We've barely scratched the surface of the little wonder that the RV770 is, but rest assured that we'll look into it in even greater detail throughout this day (be sure to check back at regular intervals as we push out the next articles), and in the coming weeks as we grow more familiar with the architecture. There are a few things left to touch upon before closing though:

• The presentations we've seen alluded to a very significant increase in Geometry Shader performance, and, more specifically, geometry amplification performance due to increased on-chip storage capacity for GS-generated data and supporting 4 times more threads in flight. We've done a bit of in-house testing and managed to get quantifiable GS performance increases. So that you can check for yourselves, here are some RightMark3D 2.0 Hyperlight numbers (the only publicly available test that has chances of actually being GS bound, by its use of amplification, in spite of the fact that it does far too much texturing for its own good-it's actually probably texture limited on the RV670). The both Geometry and GS load were set to high:

RV770 vs. RV670 Shader Performance

• GPGPU is an important emergent area of application and, dare we say, battleground. The RV770 brings significant increases here as well, but the subject itself deserves to be treated separately so we'll defer looking into GPGPU to a later date.

• Going by the wording in one of the presentations we have, the tessellation unit has been improved from the one included in the R600/RV670. This is yet hard to verify in practice, but stay tuned as new, interesting developments in this area are bound to happen far sooner than you'd expect (yes, games will start taking advantage of it, as surprising as it might seem to some)

• In another slightly unexpected move, ATi opted to implement a hardware solution for power management, based on an on-chip microcontroller that, going by the figures ATi quotes, does a rather great job. Check out the slide underneath for slightly more details:

Dynamic Power Management

This concludes our preliminary look at the RV770 architecture. There are many things left to say and find out (we hear Beyond3D's sexy overlord Rys might have a thing or two to say about the topic, so be sure not to miss that as Rys' work is always great). Later today we'll be showing you how all of these improvements pan-out in real life scenarios, and whether or not the 4850, the first RV770 representative that made it into the lab, is or isn't the little chip that could. Until then, we're going to leave you to look at what is referred to, in highly academic circles, as "geek porn":

RV770 Die Shot

Ready to enjoy the RV770 experience yourself? Don't miss on your chance to win a Radeon HD4850 Crossfire combo, sponsored by ATi!

Rage3D wishes to thank ATi's Scott Hartog, Dave Bauman, and the rest of the ATi Team for their support, without which this series of RV770 articles might never have come to fruition.