ATI on its way back?

[Guest jahman]

>What's a TMU?TMU - Texture Mapping Unit, the GPU component responsible for poor performance rendering clouds in the ATI Radeon HD 3800 series.Cheers,- jahman.

[Guest jahman]

>>They fixed the TMU issue with the 3xxx cards which>>is why they were choking to death in heavy weather.>>>You mean they fixed the TMU issue for the 3xxx cards>(driver fix), or only for the 4xxx (hardware fix)?>>Do you have any additional info (e.g. URL)?>>Thanks for the clarification.>>Cheers,>>-jahman.Love answering my own questions...According to THG article "(First Look) AMD/ATI RadeonHD 4870" at (nice preview pics!):http://www.tomshardware.tw/574,news-574.htmlThe ATI Radeon 4800 specs are:Radeon HD Units 4870X2* 4870 4850 3870----------------- -------- ------ ----- ----- -----Transistors million 1,930 965 965 666Process nm 55 55 55 55Stream Processors 1,600 800 800 320Texture Units TMUs 80 40 40 16Render Back-Ends 32 16 16 16Core Clock MHz 750 750 625 775Memory Type GDDR 5 5 3 4Memory Clock MHz 900 900 1,000 1,125Memory Rate Gbps ? 3.6 2.0 2.25Math (+ and x) TeraFLOP 2.4 1.2 1.0 0.497* NOTE: The HD4870X2 specs are my *2x extrapolation* of the 4870 specs!So the improvement in 3870 vs. 4870 cloud handling would bedue to an increase in TMUs from 16 to 40 (a 2.5x increase!)Cheers,jahman.

[Guest Nick_N]

TMU's are hardware however they can be limited by the manufacturethe 38xx series cards only have 12-16 as I recall and the 4xxx series will have 32

[Ray Proudfoot 8,905]

Thanks!