R500 to be ready at end of Q1 2005
Xbox 2 chip
By Fuad Abazovic in Wien: Tuesday 28 September 2004, 14:15
THE NEXT GENERATION Xbox chip will be ready as soon as the end of the first quarter of next year.
This chip comes as a derivatove of the R520 chip better known under its code name Fudo and will be of a similar architecture to the upcoming desktop chip. The only main difference will be an integrated frame buffer that you dont see that often on desktop cards.
At this time, sources said the Xbox 2 development kit includes a 9800XT card and platform and you can only achieve five to 10 FPS with Xbox 2 working titles.
Thats why a full developer's kit will be available in late Q1 2005. This kit will include the flagship R500 chip that will give the right measure of graphics performance.
From an aarchitectural point of view, we are talking about at least 16 pipelines powered by two TMUs (Texture Memory Units) which roughly give you twice as much power as the current X800 generation of cards that have only one TMU. This will occur only in multitexture games but nowadays all games use more then one texture per pass.
If Xbox games works at 60 FPS you can imagine that R500 will end up more then six times faster then Radeon 9800. R500 looks like a heck of a good chip to me so does Fudo - R520 I guess. µ
