HD 2900 XT (R600) Review Sammlethread

Zitat

Obviously the industry is in transition from DX9 to DX10. How much did that impact the design, and how would you expect those tradeoffs to manifest over the lifetime of the R6 family?

What a question! DX10 basically decided everything in the R600. We kept DX9 in mind, and certainly wanted to make a great DX9 part and did (basically, we are generally 1.5 to 2x the performance of our previous high end part in DX9). But we focused all the new hardware on the DX10 feature set, and we believe we have a great part here. Regretfully, not only do we need a great part (which we have), we also need a whole new driver for DX10. This means that our system is a little green yet still on DX10, but I expect only greatness over the coming months and years for this part, in DX10.

[...]Lastly, as you look around the web at reaction to the R6 family. . .are there any specific aspects to the design that you feel have been particularly misunderstood or not emphasised to the degree they deserve?

I can’t help but be a little disappointed that we did not have enough time to get more optimizations into our drivers in time for the launch. I still cringe when I see poor performance (especially if it’s compared, to, say, our previous generation products), and send daily emails to the performance and driver team, begging for this or that. In fact, I do believe that they all hate me now. They should join the club.

Also, on the feature side, we weren’t able to expose the adaptive edge detect CFAA modes to the public, or even to the press, until very late in the review process. This means that most reviewers did not have a chance to look at the amazing quality this mode offers – There is nothing comparable to it out there.

We also had some last minute performance possibilities, which is always incompatible with stability, and we did not have enough time to get those tested and integrated in time for launch. We see in the latest driver, some 2x to 3x improvement in adaptive AA performance, for example, which is great but came later than I would have liked. But, I’ll admit, there’s so much to do still, that I haven’t really spent that much time on reviews and such. The reality is that I expect things to continue to improve and be much better in a few months.