ATI have counter - attacked nVidia's claims of bandwidth supremacy for the upcoming GF FX, by giving astonishing figures, which they claim prove that the Radeon 9700 PRO is a better card altogether.
It all started when nVidia announced the FX chip and hinted at 48GB/s, ATI have now come back with 174.6 GB/s!!!!
The whole debate, as is usually the case, is based purely on theory but nonetheless, is interesting to follow and the essence of the bandwidth argument is simple, the more bandwidth the faster the card. But, much like in the AMD/Intel battle, the hard part is deciphering the numbers.
The magic word is compression, according to nVidia their compression, 3 to 1, manages to coax 48 GB/s out of the 16 GB/s the chip should actually be able to produce.
In come ATI to claim that their magnificent Z compression, delivers 8.8 to 1 compression and combined with their colour compression methods yields the amazing 174.6 GB/s.
As most of you can guess, these numbers, both nVidia's and ATI's cannot be taken at face value since they represent theoretical limits rather than practical ones. In practice the effective bandwidth of each card will depend on the data tranferred and on various other factors. The real values are probably a lot lower than that.
It is still useful to know the theoretical limits from both manufacturers however, so that we can better appreciate the probable limits of each chip.
