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NVIDIA's GeForce GTX TITAN X Becomes First 12GB Consumer Graphics Card
Deathspawner writes: When NVIDIA announced its GeForce GTX TITAN X at GTC, no one was surprised that it'd be faster than the company's previous top-end card, the GTX 980. But what did impress many is that the company said the card would sport a staggering 12GB of VRAM. As Techgage found, pushing that 12GB is an exercise in patience — you really have to go out of your way to come even close.
Additional reviews available at PC Perspective and AnandTech. The latter notes, "...from a technical perspective, the GTX Titan X and GM200 GPU represent an interesting shift in high-end GPU design goals for NVIDIA, one whose ramifications I’m not sure we fully understand yet. By building what’s essentially a bigger version of GM204, heavy on graphics and light on FP64 compute, NVIDIA has been able to drive up performance without a GM204-like increase in die size. At 601mm2 GM200 is still NVIDIA’s largest GPU to date, but by producing their purist graphics GPU in quite some time, it has allowed NVIDIA to pack more graphics horsepower than ever before into a 28nm GPU. What remains to be seen then is whether this graphics/FP32-centric design is a one-off occurrence for 28nm, or if this is the start of a permanent shift in NVIDIA GPU design."
I know some people who are drooling all over this card for various real-time simulations. The Unified Physics Solver and 12GiB RAM on the card will allow them to push a combination of good graphics and good enough physics, at decent frame rates in real-time, all on a single card. It also makes it easier to develop sim solutions.
Hell you can't even use Crysis 3 by itself as its been shown to run better than it should on some cards, worse on others. That is what happens when you run a poorly optimized game.
Frankly I wish more would do like Tek Syndicate (of course they aren't taking money in the form of ad contracts while many of them are getting huge checks from at least one) where they choose a half a dozen popular games that require some muscle and then see what you get, as IMHO this is a hell of a lot closer to what one would get IRL than "run one benchmark, run BF4" like the others tend to do.
But is there even a point in having 12GB of VRAM at this time? Most games aren't even hitting 4GB and by the time you have games hitting 12GB the GPU is gonna be so out of date it might as well be an FX5900, since its lousy FP means the CUDA guys aren't gonna want this,. So other than "look at my massive ePeen" is there a real use for 12GB now?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I completely disagree. The majority of the HPC realm still uses Nvidia only because they know CUDA and not because of any technological advantage. AMD has held the line at not allowing sloppy programming methods into their OpenCL compiler and that has held back a lot of HPC users from jumping ship. You can even see this in many complaints from open source projects, like Blender, where they refuse to produce proper multi-threaded code and rely heavily on the CUDA compiler to do the work for them.
The rest of your complaints, "shitty drivers", "piss-poor memory handling" and "worse performance per watt" are also bogus. I own or manage machines using a large number of Nvidia and AMD video cards, and have seen as many driver issues between the two that neither has come out worse. This is a typical fanboy stereotype that keeps being repeated with no real fact behind it.
Your second complaint is seen a lot in programming forums, but I have never seen anyone do a proper write up of any memory issues with any of AMD's generations and most of the conversations lead me to believe it was an issue of the programmer's personal preference not wanting to learn a second platform with less market share than an actual technical issue. Most of these issues would be alleviate if the programmer would just use a common optimized library and stop trying to redo the work themselves.
Lastly, AMD's offerings have historically produce more performance per watt and their latest offerings continue that trend. This, besides the bit shift ability you mention, is also one reason why AMD was used for Bitcoin mining and supercomputers.
http://www.tomshardware.com/re...
http://www.green500.org/news/g...
Now, my latest personal computer has an Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 inside because I more often need to fix CUDA code and noticed some of the games I wanted to play ran better on it (again, from the game designer's preference and not a technical merit). I personally own eight other video cards across AMD, Nvidia and Matrox (who use AMD GPUs these days) and three generations for testing.
And I am only sticking up for AMD because I admire their push to get people to code for multi-core better. Nvidia has been too conciliatory in the last six years in that respect, which is fine for their revenue stream and market share but not a good thing in the big picture for the broader computer industry. Since Moore's law has begun to slow, we are going to need a massive shift to multi-core optimized applications and we need programmers ready for that day.
AMD seems to be ready with the tough love to get everyone there while Nvidia keeps enabling bad behaviors.