by Anna Filatova
05/19/2005 | 09:18 PM
We have already mentioned the new graphics cards from Sapphire equipped with the new liquid metal cooling solution aka Blizzard in our news (see this news story for details). I would like to share a little bit more details about it with you here.
<%BANNER[article]%>So, this is the card, the monster with liquid gallium alloy inside its heatpipes:
Sapphire RADEON X850XT Blizzard engineering sample
As you can see, the card is equipped with two fans. Their rotation speed is controlled by ATI’s thermal diodes and depending on the VPU temperature they can rotate slower or faster. However, according to Sapphire, they provided their engineering solution with these fans for redundancy purposes only. The boards that will go in mass production will most likely have only one fan and ideally they are planning to see this design completely fanless. Also, as you can see, there is a 12V connector for the fans, which should go away on mass products: it will be replaced with the 5V plug that will go into one of the onboard 5V connectors.
Although the card looks quite massive and features dual-clot design, it is feels very light. Besides, it may shrink into a single-slot solution once the fans are removed from the card.
The first samples of this wonder card, which should provide impressive results (8-12oC lower chip temperatures), are expected in early Q3, and the actual retail products will start selling in August 2005 already.
I believe that overclocking fans can’t wait to get their hands on this baby. And in fact, I absolutely share their impatience. The guys at Sapphire shared some of their recent achievements with me: they managed to make their RADEON X850XT run at 650MHz chip frequency without any tricky voltage modifications. That is already quite impressive.
As far as the anticipated price point is concerned, I can say that the cooler itself should cost about $40-$60. Add here the price of the RADEON X850 series graphics card by that time and you will get the answer to this important question.
Well, it looks like water cooling solutions have now acquired a pretty promising competitor: relatively inexpensive, easy to mount, potentially noiseless and highly efficient, this is the first impression the new liquid metal cooling from NanoCoolers makes.
Besides this exciting graphics card, Sapphire was also showcasing some… boxes. :) You do know that Sapphire is partnering closely with ATI, and they will be offering not only graphics cards but also mainboards with MVPU support for both: Intel and AMD platform. The board on RADEON Xpress 200P chipset was actually shown life (not working though) with the RADEON Blizzard graphics card we have just discussed. It will be based on silver-white PCB and will have specifications close to the following:
The working samples of both Intel and AMD mainboards on ATI chipsets supporting MVPU technology will be available at Computex, so I hope I will be able to tell you more about them by then.
Besides, I thought you might find it interesting but Sapphire is going to expand its product range by going into the multimedia market. Pretty soon we will see Sapphire mp3 players, USB drives and many other nice accessories. I believe more news are to come during Computex as well.
As you remember from my last year’s E3 report, there was a Fatal1ty shoot-out event held at the ABIT booth. This time there was the entire Fatal1ty booth dedicated to gaming, where you could try yourself against the eternal winner, Jonathan “Fatal1ty” Wendel, or against other hardcore gamers.
On the first day of E3 there was a Counter Strike tournament held there. Despite everybody’s expectations, the team 3D won only the second prize, while the victory was taken by less known but very promising team Complexity. Today there was a WarCraft tournament. The winners of both tournaments will go to ACON 5 to compete against the best of the best. Good luck, guys!
ABIT, was certainly there, although it was pretty hard to spot the ABIT guys in this noisy crowd. :) Of course, they were showing their successful fatal1ty product like including the ABIT Fatal1ty AN8 mainboard that won the Editor’s Choice award on our site not so long ago (for details see our review called ABIT Fatal1ty AN8 mainboard on NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra Chipset: Built to Kill).
On the mainboard side I would also like to mention that beginning with the i955X series, ABIT will be equipping their boards with fanless cooling solutions. The new nForce4 mainboards will also be available in modifications with no fan, but a heatpipe instead. So, hardcore gamers will still have the opportunity to go for a noisier Fatal1ty series, while those users who value quietness, will definitely decide on a fanless board.
We have already got used to it I think, but VIA again was in the middle of licensing wars. If you have been following our News lately, then you should know all the details around the Pentium M bus license (see this story for details).
But this is not the only negotiation in progress. Since E3 is a gaming show, solutions for comfortable and pleasant game-play are the primary focus here. And certainly, cost-effective solutions for the mainstream users win quite a bit of attention. While ATI and NVIDIA keep advancing their dual-graphics card solutions and throw all their effort into this endless competition, VIA didn’t keep its hands in pockets as well. They already developed platforms for both of them. At the show they were demonstrating two running systems: for Intel and AMD platforms, of course. Both systems were working with dual graphics cards: one with two ATI cards, and another one with two NVIDIA cards. Let’s take a closer look at them.
