ATI has announced that it will unveil a high end surprise during the Texas Gaming Festival this weekend. Details of the surprise are a closely guarded secret but, as you would expect, everyone has a theory. The current favorite suggests that the Canadians will use the Texas event to reveal a new X850 512MB board.
One of the arguments for the 512MB board stems from the fact that ATI will be gathering the world's top overclockers at TGF. ATI will host the first-ever Overclocking Competition Event and it is expected that ATI will go for the world record. Given its current high end lineup the company couldn't really hope to get it but with new hardware and good overclockers it may be possible.
Further evidence for the 512MB theory comes from some benchmarks of the new board which have been released and seem to feature improvements in-line with memory increase.
If the theory does prove correct it would seem that this board will simply aim to keep benchmark sites busy as a memory increase is not the performance boost which ATI fans will be hoping for. It seems likely that boards with 512MB will remain flagship models since ATIs HyperMemory technology aims to bring boards with reduced on-board memory to the mainstream. Many will want to try out Doom 3 and enjoy the full might of its textures but most will probably decide to wait until the, expected, Q2 2005 launch of the R520.
The latest list of rumored specs for the R520 include :
24 Pipelines
700MHz Core
256-bit 512MB 1.8GHz GDDR3 Memory
57.6 GB/sec Bandwidth (at 1.8GHz)
32 Texture Units
96 Arithmetic Logic Units (ALU)
192 Shader Operations per Cycle
134.4 Billion Shader Operations per Second (at 700MHz)
300-350 Million Transistors
90nm Manufacturing
Shader Model 3.0
ATI HyperMemory
ATI Multi Rendering Technology (AMR)
Performance Improvement of 3X Over Radeon X800 XT
16x stochastic FSAA
FP32 blending, texturing
