NVIDIA GF100 & Friends speculation

[CarstenS]

GTX 480 achieves 1,6 billion polygons (tessellated) per second in realtime - plus some graphics rendering:
http://translate.google.de/translat...tro-2033-in-3D/Action-Spiel/News/&sl=de&tl=en

Unfortunately, I didn't see it myself. But this sure sounds pretty nice. Now, what would be interesting is, how do real games run on it.

 

[trinibwoy]

We can only hope they have more luck getting devs to use the hardware more effectively than they have with PhysX to date. Even the early shots of Crysis 2 don't look like much of a leap in terms of geometric complexity.

 

[GZ007]

The scene in which GTX 480 achieves 1,6 billion polygons (tessellated) per second in realtime is the maxed out water demo that could be seen in the leaked videos.
For the grass demo pictured on that german site they claim 48 milion triangles per frame .

 

[DavidGraham]

We can only hope they have more luck getting devs to use the hardware more effectively than they have with PhysX to date. Even the early shots of Crysis 2 don't look like much of a leap in terms of geometric complexity.

Crysis 2 will rely on the artistic design of it's environment ( heavy post processing , beautiful sets , attractive lighting models , shining colors ..etc), to boost it's visuals , rather than graphics brute force , but graphics complexity will remain the same .

They did that in Crysis Warhead , which looked better than the original Crysis , despite having lower texture resolutions , .. that was a consequence of designing beautiful levels .

 

[trinibwoy]

Sure but at the end of the day all those things are just window dressing on top of the underlying geometry. Imagine how much better things could look if you improved the quality of your starting point. I'm also baffled as to why we still have such poor texture quality in PC titles. That needs to change too.

 

[seahawk]

Hemlock is set against GF100.

Which is "only" a dual GPU card, and not a GPU.

 

[GZ007]

The Metro 2033 DX11 screens with tesselation look impressive http://www.pcgameshardware.de/aid,7...piel/News/bildergalerie/?iid=1258212&vollbild. But those are closed areas and tunels where the extra details wont hurt .

It will be interesting to see running that game on 5k radeons. If the gtx4xx cards will have any advantage without physx. The russian team had some of the first gtx4xx cards from nvidia.

 

[Thraxis]

Sure but at the end of the day all those things are just window dressing on top of the underlying geometry. Imagine how much better things could look if you improved the quality of your starting point. I'm also baffled as to why we still have such poor texture quality in PC titles. That needs to change too.

Generally from what I've understood it's due to companies still needing to use DVDs. So you have to crunch all your data into roughly 9 gigs of space. Even if you use digital distribution, then you have to be roughly the same size as a DVD (to remain consistent between your retail and online product), unless you go DD only. I guess you could also do a 2 DVD installation, but then prices go up to print another disc. I'm pretty sure as soon as we see a bigger format (Blu-ray for instance) we will see higher resolution textures, and less compressed data.

 

[Blazkowicz]

I don't believe blu ray will take off on the PC. no one wants to pay for it except some movie enthusiasts.

multiple discs aren't much expensive and the publishers don't care about packaging (I remember being shocked a few years ago, when seeing discs stacked on that plastic knob in the DVD case. lol! I preferred the CD audio cases, even though you would break them)

 

[KimB]

I don't believe blu ray will take off on the PC. no one wants to pay for it except some movie enthusiasts.

Oh, it most certainly will. It will just take a while. People are most definitely going to start getting fed up with DVD's as they approach 3-4 discs per game.

As far as movies are concerned, as HDTV's get more and more penetration, and the costs for blu-ray players come down, it will make more and more sense to just go blu-ray.

 

[thatdude90210]

I don't know if I'm a typical PC gamer, but I haven't used a game disc in years. If it's not on Steam, I'm not buying it. I barely need the DVD drive, let alone a Bluray drive. I don't think I had anything in that DVD drive since installing Windows 7 in October.

 

[steveOrino]

I don't believe blu ray will take off on the PC. no one wants to pay for it except some movie enthusiasts.

multiple discs aren't much expensive and the publishers don't care about packaging (I remember being shocked a few years ago, when seeing discs stacked on that plastic knob in the DVD case. lol! I preferred the CD audio cases, even though you would break them)

Well economies of scale will determine that. You could have said the same thing about DVD drives years ago when they were going for 400-500 a drive. Try backing up anything on a single DVD these days, I would gladly welcome cheap 50gig+ discs to burn to.