The first system was built around the VIA PT880 Pro chipset and was equipped with two ATI graphics cards. Again, if you have been reading our News, you should remember something about the upcoming multi-VPU technology from ATI, which may be called CrossFire (see this News story for details about the trademark status). VIA claims that they will be offering a better value alternative to the upcoming ATI MVPU. According to VIA, any combination of a PCI Express and AGP 8x graphics cards will work just fine in a system with VIA PT880 Pro mainboard. This system will ideally support up to 4 monitors, and the newest chipset modifications will also support Intel dual-core processors, which means that they will be laid out taking into account the thermal and power requirements set by the new dual-core architecture from Intel. These chipsets are still going through validation process, but pretty soon VIA will be offering PT894 chipset with PCI Express support and its Pro version supporting dual PCI Express graphics cards.
VIA PT880 Pro based mainboard and two ATI graphics cards:
AGP + PCI Express
The other system displayed at VIA’s booth was the AMD Athlon 64 platform built around VIA K8T890 Pro chipset. It was equipped with the SLI graphics system built with two NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT based graphics cards.
VIA K8T890 Pro based mainboarde and NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT SLI
Of course, SLI is a very niche product, however, VIA believes that they could offer NVIDIA a good way of covering the mainstream and lower mainstream market segments as well. Right now the nForce4 mainboards are quite expensive, and combined with the price of the SLI kit, this brings us to the necessity to make a pretty significant investment. VIA claims that once they agree with NVIDIA they will be rolling out a much more affordable alternative for SLI. They will try to push the price of their “SLI” boards below the $120-limit, which is really attractive. They already have a few partners in their camp. Among them are ASUS, Gigabyte and a few second tier mainboard manufacturers.
So, I believe that during Computex I will be able to tell you more definite what’s going on with these platforms and how soon they are going to hit the streets in mass volume. Of course, we will do our best to offer you some detailed performance analysis by then, too :)
Well, E3 is about entertainment, and this includes not only gaming fun. Multimedia centers, advanced digital video, HDTV are also in focus of the hardware developers. VIA id going to have something for us here pretty soon. I am talking about the new chipset for media center and home entertainment type of systems – VIA K8M890, which should have quite a few improvements aimed at delivering high quality video and multimedia experience.
Of course, you are waiting for some hot stuff about the upcoming GF70 from NVIDIA or MVPU from ATI? I had the chance to see a demo system running with the upcoming R520 in it, so the presence of an actual card indicates the announcement might be just around the corner. Well, all I can say right now is that the guys are working on it and pretty soon we will be offering you quite a bit of exciting inside information on these.
But the desktop graphics is definitely not the only thing these companies are working on. The market of handheld devices is growing very rapidly and we have observed the ever increasing interest to it for quite a while now. Both major graphics chip developers cannot miss the opportunity to get a piece of this market by offering 3D solutions for cell phones, portable gaming consoles and other handheld devices.
ATI was demonstrating the first cell phone with real 3D in it. They were actually showing the first prototype of this piece during CES, but it has been much better polished off since then. The new LG cell phone equipped with the ATI ImageON graphics processor offered really high quality gaming experience. Take a look:
LG cell phone with 3D from ATI
Besides, you can enjoy playing some games with the active Gyro sensor, which allows you to turn, accelerate and break without hitting any buttons.
NVIDIA is trying not to fall behind here. They were showcasing their gaming on the Go solution aka Gizmondo, equipped with a new 3D 4500 chip. According to NVIDIA, it offers real 3D image quality at about 30 fps and supports brand name Powermizer power saving technology.
Gizmondo console with 3D from NVIDIA
The 3D 4500 chip is going to bring NVIDIA 3D graphics into the cell phones. Unfortunately, these phones will first appear in Europe and Asia, and hopefully after that in the US, if all goes well with them. I believe it will be a real treat for some “on the go gaming fans”. The only question that bothers many potential users is the following, though: how good the power saving technology they offer actually is, because no one would be happy if their phone just dies in the middle of some important conversation :)
The situation in the gaming console market can now be called a “perfect storm”: we had three major announcements within a short period of time (you cane read more about the announcements from Sony and Microsoft in our news), which inevitably pushed the market activity up. I am sure that if you are following the exciting news from the E3 show you couldn’t miss the Sony PlayStation 3 announcement. Sony developed this solution not only working closely with NVIDIA but also with Rambus, who offered their high-speed XDR technology to be implemented in the PS3.
