ATI’s Future Drivers to Take Advantage of Dual-Core Chips

[dangel]

...and now ATI follows nVidia's announcement..

"ATI Technologies recently said at press-conference that in several month time the company’s drivers for graphics cards would take advantage of dual-core microprocessors. The move will allow users of systems running chips with two engines to get higher performance in games."

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/d...011083359.html

Going to be a longer wait tho by the sounds of it..

"According to estimations of both ATI and NVIDIA, performance boost for dual-core chips may be in the range of up to 30%."

[shaithis]

Several months? Perhaps they would have done better to wait a bit longer before announcing a small change will be completed around the middle of next year.........

[kempez]

Another great move by thet ATI press department.

Is there anything they can do without hyping it up first?

[Octavean]

"According to estimations of both ATI and NVIDIA, performance boost for dual-core chips may be in the range of up to 30%."

It sounds like a best case situation and rather provisional. I’m guessing that most of the time 30% will not be realized. I’d also wager that beta drivers will be leaked before ATI finalizes their first official release therefor the wait may not be as long as expected.

Anyway, it’s nice to hear. I just got my Athlon 64 X2 3800+ in the mail yesterday.

[dangel]

The wording is misleading - i think it's a peak increase and not linear. For example, if you have a slower dual core (in terms of clock speed) distributing the processing may give you much larger increases than, say, a faster clocked dual core - simply because you've increased your overall processor headroom by making use of the second core on a cpu-limited system.
I'd expect 'generalised' increases for dual core to be smaller (but worth having nonetheless).

[Octavean]

Indeed,...an increase is after all,...an increase.

I’ll take it and be happy for it.