Nvidia's DX11 GF100 Graphics Processor Detailed

J. Dzhugashvili writes "While it's played up the general-purpose computing prowess of its next-gen GPU architecture, Nvidia has talked little about Fermi's graphics capabilities — to the extent that some accuse Nvidia of turning its back on PC gaming. Not so, says The Tech Report in a detailed architectural overview of the GF100, the first Fermi-based consumer graphics processor. Alongside a wealth of technical information, the article includes enlightening estimates and direct comparisons with AMD's Radeon HD 5870. The GF100 will be up to twice as fast as the GeForce GTX 285, the author reckons, but the gap with the Radeon HD 5870 should be 'a bit more slender.' Still, Nvidia may have the fastest consumer GPU ever on its hands — and far from forsaking games, Fermi has been built as a graphics processor first and foremost."

Comments

When's it coming out?

[Ant P.]

There's no point bragging about being faster than last month's graphics card if your own is still a quarter of a year from being an actual product.

Re:When's it coming out?

[Pojut]

I'm gonna have to disagree with you there.

Look at the 4850. When it was brand new, it cost $199, and it could run ANY game on the market at full resolution and detail with a smooth, sustained framerate. Flash back to the year 2000. Try to find me a $200 card back then that could do the same. Hell, I challange you to do the same thing just 5 years ago, back in 2004.

Good luck.

Re:When's it coming out?

[Pojut]

As a poster previously in the thread stated, a big part of it are games that need to work on consoles and PC. As an example, considering the 360 has a video card roughly equivalent to a 6600GT, there is only so far they can push ports. Hell, even now, 3-4 years into the current gen, there are STILL framerate problems with a lot of games...games that can now run at an absurdly high FPS on a decent gaming PC.

Re:When's it coming out?

[MartinSchou]

Look at the 4850. When it was brand new, it cost $199, and it could run ANY game on the market at full resolution and detail with a smooth, sustained framerate

Pull the other one. It has got bells on it.

Define "full resolution".

If I have a very old 1280x1024 monitor, sure.
If I have a new 1920x1200 monitor, not so much.
If I have a dual 2560x1600 monitor setup, not in this life time.

Also, define "full detail". Is that at medium? High? Maximum? What level of anisotropic filtering? Anti aliasing?

But let's have a look at something a bit realistic and look at "any game", in this case Crysis.

From [H]ard|OCP's review of the 4850 from June 25th, 2008:

Highest Playable Resolution:
1600x1200
No AA | 16x AF

Minimum FPS: 16
Maximum FPS: 42
Average FPS: 28.5

Considering that the Radeon 4870 and Geforce GTX 260 have their highest playable at 1920x1200, I'd say you're flat out wrong in your claim.

Now, you may claim that Crysis doesn't count as it's not "ANY game on the market", so let's use Age of Conan instead:
Woops, that one seems to hit its limit at 1600x1200.

That was my rather convoluted way of saying "you're an idiot".

Re:When's it coming out?

[non0score]

The 360 and PS3 are practically identical.

The PS3 and 360 PPC elements are identical, yes. But the rest aren't. The SPUs are vastly different to the PPEs ranging from the ISA, to the memory architecture, to the instruction latencies, to the register file size/width, to the local memory latencies, to the...oh boy, they're vastly different on so many levels. I also don't know how those TFLOP numbers came about, because they're totally wrong.

Comparing GTAIV on the 360 vs the PS3, the 360 looks like it's running in 16-bit color depth, shadows are absolutely horrible, and the draw distance isn't even on par with the PS3.

Using GTA to compare the graphics hardware and concluding that PS3 is better? I just hope you don't mention that to the devs, because they'll laugh their ass off about how wrong that comment is.

the PS3 has 256MB of GDDR3 for their GPU, and the 256MB of XDR DESTROYS the 512MB of GDDR3 that the 360 uses for system memory (For one GDDR3 isn't meant to be used as main system memory, XDR is.)

On the XDR front, I don't know how it destroys the GDDR3. Both are pieces of memory and they're just there to support reads and writes. As long as they have the bandwidth, size, and low latency, that's all that really matters to devs (obviously, devs shouldn't have to worry about signal integrity and what not here).

PS3 stomps the 360. The 360 is by far inferior, it's locked down, and it burns itself out more often than not.

And the slim isn't locked down? But true, the original PS3 doesn't burn itself out more than the original 360.

Re:Feh.

[Kratisto]

I think this is largely because consoles set the pace for hardware upgrades. If you want to develop a multi-platform game, then it's going to need to run on XBox 360 hardware from four years ago. I don't even check recommended requirements anymore: I know that if it has a 360 or PS3 port (or the other way around), I can run it.

Re:Feh.

[Pojut]

Mostly agreed, however I will take a low-to-mid range CPU if it means I can afford a top of the line GPU...when it comes to gaming, anyway.

The GPU is a much larger bottleneck in terms of gaming, although the line of importance between the GPU and CPU has been blurring a bit lately.

40nm process...

[Sollord]

Isn't this going to be built on the same TSMC process as the 5870? The same one that's having yield problems and supply shortages for AMD and yet the nvidia chip is even bigger and more complex chip? I for see delays.