Multiple dvds are very expensive, MS charges additional royalties/licensing fees for games that go over 1 dvd on the 360. This doesn't matter on the PC of course, but since most games are developed for consoles with that one dvd cost savings in mind, you are less likely to see multi dvd games on the PC.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I don't believe blu ray will take off on the PC. no one wants to pay for it except some movie enthusiasts.

multiple discs aren't much expensive and the publishers don't care about packaging (I remember being shocked a few years ago, when seeing discs stacked on that plastic knob in the DVD case. lol! I preferred the CD audio cases, even though you would break them)

It'll happen around when BRD burners hit under 100 USD and/or BRD readers hit under 50 USD. At that point DVD drives won't be signfiantly cheaper, and thus they won't be out much money if they never (or only occasionally) use the BRD features.

Regards,
SB

 

[Thraxis]

I don't know if I'm a typical PC gamer, but I haven't used a game disc in years. If it's not on Steam, I'm not buying it. I barely need the DVD drive, let alone a Bluray drive. I don't think I had anything in that DVD drive since installing Windows 7 in October.

But still as said before, you have a system/expectations in place where you have whats on the physical disk being the same as the digital distribution files. A company more than likely won't start making one version superior over the other in image quality as that takes more time and resources that they'd rather not spend to make more profit and they would surely bring about some consumer backlash.

When developing a game a company will have a general space target for media assets, this is usually talked about in pre/post launch interviews from companies that cater to both the higher and lower end market graphically (Valve and Blizzard just off the top of my head). This is due to in one part due to physical distribution and another part due to compression technologies (hence why Valve switched to .vpk for their latest titles as it apparently saves space in graphic media compression). If I find the specific article that is lingering in the back of my head, I'll throw it here for a more in depth read.

I'd expect blu-ray to eventually penetrate the desktop market over time, last time I looked (December or so) at the laptop market, it was starting to gain real traction (a little silly due to most screens not being 1080p). Multiple dvds will last a few years and eventually fade away, if not to blu-ray, than to any other standard that could pop up and be pushed down the line.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

We can only hope they have more luck getting devs to use the hardware more effectively than they have with PhysX to date. Even the early shots of Crysis 2 don't look like much of a leap in terms of geometric complexity.

I fully expect it shall. There's certainly more developer excitement about Tessellation. Due mostly to Dx11's explicit support (lukewarm if that prior to this) which means it'll be guaranteed to be supported by all vendors releasing Dx11 hardware.

With Nvidia finally joining the party that means there's now two IHVs actively pushing and promoting tesselation.

Contrast that to PhysX which has always been an uphill battle selling it to devs and has always been limited to one hardware vendor.

While I wish it was different, I still expect most tesselation in the first year or two to be mostly "tacked" on features. Engines targetting/being developed around tesselation are going to need some time.

That said, I'm still impressed by and encouraged by even the few tacked on bits that have been released thus far. But what I'm really looking forward to is the day that tesselated geometry, objects, and NPCs exist in game. I'm still incredibly impressed by the greatly exaggerated cobblestones and shingles in Unigine (dragon much less so from a non-technical standpoint) and how light and shadows play with them. Greatly looking for the day a game has stuff like that but more realistically implemented.

Regards,
SB

 

[Blazkowicz]

Well economies of scale will determine that. You could have said the same thing about DVD drives years ago when they were going for 400-500 a drive. Try backing up anything on a single DVD these days, I would gladly welcome cheap 50gig+ discs to burn to.

good luck reading that 50GB disc two years later.
I think a 1500GB or bigger hard drive will be enough for backup ; those days backup to datacenters should be considered as well (look at Backblaze for a cheap example)

Multiple dvds are very expensive, MS charges additional royalties/licensing fees for games that go over 1 dvd on the 360. This doesn't matter on the PC of course, but since most games are developed for consoles with that one dvd cost savings in mind, you are less likely to see multi dvd games on the PC.

did not remember that, probably it's an incentive for multiplatform games not to benefit from bluray, or so that the x360 is not viewed as the more cumbersome console.

I find it less relevant on the PC, once you installed the game you won't be doing a lot of disc swapping, unless you're doing a retrogaming drill, with Under a Killing Moon, Wing Commander IV, the Myst sequel etc.

 

[Pete]

who ever said AMD planed to compete with G100 directly?

My mistake, I forgot Evergreen was the family and Cypress was 58x0. I thought neliz was implying that ATI, while developing Evergreen, knew Fermi (and derivatives) would be late and intended their refresh to compete with Fermi & co.* Still, I'm guessing ATI planned for 5870 to at least compete with (if not necessarily equal) NV's GF100 cut-down part. It would make sense given what happened with 4870 and GTX 260 and assuming both IHVs basically double performance/raw specs each generation, wouldn't it? Granted, that's two big ifs.

