ATI's Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition GPU @ HEXUS

[chaoticone]

If you're talking about 3Dc, then yes, it's simply modified DXT5 texture compression designed to compress normals. Effective though and it looks like NVIDIA hardware will support it at some point in the driver using a pixel shader.

Rys

so in that case is that why they are faster in certain things than the nvidia , would they would not have been better changing from the fp24 to the fp32 ? , not meant to flame anything

[Rys]

FP32 support in the fragment shader (and elsewhere in the pipeline) requires totally new hardware on ATI's part. That's for their next generation. R420 is a Shader Model 2.0 part, which means FP24 in the fragment shader and a fat maximum instruction count for their new HLSL compiler target (basically).

They're faster in some things due to raw core speed (it's clocked some 120MHz higher than an Ultra) and more mature drivers/shader compiler.

Rys

[chaoticone]

that told me