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Both cards use DDR1 ram, running at 310mhz(620) on the Radeon and 325mhz(650mhz) in nVidia's case. The difference is that ATi use a 256bit pipeline unlike the ti4600's 128bit pipeline. This means theoretically almost DOUBLE the bandwidth is available to the Radeon. Since the launch of the original radeon the throne of performance king has been very close between ATi and nVidia, continually battling for pride of place in the performance users desktop. Once again we find ourselves in this situation but this time the question on everyones mind is which card will be the card to buy at christmas? Today, I have an ATi Radeon 9700 Pro and an nVidia ti4600 reference card. The first thing that struck me as different from their predecessors is the exclusion of RAM sinks. This is due to moving over to the tinyBGA format. These give off a lot less heat that the old variety and of course let us achieve a faster speed. One of the other reasons for excluding ramsinks is in the design of the heatsinks. In theory they both move air across the RAM, in nVidia's case more so due to the shrouding over the sink. The problem with this design is assumes that there is adequate case cooling for the rear ram chips - this is not always the case. The ATi Radeon card uses Flip-Chip technology which has only just been adopted by nVidia in their new Geforce FX cards. Both the ti4600 and Radeon still use the .15micron process with a 256bit architecture. They also both run at similar clock speeds, 325mhz for ATi and 300mhz for nVidia. The difference between these cards that lets the Radeon shine is the RAM. Both cards use DDR1 ram, running at 310mhz(620) on the Radeon and 325mhz(650mhz) in nVidia's case. The difference is that ATi use a 256bit pipeline unlike the ti4600's 128bit pipeline. This means theoretically almost DOUBLE the bandwidth is available to the Radeon. The Radeon is also the first card to be fully DirectX 9 compatible sporting Pixel and Vertex Shaders also used in the Mobility Radeon 9000. And just starting to come into play with the new 8x AGP boards, is of course - AGP 8x compatibility.
Category: Computer Hardware, Software and Peripherals
Type: Glossaries and Dictionaries
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