately 959 million transistors (from 956 million). The GPU is still made up of 800 stream processors, 40 texture units, and 16 ROPs. It still sports a 1 GB GDDR5 frame buffer on a 256-bit memory bus, too.

Where it differs most is clock speed—on its core and memory bus. Stock Radeon HD 4870s employed a 750 MHz engine and quad data rate memory running at 900 MHz. This new offering cruises at 850 MHz with 975 MHz GDDR5 memory.

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In order to get those elevated frequencies, ATI had to do some work to the GPU’s core. In short, the RV770 consistently had issues clocking beyond a certain point—a fact that was evident in many of our System Builder Marathon overclocking attempts, which generally fell short at the same frequency range.

The company’s engineers went in looking for slow electrical paths and re-wired them in such a way that they wouldn’t inhibit faster frequencies. Physically, the GPU is fractions of a millimeter larger due to additional capacitors that clean up power to the chip. But it remains the same ol’ design popularized mid-2008. As you can see from the table above, clock-for-clock RV770 and RV790 perform nearly-identically clock-for-clock.

  Radeon HD 4870 X2 Radeon HD 4890 Radeon HD 4870 GeForce GTX 285 GeForce GTX 260 Core 216
Manufacturing Process 55 nm TSMC 55 nm TSMC 55 nm TSMC 55 nm TSMC 55 nm TSMC
SPs 1,600 (2 x 800) 800 800 240 216
Core Clock 750 MHz 850 MHz 750 MHz 648 MHz 576 MHz
Shader Clock 750 MHz 850 MHz 750 MHz 1,476 MHz 1,242 MHz
Memory Clock 900 MHz GDDR5 975 MHz GDDR5 900 MHz GDDR5 1,242 MHz GDDR3 999 MHz GDDR3
Frame Buffer 2 x 1 GB 1 GB 1 GB / 512 MB 1 GB 896 MB
Memory Bus Width 2 x 256-bit 256-bit 256-bit 512-bit 448-bit
ROPs 2 x 16 16 16 32 28
Price $400 $249 ~$180 $340 ~$180

Not surprisingly, the 4890 card itself is easily mistaken for a Radeon HD 4870. They’re the same length; they both employ dual-slot coolers and the same dual-DVI plus video output configuration. Subtle differences set the two cards apart, giving away the fact that these two boards are indeed based on different GPUs.  And despite the slight increase in load power consumption as a result of the 4890’s higher clock speed, ATI still gets away arming the card with two six-pin auxiliary power connectors.

 

As of right now, ATI doesn’t have plans for a Radeon HD 4890 X2 variant, as it likely wouldn’t offer much more than a Radeon HD 4870 X2. And the chip’s extra full-load power consumption would create additional heat that’d need to be cooled.

Overclocking

The principal benefit from moving from HD 4870 to HD 4890 would, in our minds, be overclocking headroom. Stock-to-stock, you’re looking at a 100 MHz frequency increase. However, right out of the gate, ATI’s board partners will be shipping juiced models running a 50 MHz-faster core clock. According to AMD, the new GPU layout should be capable of going even faster than that.

The driver’s Overdrive sub-routine now offers a maximum frequency of 1 GHz, suggesting ATI is fairly comfortable with its enthusiast customers running at that speed. Rather than push our card that high and run the risk of misrepresenting performance with a hand-picked sample, however, we ran our HIS Radeon HD 4890 Turbo sample at its stock 900/975 MHz speeds and compared it to the reference clocks ATI is officially launching.

Upping the core clocks to 900 MHz is good for gains between five and 10% at 2560×1600. One of these factory-overclocked boards undoubtedly enhances the value of ATI’s Radeon HD 4890 versus the 4870 1 GB. However, there will undoubtedly be an additional price premium over the reference cards, too, softening the worth of that extra performance to some degree.

Back of the Radeon HD 4890 Back of the Radeon HD 4870
Source: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-4890,2262-2.html

Inchisoare pentru adolescentii ucigasi, cu cele mai noi jocuri pe calculator, televizoare cu plasma si capace de toaleta personalizate

Filed under: Articole de Presa — Tags: , , , , — admin @ 08:15

Adolescentii incarcerati intr-un penitenciar britanic traiesc o viata de milionari, potrivit unei foste angajate a inchisorii Waren Hill. Detinutii, unii dintre cei mai infricosatori criminali juvenili, se pot uita la televizoare cu diagonala de 127 de centimetri, se pot juca pe calculator si isi pot alege modelul capacelor de toaleta pentru baile proprii ale celulelor, titreaza, luni, “Mail Online”.Una dintre fostele angajate ale penitenciarului, Helen Stanmore, in varsta de 52 de ani, a declarat ca prizonerii de la inchisoarea Waren Hill de la Hollesley, in apropiere de Woodbridge, Suffolk, se bucura de o viata de lux. Asta dupa ce platitorii de taxe le-au dat lunar peste 100.000 de euro in ultimii patru ani. Adolescentii o duc atat de bine, incat ei se pot juca si Nintendo, in timp ce isi comanda obiecte din cataloage Argos. “Nu-mi vine sa cred ce viata au. Am fost socata de toate bunatatile de care au parte. Am auzit ca acesti adolescenti au comis crime oribile si atat vreme cat se poarta frumos au parte de tot ce-si doresc. O duc chiar mai bine in inchisoare decat o faceau afara. Nu este normal. Stau si se joaca toata ziua. Este mai mult un loc de distractie, nu o inchisoare”, a marturisit britanica, noteaza “Mail Online”.

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