Anandtech has spotted ATI's R300 GPU used @ VIA's booth to show off the AGP 8x capabilities of their upcoming KT400 chipset. According to their report the card only ran 3DMark2001 SE in demo mode with benchmarking beeing out of the question. Read more...
Given that the chip is already up and running and production is due soon we are beginning to wonder if the R300 will be made on a 0.13-micron process or if it will be 0.15-micron like its predecessor. If it is indeed a 0.15-micron chip then there is the question of whether ATI will make it a DX9 compliant part with full floating point pipelines. Assuming ATI does make the R300 as feature rich as NVIDIA's NV30 currently appears on paper, then there's the question of yield and clock speeds. It will be interesting to see the design choices ATI made with the R300 and how that effects competition with the NV30 later this year. The DDR SDRAM chips used on the 128MB R300 card were 2.86ns parts rated at 350MHz, thus you can assume an effective memory clock of 700MHz. It is also safe to assume that the R300 has a 256-bit memory bus much like the Parhelia-512 and 3DLabs P10 GPUs resulting in 22.4GB/s of raw memory bandwidth without taking any sort of occlusion culling technology into consideration. Granted that this isn't an indication of final shipping clock speeds but it should give you a ballpark figure to expect from R300.
Given that the chip is already up and running and production is due soon we are beginning to wonder if the R300 will be made on a 0.13-micron process or if it will be 0.15-micron like its predecessor. If it is indeed a 0.15-micron chip then there is the question of whether ATI will make it a DX9 compliant part with full floating point pipelines. Assuming ATI does make the R300 as feature rich as NVIDIA's NV30 currently appears on paper, then there's the question of yield and clock speeds. It will be interesting to see the design choices ATI made with the R300 and how that effects competition with the NV30 later this year. The DDR SDRAM chips used on the 128MB R300 card were 2.86ns parts rated at 350MHz, thus you can assume an effective memory clock of 700MHz. It is also safe to assume that the R300 has a 256-bit memory bus much like the Parhelia-512 and 3DLabs P10 GPUs resulting in 22.4GB/s of raw memory bandwidth without taking any sort of occlusion culling technology into consideration. Granted that this isn't an indication of final shipping clock speeds but it should give you a ballpark figure to expect from R300.
