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Nvidia 480-Core Graphics Card Approaches 2 Teraflops
An anonymous reader writes "At CES, Nvidia has announced a graphics card with 480 cores that can crank up performance to reach close to 2 teraflops. The company's GTX 295 graphics cards has two GPUs with 240 cores each that can execute graphics and other computing tasks like video processing. The card delivers 1.788 teraflops of performance, which Nvidia claims is the fastest single graphics card in the market."
No, seriously... can anything run it at full options yet?
Tibbon
tibbon.com
1.21 Jiggawatts
Yet again, Nvidia showed ATI that it, indeed, has the biggest penis.
That's just great and all but when can I get a video card that doesn't take up half my case and melts down after 6 months of use? Not to mention, doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
Color me doubtful but I suspect it's 480 stream processors which isn't anywhere NEAR the same thing as the "cores" on the CPU or even the core of the GPU.
Why has the press suddenly started to call stream processors "cores"? Marketing?
I can run Crysis/Warhead at 30fps maxed out at 720p. I have a single 4850.
The problem with video card review is they don't bother testing anything lower than 1920x1080 which is 2.25x bigger than 720.
Crysis takes a lot to run but it has already been tamed as long as you aren't running at 2560x1600 or some other absurd resolution.
218 GFlops
http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT072405191325&p=2
A single 8800 kill the cell and the video processor in the ps3 combined
One of the benefits of the technology war is that it produces good midrange and low end technology as well. This is particularly true in the case of graphics cards since they are so parallel. They more or less just lop off some of the execution units and maybe slow down the clock and you get a budget card.
Whatever your budget is, there's probably a good card available at that level. Now will it be as fast as the GTX 295? Of course not. However they'll be as fast as they can be at that price/power consumption point.
Don't pitch because some people need/want high end cards. Enjoy the fact that they help subsidize you getting good, cheap midrange cards.
If you want serious suggestions, tell me your budget range and what you want to do and I'll recommend some cards.
with CPUs anymore? I'm just going to fill a case with graphics cards and call it a day.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
... for Windows 7 (or whatever they call Vista now).
Yeah, but you'll need all that power to run Windows 8
What the fuck are you smoking? It's a $500 card.
The specs are very specific (lol, get it?).
I take it you havn't seen full-length graphics cards yet? 280's, 8800 GTX's, GX2's, etc, aren't full length cards, but they're close.
These are full length cards: http://management.cadalyst.com/cadman/Review/AMD-ATI-FireGL-V8600-and-FireGL-V8650-Graphics-Car/ArticleStandard/Article/detail/526886?contextCategoryId=6631
You can tell the difference by them not only being longer, but having that retention connector at the end (right side of the pictures) which helps steady the card.
Can someone please post the link to a how-to guide for convincing your wife/girlfriend of the necessity of owning a graphics card with dual 240-core GPUs? Or, if you are a girl who acknowledges said necessity without a fight, please post a link to your Facebook profile. Thank you in advance.
61C on a video card isn't much to worry about. Using RivaTuner I used to watch an 8800gts creep up to 90C and it never died. Unfortunately, taking comfort in knowing your video cards won't get cooked isn't very useful when you're worried about the other nearby devices. For what it's worth my old temps were in an antec sonataII case. When I switched over to the antec 900 my 8800gts temps dropped to the 55-60C range. Maybe a new case is the aftermarket part you're looking for?
Apart from, you know, link length.
The most important thing to understand is that these aren't actually 'cores' in the same sense that your Core 2 Duo has two of them. They're shader units. It works more like SIMD than parallelization, only instead of something like SSE that can perform a single operation per clock across 4 packed floating point values it performs the operation on thousands of them.
If they could slap a billion or a million or even a thousand shader units on a card without actually reducing performance they would, but they can't. At a certain point the bottleneck becomes link length. You can overcome it by increasing voltage but then heat becomes the issue. This is a large part of the reason transistor count is tied to transistor size. NVIDIA isn't "failing" in this respect, they're just succumbing to the laws of physics.
If they could improve performance by slapping 20 or 4 or even 2 of the *actual* cores on each card they would, but they can't. Because it's not an actual processor, it doesn't have fancy features like three levels of cache and a TLB and branch prediction and out-of-order execution. But even if they were engineered to work this way, you can't improve PC performance by slapping in a thousand Core 2 Quads either. A part of the reason Xeons have so much cache is so you can mitigate the penalty of having 8 processors using commodity RAM, but eventually you run up against that bottleneck. Shared resources become saturated much faster than most people expect.
The most efficient way of improving graphics performance is with SLI because you are replicating all of the hardware, the memory and the bus the *actual* core depends on. For the exact same reason, you can extract the most performance out of each CPU core by putting each one in a different machine.
