Quote[/b] ]"The latest graphic cards from nVIDIA and ATI, such as the GeForce 6800 and the X800 series, use 256-bit interfaces to reach peak memory bandwidths above 30 GB/sec. Other methods to increase this resource are bandwidth saving techniques, such as data compression.
What if you could use find a way to eliminate current graphic architectures' bottlenecks? Well, ATI has found a way to do so.
They have developed a solution that allows them to break the bandwidth constraint of 30GB/sec found in today’s graphic cards and achieve a stunning 256GB/sec bandwidth. Although the use of embedded DRAM for graphics is not something new, with a failed attempt by BitBoys and a successful implementation in the Nintendo GameCube, this is the first time that someone has used such a large amount of embedded DRAM in this innovative way.
The Xbox 360 graphics subsystem includes 10 MB of embedded DRAM GPU to use it as a frame buffer. By using this embedded RAM, which is similar to a processor's cache memory, the Xbox 360 will be able to run games at 720p (1280x720) and 1080i (1920x1080) HDTV resolutions with full screen anti-aliasing and almost no impact on framerate.
The Xbox 360 uses GDDR3 memory, which requires less power and runs cooler than previous memory types, running at 700 MHz with a memory interface bus that has a bandwidth of 22.4 GB/s. This memory is equally accessible to both the VPU and CPU, conforming what is known as unified memory architecture (UMA) configuration.
The polygon performance of the Xbox 360 is as high as 500 million triangles per second, which means the Xbox 360 can process aproximately 1.2 billion vertices per second. In comparison, the GeForce 6800 Ultra can process 600 million vertices per second. Want more numbers? The Xbox 360 has a pixel fillrate of 16 gigasamples per second using 4X multisampling anti-aliasing (MSAA) and a shader performance of 48 billion shader operations per second.
Finally, the overall system performance is equal to 1 teraflop; that is a trillion calculations per second."
