In a bit of a surprise, ATI is running working R520 silicon behind closed doors at their booth here at E3.
The R520, not the GPU in the upcoming Xbox 360 but rather the next-generation PC GPU, was running in an Intel PCIe system at ATI's booth.
The system was used to demonstrate Remedy's upcoming title called Alan Wake. The game itself was quite impressive, with an incredibly large and interactive environment, as well as some of the most impressive weather effects we'd ever seen.
Alan Wake is designed for the next-generation consoles (e.g. Xbox 360 and PS3), and thus wasn't running perfectly smoothly on the R520 but performance was quite respectable.
We aren't expecting to see the official R520 launch until later this year and not at Computex, based on information we've been hearing from Taiwan.
The fact that there is working R520 silicon at this point is important, as NVIDIA is sure to be talking quite a bit about their GF70 GPU at the show.
Unfortunately cameras weren't allowed in the Alan Wake demo room, so we couldn't capture the impressive demo or shots of the board running in the system.
We also received word that Prey, another title using the Doom 3 engine, may have also been running on R520 silicon.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
32 Comments
View All Comments
AnnihilatorX - Thursday, June 9, 2005 - link
#21Of course they would have port it to x86 first. Otherwise it would not run at all!
imaheadcase - Sunday, June 5, 2005 - link
www.alanwake.com will have link to a video showing some weather effects from in game. It looks freakin sweet!Murst - Friday, May 27, 2005 - link
When has a console beat a PC or a PC beat a console?I have never even seen benchmarks which directly compare the two (would be interesting if someone could set up similar hardware, but they prob can't).
Also, if they had an X2, they probably would have used one. Besides, how do you know what processor they used. All it said was intel pcie board. Intel has a few processors which fit that description. For all you know, they used some new chip from intel which is 10x as fast as the X2 (ok... its theoretically possible).
MDme - Sunday, May 22, 2005 - link
I agree...run the alan wake demo on a 4800+ or an FX-55/57 then with Ati520/GF70 Multi-GPU/SLI then we can make a conclusion if next gen consoles will beat upcoming gen PCs.Brian23 - Saturday, May 21, 2005 - link
One 1600x1200 32bit color frame takes up 7.68MB of memory. Iirc, the AA just a function performed on the frame it doesn't effect the size of the frame in memory.ElMoIsEviL - Saturday, May 21, 2005 - link
"1600x1200 4x AA frame"You're not sticking the whole frame. Only the AA data which is calculated on the same die as the memory in real time.
Basically the GPU core doesn't even calculate AA, it doesn't even know it's there. It's all done on the fly therefore you don't need a HUGE amount of memory in order to process the AA.
Basically COMPLETELY free AA.
Griswold - Friday, May 20, 2005 - link
#17I dont see any good reason to use embedded RAM on a PC vid card. Try sticking a 1600x1200 4x AA frame into lousy 10MB buffer (thats what the xbox gpu does with that RAM). Not gonna happen, it's too big. No idea what good it is on the consoles either since it will just limit the resolution and AA depth - or performance.
Dukemaster - Thursday, May 19, 2005 - link
''We aren't expecting to see the official R520 launch until later this year and not at Computex''Isn't Computex next month?
knitecrow - Thursday, May 19, 2005 - link
how does the R500 compare to R520 and previous gen cards? [in terms of performance]does anyone know?
Brian23 - Thursday, May 19, 2005 - link
I was confused there for a minute. I sat down to read the newest 3 articles on Anandtech and when I finished the one on Xbox 360, the R520 article had disapeard! I thought ATI had contacted Anandtech or something.