I'm an old gamer starting off both an Atari 2600 and a 286 with CGA graphics. I've played just about everything in between then and now. Currently, I enjoy gaming on my PS3 and PC loaded with 8GB RAM, Quad Core with nVidia 8800GT card.
The whole PC vs. Console war is just dumb. Anyone that relates to me will tell you that a PC has the potential to be the best platform, but the games are coded to be open ended (review the plethora of video, graphics, input and audio option settings to choose from) to capture the largest market share. A console will run with inferior spec when compared to a high-end PC, but it has been tuned and optimized just for that platform. Without question, the moment you play a console game, it will run as expected and designed for.
So, which platform *is* better? Depends on a lot of things. Will that latest game run on your PC to your own satisfaction? Or do you prefer games where it will run flawless on both your console and everyone else's; thus leveling the playing field?
Life is not for the lazy.
Compare this to the Radeon 4870 X2 : 2 55nm RV770 GPUs on the same PCB connected by a PCIe bridge although the card has a "Crossfire X Sideport" interlink ( which I think is Hypertransport, although I may be wrong ) that directly connects the two GPUs, which isn't enabled in their drivers at the moment. (you can see it on the PCB -- a set of horizontal traces directly linking both GPUs ) One might wonder if they've delayed enabling the direct link because they knew Nvidia would respond this way.
Anyway, it's always great when two companies battle it out, as the consumer always wins.
jdb2
Hey now this man speaks the truth albeit with a poor choice of words, to use an alternative but equally popular automotive analogy, I may attach a PCIE connector to my car but that does not therefore mean that my car is suitable for operation inside a standard computer case much less plugged into an actual PCIE slot.
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
Not even close. A single ATI HD4870X2 card has 2.4 TFLOPS or processing power: 2 (instr/clock with MAD) * 800 (Streaming Processors) * 750 (MHz) * 2 (GPUs) = 2.4 TFLOPS.
http://hothardware.com/Articles/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-295-Unleashed/
Until NVIDIA starts supporting the development of open source drivers I'm sticking with ATI, no matter how many Blazing Cores of Might NVIDIA might fit onto their chips. While ATI's closed source drivers have their fair share of bugs, and it will be some time before there are good 3D open source drivers for their more recent cards, at least the development has started and ATI has been aiding it, not hobbling it.
Most likely your HVAC unit has a heat pump and not just a resistance heater. If so, it pulls heat in from the outside. They usually have a CoP of between 2-3 which means that for every kWh of electricity used it puts between 2-3 kWh of heat in the house. If you use just a resistance heater, though, then you might as well run your computer.
I'll do one better.
Case = bullshit $20 wonderjob at a pawn shop.
PSU - 700w Rocketfish for 70 bucks.
mobo/CPU combo - PC Chips with dual-core AMD Athlon64 X2 5200+ - 60 bucks
RAM - 4GB cheapo RAM - 20 bucks from craigslist.
GPU - 512MB 9800GTX+ - 175 from pricewatch.
Hard Drive - 80GB 7200RPM WD - FREE from craigslist, complete with porn!
Optical drive - DAEMON TOOLS, but I've found the one in my machine for 10 bucks
OS License - XP Pro - 100.
455 bucks, Crysis at 1920x1080 at high settings. I get very few framerate issues, in fact I only got them during the battleship invasion part of the game.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I mean seriously, as long as they don't publish the hardware specifications so you can write your own software for it, it's preety much useless. The only thing you can do with it is play games. And even then you have to fear every little software update as it might trigger some bug in the binary only drivers the manufacturer provides.
Learning how to put these CUDA cores to work for more than games is a great new opportunity because each new NVIDIA card has more of these resources. Unfortunately this seems to be rocket science and just because engineers can build these boards doesn't mean that the software community is ready or able to design software that benefits from this architecture. When they do, things will get very interesting. Hardware people decided to go multicore because it was getting harder to go faster with uni-core processors. Software people got told they would have to write a different kind of software to stay competitive, and this area will be very important in the future. Actually it is right now. I noticed Dell is pushing 2.5 GHz quad core machines with six gigs of memory at Costco. I don't know how much of the contemporary software can properly utilize these cores, but time will tell. As the programming languages get built-in support for multi-core programming, things will improve. I noticed there is some nice support in Python.
A part of the software design process is how to break up the main application into the different components. With multi-threading, the design needs to figure out what can be handled in a different thread, and if having a different thread for that function is worth the code administration needed to tie things all together.
Remember, it is fairly easy to make a different thread and have it do what you want it to do. The difficulty is in how to tie the different threads together to make the application work as expected.