ATI : R480 and SLI-Like

According to the Italian website Hardware Upgrade, ATI should release improved versions of the current Radeon X800 the first of December. Also according to the same source, all chips will be based on the 110 nm R480 chip. The following versions are announced:

- R480 XT Platinum Edition : 16 pipelines, 540/590 MHz
- R480 XT : 16 pipelines, 520/540 MHz
- R480 Pro : 12 pipelines, 520/540 MHz

Here are the previous versions :

- Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition : 16 pipelines, 520/560 MHz
- Radeon X800 XT: 16 pipelines, 500/500 MHz
- Radeon X800 Pro: 12 pipelines, 475/450 MHz

Frequency gain aren’t impressive: : 3.8 to 5.4% for the XT PE, 4 to 8% for the XT. The most important performance gain is for the Pro version: 9.5% for the frequency and 20% for the memory. It is logical because ATI needs to improve this graphic card performances to compete with the NVIDIA 6800GT. The rumour, however, mentioned a R480 with a 130 nm fabrication process, so we will have to check this information reliability. Functionalities should remain identical.

Hardware Upgrade, also mention the AMR: ATI Multi Rendering. This technology should be ATI’s answer to NVIDIA’s SLI, but would be more flexible. This technology would work with any ATI PCI Express cards and would not require two identical cards. No additional connector will be required and the two cards will communicate via the two PCI Express x8 slots included in the future motherboards equipped with ATI’s chipsets. So will this solution will be as efficient as NVIDIA’s SLI in practice…