Right now Rambus XDR provides the I/O bandwidth of 100GB/sec in and out, and the memory bandwidth of 25GB/sec, which seems to be just enough to satisfy the need for data. Modern transistors are so fast that in case of insufficient memory bandwidth the data cannot be delivered on time. This is where Rambus steps in with their high-speed XDR technology offering really high speed data transfer rates. As a result, cell processors supporting this technology are not starved for memory and processor-to-processor bandwidth. And they can potentially work at speeds no commercial processor has ever worked at.
Besides, the narrow high-speed interface developed by Rambus gives the opportunity to shrink the processor die tremendously. If you take a the combined die size of the processor and the graphics synthesizer in PlayStation one (these were two separate chips in those days) as a reference, then with the current level of technological advancement you will be able to shrink the die to only 1/6 of what it used to be. And since Sony is the lucky one here to have this technology at their disposal, it gives them truly long-term die shrink plan.
I had a really interesting discussion with Steven Woo from Rambus today, and he sounded very excited about the innovations in the console market. “This is the first show we can say we are really into PS3”, he said.
I am pretty sure that high-speed memory technologies offering super-high bandwidth and fast transfer rates will be demanded not only in the console market, but also in the PC market, and it might be an opportunity for solutions like XDR. I am sure you have already read this news story about the AGEIA physics processor. Now I would like to tell you a bit more about it.
The main goal of the PhysX processor designers is to give software developers more tools to include motion and create believable environments in the games. CPU cannot do what the GPU does in the system, so we see clear separation of functions. The same with physics. The creation of realistic physical effects and real-world gaming environment where the characters can interact with all objects is a pretty complicated task and requires a lot of resources. This is where the new PhysX processor steps in. It will be responsible for the following parts of the game, allowing the CPU and GPU have more resources for their needs. The mastermind behind the actual gameplay can be presented as a triangle, where each component has its own unique responsibilities:
These three points of focus are:
The PhysX based graphics cards are expected to become available in Q4 this year. ASUS is the primary partner interested in manufacturing physics boards so far. The chip will be manufactured with 0.13micron technology, and the 182sq.mm die will host 125 million transistors.
Speaking about the board design it is important to say that the boards will support PCI interface. Yes, the regular PCI. There are certainly marketing as well as technological reasons for that. First of all, far not all the mainboards out there come equipped with two PCI Express slots onboard, so since you will need a graphics card AND a physics card, you may simply have no PCI Express slot for the latter, but you will always have PCI. Besides, even if you have two PCI Express slots, you might want to have an SLI or any other dual graphics card solution running, which again means there would be no room for the physics board. That’s just one of the reasons. However, I am sure that sooner or later they will also switch to PCI Express, as it will allow much faster operation.
Here is what the card looks like so far:
PhysX based graphics card with 128MB GDDR3 memory onboard
There was a demo system with a dual-core Intel processor, ASUS mainboard, 1GB of RAM and a new PhysX based graphics card running, and I saw a few interesting demos showing “absolutely real world”. By this I mean that every single object in the scene was real and features physical characteristics which could change as a result of interaction between the objects. All changes of the gaming physics were performed in real time, i.e. the physical parameters were recalculated constantly.
To tell the truth this was the moment when it occurred to me how much more complicated the game developers’ task has actually become. Right no when you are playing some game, there are a few possibilities for you to act in each particular case, i.e. the game forces you to follow the preliminarily planned rout. If you hit against the wall, nothing will happen: you will just stand there facing the wall. And you can keep shooting the wall or hitting it with some weapon – nothing is going to happen, because the wall is not real, it is not meant to be real, it is not meant to be destroyed. And with the opportunities offered by the new PhysX processors you will be able to destroy this wall in a dozen possible ways: shoot through it, drive into it, throw something heavy, etc. So, say, you broke through it. And what’s then? And it means that there should be a new game scenario activated: the plot will differ, you will no longer follow the “correct” route, you will be on your own. And it means that the game developers should foresee all the possible scenarios, develop them in advance, ensure that you do not get into nothing. They should really create the entire (literally) gaming world, which would be much larger and much more complex than it ids now.
But let’s leave the decision about the level of physics to be implemented in new games to the game developers, especially since they seem to be pretty excited about the new technology offered by AGEIA. Among the companies which have already expressed vital interest in the new hardware are such big names as Epic Games, Ubisoft, and quite a few others.
The cards based on the new AGEIA PhysX processor will start sampling in Q3 2005, and when they appear in retail in Q4 their price is supposed to be between $249 and $299.