I was under the impression that hemlock would be their high end and compete with nvidia's high end the gtx 480.

Right, but unless we're parsing "directly" too finely (meaning equal performance and price--which hasn't happened at the top for a while--vs. compensating for slightly lower performance with a slightly lower price), I'm thinking ATI's still competing for enthusiast gamers at the high-end, be it single or double GPU cards. Sure, technically they may be competing one rung down from NV, but it's the same $300+ ladder.

Maybe I haven't followed GF100 as closely as I thought. Before the hyper power draw talk, wasn't it assumed that a dual Cypress would slot in between a single and dual Fermi?

Guys , about testing with 2500x1600 resolutions , I just noticed that this is a trend that happened with all major card releases : 8800GTX , HD2900 and even HD5870 :
[...]
Especially in the case of 8800GTX vs X1950 and 8800GTX vs HD2900 , in the reviews , the size of video RAM seemed irrelevant .

The 8800GTS takes a disproportionally large hit going to 25x16 compared to the GTX. I'd ascribe that to RAM, but I don't know if newer drivers have since closed that gap. And extra memory helped the 4870 1GB vs. 512MB in some titles at 25x16 4xAA. I kind of doubt current games push the 1GB boundary in the same way, even with 8xAA, but I'm curious to find out. Obviously dual- or triple-head gaming may cross the 1-to-2GB barrier (see ATI's 57x16 Eye6 improvement chart).

* Sorry about that, neliz.

 

[eastmen]

Right, but unless we're parsing "directly" too finely (meaning equal performance and price--which hasn't happened at the top for a while--vs. compensating for slightly lower performance with a slightly lower price), I'm thinking ATI's still competing for enthusiast gamers at the high-end, be it single or double GPU cards. Sure, technically they may be competing one rung down from NV, but it's the same $300+ ladder.

Maybe I haven't followed GF100 as closely as I thought. Before the hyper power draw talk, wasn't it assumed that a dual Cypress would slot in between a single and dual Fermi?

But would the 5870 be $400 bucks if nvidia launched a full gtx 480 back in oct or nov ? I'm not convinced that it would have been. I think that both the 5850 and 5870 have been very high margin parts for ati these past 6 onths.

As for the 5970 and dual fermi. Well I'm not sure. Cost alone would prevent the gtx 480 dual from being priced close to the 5970.

I really do think that depending on what the gtx 470 and 480 turn out to be , ati has a few options. I've stated them before. But I certianly think ati can drop prices on all thier cards esp high end and still maintain strong profits off the parts. I also believe that ati can in additon to 2gig 5870s introduce a 5890 so to speak.

Either a new chip with more shader units and clocked higher or a respin of cypress that clocks higher , gets better yields and runs cooler with less power. I think ati can do either of these and they have certianly had the time. The other option is hecto whatever. It may be ready for a Juneish release.

I'm personaly very interested in the pricing war that will hopefully follow if the gtx 480 is on par with the 5870

 

[neliz]

My mistake, I forgot Evergreen was the family and Cypress was 58x0. I thought neliz was implying that ATI, while developing Evergreen, knew Fermi (and derivatives) would be late and intended their refresh to compete with Fermi & co.* Still, I'm guessing ATI planned for 5870 to at least compete with (if not necessarily equal) NV's GF100 cut-down part. It would make sense given what happened with 4870 and GTX 260 and assuming both IHVs basically double performance/raw specs each generation, wouldn't it? Granted, that's two big ifs.

* Sorry about that, neliz.

I don't think AMD ever realized in what sorry state GF100 was in during 2008, so I doubt they ever took that into consideration when speccing up Cypress XT.
You might want to speculate it was conservative once AMD realized a couple of months before launch that nVidia would need a tape-out Home-run to ever put the Fermi architecture against the Evergreen architecture, at least on the high-end parts.

I don't think AMD ever underestimated GF100 and drew up Hemlock as a worst case scenario. A 4870X2 that needs to keep up appearances while you get your refresh out.

At most AMD would've had a couple of months of free running with an impending graphical curbstomp had there be no such thing as a Hemlock.

P.S. A pricewar Eastmen? for that you need:
A. A product on the market and available
B. A product that is priced low enough to take away sales from your part because of perf/$ and "awards" in direct comparisons.

Those two are not a given (yet) so I wouldn't bank on that.

 

[Malo]

Which is "only" a dual GPU card, and not a GPU.

Isn't it rather irrelevant what the configuration is if it is priced about the same? If GTX480 is $700 and so is Hemlock, then wouldn't that be the appropriate comparison? If Nvidia choose to price it that high then one would think they believe it is competing against that card and not Cypress.