New MegaBrass™ GPU could be ‘7800GTX killer’, reports Alain Sucre
Stocks in both ATi and Nvidia fell dramatically today at the announcement that British company Amstrad was entering the graphics card business. Developed secretly at Tottenham Hotspur football club, the new Amstrad MegaBrass™ GPU takes an unusual approach. With just one pixel pipeline and half a vertex shader, the MegaBrass™ is hardly state of the art for graphics processors. But it’s designed to run at clock speeds in excess of 15GHz, which should make up the difference.
‘This is going to be even bigger than the e-m@iler™’, Amstrad head honcho Alan Sugar told us. ‘The MegaBrass™ will be the first GPU to accelerate S&M 4.0 natively. It will also support HDR, sRGB, S3TC, HDTV, RNIB, BSE and CJD. With one billion-bit floating point precision across the entire rendering pipeline, image quality will be unbeatable.’ The high visual quality is being marketed under the branding MegaBrasso ImagePolish™.
The MegaBrass™ will be available in two versions – the DSS22 and DSS28.1. A specially pre-overclocked Brown Sample version of the latter is also expected. Best of all, a multi-GPU architecture will allow up to 11 cards to be run in parallel. This looks like the most flexible implementation yet, with the user able to run cards in parallel across PCI Express, AGP, PCI and even ISA if available, although no ANR version has yet been announced.
‘What with S3 launching its ChromeS20 series and now Amstrad entering the fray, times are looking bleak for the incumbents’, ATi’s Public Relations Enforcer Andrew Banana told us. Nvidia’s Public Relations Dandy Adrian Stoat concurred: ‘We’re all doomed. The party’s over.’
Benchmarks – FEAR, 1,600 x 1,200 4x 8x, soft shadows
Nvidia GeForce 7800GTX – 1fps
ATi Radeon X1800XT – 1.2fps
Amstrad MegaBrass™ Brown Sample – 4fps
11 x MegaBrassTR Brown Sample – 458fps
All tests run on an Amstrad PCW8256; 3.4MHz Z80, 256KB of RAM
The MegaBrass™ will be available in two versions – the DSS22 and DSS28.1. A specially pre-overclocked Brown Sample version of the latter is also expected. Best of all, a multi-GPU architecture will allow up to 11 cards to be run in parallel. This looks like the most flexible implementation yet, with the user able to run cards in parallel across PCI Express, AGP, PCI and even ISA if available, although no ANR version has yet been announced.
‘What with S3 launching its ChromeS20 series and now Amstrad entering the fray, times are looking bleak for the incumbents’, ATi’s Public Relations Enforcer Andrew Banana told us. Nvidia’s Public Relations Dandy Adrian Stoat concurred: ‘We’re all doomed. The party’s over.’
Benchmarks – FEAR, 1,600 x 1,200 4x 8x, soft shadows
Nvidia GeForce 7800GTX – 1fps
ATi Radeon X1800XT – 1.2fps
Amstrad MegaBrass™ Brown Sample – 4fps
11 x MegaBrassTR Brown Sample – 458fps
All tests run on an Amstrad PCW8256; 3.4MHz Z80, 256KB of RAM
No comments:
Post a Comment