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?

[rrhal]

By that logic wouldn't those same people then wait for AMD's next offering which will be yet faster? Waiting for the latest and greatest means there will always be something greater in the pipeline to wait for. How long before we saturate the PCI-E bus and need something faster? The current bus structure is about as old as AGP was when it lost favor.

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

They have admitted those 2 games were programmed by monkeys.

If you compare a 4850 from then to a 4850 today with the game fully patched and monkey shit removed you'd see an increase in frame rates. Or compared it to the squeal which had even more monkey shit removed there would be a further increase in frame rates.

Besides the fact that 2 games, that received crap reviews except from the "Oh so pretty" crowd do not represent the market.

Re:When's it coming out?

[Pojut]

When the differences are minute to the point where you have to pause a Gametrailers video and lean in close to your monitor, they may as well be the same...you aren't going to see that during actual gameplay, ESPECIALLY not in a frantic shooter like MW2.

That being said, there is one consistant difference between the 360 and the PS3 in terms of image quality: the 360 tends to be a little washed out, and the PS3 tends to be a little dark. Thank goodness for auto-switching color profiles based on the input selected.

Re:When's it coming out?

[SecondaryOak]

It's true that a few years ago you had to stay close to the cutting edge and now you don't; but I'm pretty sure it's not because graphics cards had outpaced games, but because game developers slowed their pace because they wanted good performance on consoles.

I'm sure game developers could easily overwhelm graphics cards if they wanted to, but that doesn't only block PCs without high-end cards, but also all the consoles. I have to say that as a PC-only gamer, I find the situation very positive. I like not having to upgrade constantly.

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.

Feh.

[Pojut]

The days of needing the biggest, fastest, most expensive card are pretty much over. You can run just about any game out there at max settings at 1920 X 1080 silky smooth with a 5870, which goes for less than $300. Hell, even the 4870 is still almost overkill.

Unless you plan on maxing out AA and AF while playing on a 30 inch screen, there is no reason to drop $500-$600 on a video card anymore...

Re:Feh.

[Knara]

Almost as if Nvidia were looking at some other market than gamers....

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.