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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Offers 2,304 Cores For $650
Vigile writes "When NVIDIA released the GTX Titan in February, it was the first consumer graphics card to use the GK110 GPU from NVIDIA that included 2,688 CUDA cores / shaders and an impressive 6GB of GDDR5 frame buffer. However, it also had a $1000 price tag that was the limiting specification for most gamers. With today's release of the GeForce GTX 780 they are hoping to utilize more of the GK110 silicon they are getting from TSMC while offering a lower cost version with performance within spitting range. The GTX 780 uses the same chip but disables a handful more compute units to bring the shader count down to 2,304 — still an impressive bump over the 1,536 of the GTX 680. The 384-bit memory bus remains though the frame buffer is cut in half to 3GB. Overall, the performance of the new card sits squarely between the GTX Titan ($1000) and AMD's Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition ($439), just like its price. The question is, are PC gamers willing to shell out $220+ dollars MORE than the HD 7970 for somewhere in the range of 15-25% more performance?" As you might guess, there's similarly spec-laden coverage at lots of other sites, including Tom's, ExtremeTech, and TechReport. HotHardware, too.
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I must have crossed the border into adulthood somewhere back there because I would never pay that much for a performance uptick in a video game. I can get myself a nice new laptop for that cash, and it would be still be proficient at 90% of today's games.
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Is anyone else getting real tired of companies purposely crippling their high end products in order to sell them for less money? It's like openly broadcasting that their cards cost way too much to begin with.
It's a question of tolerances. The chips that come out of the fab are not 100% perfect. The designs are amazingly complex, and they usually contain some defects in the manufacturing process. If they don't meet the high-end specs, maybe they can disable the broken cores, relabel it as a mid-range chip, and sell for less money. It allows the yield to be higher and it lowers the price for ALL of the products.
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Implementation trumps architecture. There's a reason nobody who's interested in power efficiency, noise and/or heat uses AMD products.
While this does happen it is also a way for them to increase the yield of the chips. These are huge chips they are building and the chances of bad cores on the die is rather high. So instead of junking the chips with bad cores since they cannot be sold as the ultimate high end, they create a cheaper product with cores disabled. Not all disabled cores will be bad but this does help them improve manufacturing efficiency. Also, they might have serious manufacturing issues producing these huge chips so it might cost them an arm and a leg to build them right now. So they set the price abnormally high to control the demand until they can iron out the manufacturing issues and improve the yield.
They seem to be using the terms Cores and Shaders interchangeably. is a Shader a core ?
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If this was a previous generation where AMD was actually still competitive, Titan would have been the high end part, and it would have cost $500 instead of $1000. The part known as GTX 780 would have been a slightly depopulated part capable of 90% the performance for a 20% savings or so and the rest of the line would have fallen under those two. Since AMD is no longer really a threat in the high-end GPU space, Nvidia can literally maintain the MSRPs of the old parts as if the new parts are merely higher performing extensions of the previous generation without any downward pricing pressure on anything.
Noise? Wouldn't that just depend on which manufacturer packages the AMD GPU?
In GPU terms, yes. The shaders and cores are very different between AMD and NVIDIA (that's why AMD can have 1536 and compete with a HD 7970 with 2048 shaders).
Anything more the $250, and it's likely you won't find any game out there that can't be played well with a $250 card.
I am so glad that I grew up in the 3dFX Voodoo days for my gaming. The cards were relatively cheap, and spending $200 on one seemed like a huge sum of money. Like, this-is-your-only-Christmas-present money.
Upwards of $1000 for a consumer-grade video card? I've spent less on road-worthy vehicles.
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As long as Nvidia keeps crippling double-precision performance on their (non-Tesla) cards, I'll keep buying AMD.
One of the highlights of the GTX Titan was that the card did double-precision floating point at full speed, just like one of Nvidia's Tesla products. That's no longer the case here - the GTX 780 performs double-precision at 1/24 of normal rate, just like a standard desktop GPU.
Does AMD support VDPAU these days? Because VA-API support is mighty poor in my experience. Broke down and bought a card when I had a perfectly find integrated one for my TV box because I can't get VA-API to work with mplayer. There is a source version that supports it, I couldn't get it to compile cleanly, though.
I also had a ton of trouble with the "legacy" vs new ATI drivers (the computer was low end, but only a few months old when this nonsense happened). Not sure what caused that split, but it was hell to get working on Ubuntu. Left a bad taste in my mouth all around. Think they resolved it, but it was just yet another barrier between me and what is normally a flawless experience.
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Pretty much seems like the entire point of this site. News for nerds...did we as nerds stop caring about hardware suddenly? I was not included in this memo.
Alternate description: "Nvidia lowers the cost of standard desktop GPUs by not including features for high-speed high-accuracy functions that serve no purpose in gaming".
Nope. The NVIDIA GK110 has in it's design 16 clusters of 192 CUDA cores. And on the Titan, any two of those clusters may be defective and are turned off giving you a total of 2688 CUDA cores. In my opinion, that's a nice way of increasing their usable yield. On the GTX 780, they can have 4 defective clusters giving a total of 2304 CUDA cores. So chips that they would otherwise trash can still be used in a nice high end card. Isn't redundancy in design nice?
Intel doesn't currently disable cores in their CPUs to create lower-grade chips. They do speed grading however, and they may do cache disabling - if they do it would be because some of the cache fails testing. They did more of that sort of thing in the past; your FPU-less 486SX was likely to be a 486DX die with a defective FPU. AMD does disable CPU cores. That's where the 3-core Phenoms came from, and where the 6-core FX comes from now. I believe the 4 core FX is normally a separate design but some may be 8-core die with half the chip turned off; the end user gets the same performance either way. As others have already pointed out, this kind of thing has been standard business practice in graphics for many years. The down-spec chips may have out-and-out defective portions, or they may fail to meet their power and heat specifications if everything is turned on. Or they may be perfectly good chips that AMD or NVidia sells as lower-end chips because they don't have enough demand for the expensive ones.