NVIDIA GF100 & Friends speculation

G80 = Nov '06
RV770 = June '08

Since RV770 "caught up" how do you get to three years? It is less than two years.

Maybe if you didn't quote just part of what I said you would understand ? :)

Silus said:
Not at all. I don't think luck had anything to do with it. GT200 (which was released 2 years ago, not 3), wasn't exactly a good design, but it didn't stop NVIDIA from keeping the performance crown with it. And it wasn't a financial disaster as some like to rave about constantly, otherwise that would've been seen for some time now. NVIDIA struck gold with their G80 deisng and especially G92, which took ATI almost 3 years to catch up. As for Fermi, well new architectures tend to be very hard to start (just look at what ATI had to deal with R600) and this is just another example.

Yes, almost 3 years, because only with RV870 did ATI definitely took the performance crown from NVIDIA's "hands".
 
So, my inquire about whether HD5870 has more FLOPS than it really needs can be right after all. Thanks.
Not at all. 5870 can reach its peak FLOPS rating for mathematically intensive workloads like matrix multiply. If NVidia could figure how to increase its math ability and feed the units as cheaply as ATI, it absolutely would.

Everything is a tradeoff. In RV770, for example, the ALUs occupied around 25% of the die space. They could halve the ALUs, save 12% of the die, and maybe 5% of total board cost, but if those ALUs are the limiting factor in 20% of the total cycles that a GPU is used for gaming, then it loses 10% performance. That's not a good tradeoff. So despite being able to use more than 400 SPs only 20% of the time, it would be a good decision to double it to 800.

To you, ATI's GPUs have more ALUs than it needs. To a smart hardware designer, it's got just the right amount.

And geometry, the thing nVIDIA (theoretically) worked on, seems the right move. Shame they had to spoil it with something else...
What I was trying to tell you is that ATI doesn't have to sacrifice its FLOPS to increase geometry throughput, because it's unrelated to the shader architecture. There's no scaling problem, and they just have to bother doing it. I hope it happens in the next generation for ATI.
 
Do you think that repeating that "real tessellation" thingy, somehow makes it true ?

It's incredible that at this stage, with architecture specs and all, some people are still hanging on to some FUD spreading"articles"...

It is not FUD. The smaller GF10X chips will show the difference to the smaller RV8X0.
 
It is not FUD. The smaller GF10X chips will show the difference to the smaller RV8X0.

It is FUD, because they are "real tessellation" units. The differences in architecture are irrelevant. Just because one has a fixed tessellation unit, while the other has one per SM, doesn't make it any less real or efficient.
 
Yes, almost 3 years, because only with RV870 did ATI definitely took the performance crown from NVIDIA's "hands".
How can you not acknowledge that ATI caught up with RV7xx? It was faster than G92b and crushed GT200 derivatives before they even came out. It clearly overtook NVidia in architecture.

Performance of the top single chip part is nothing more than a business decision. At the very least you should acknowledge the 3870x2 or 4870x2, which were released 4-5 months before their NVidia counterparts.
 
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It is not FUD. The smaller GF10X chips will show the difference to the smaller RV8X0.

Just wanted to say I'm amused that you can say "It is not FUD" and then immediately follow it up with an assertion that's backed up by nothing. Carry on. :)
 
Performance of the top single chip part is nothing more than a business decision. At the very least you should acknowledge the 3870x2 or 4870x2, which were released 4-5 months before their NVidia counterparts.

With the 9800GX2 (1 1/2 months behind the 3870x2) nVidia got the performance grown back for nearly 5 months and with the GTX295 for over 10 months.
 
You have to be some kind of serious fboy to not acknowledge that ATI caught up with RV7xx. It was faster than G92b and crushed GT200 derivatives before they even came out. It clearly overtook NVidia in architecture.

Performance of the top single chip part is nothing more than a business decision. At the very least you should acknowledge the 3870x2 or 4870x2, which were released 4-5 months before their NVidia counterparts.

I'm not going to go the route you went with your first line...

Also, "overtaking in architecture" is irrelevant in regular consumers eyes. It's just like the debate about die sizes. Someone back at [H] even suggested that the die size was very important for the consumer, to which I asked "do you go to a store, wanting to buy a card, and ask about the die size of the chip you are about to buy ?"...it's silly and has no relevance whatsoever...

Now obviously, in consumers that follow architectures and spec sheets, etc, obviously RV770 was better than GT200 and I never said anything that denied that. But the performance crown stayed in NVIDIA's hands during the GT200 vs RV770. As for the X2s, sure, but that's why I said "definitely took the performance crown" in regards to RV870, because with the RV670 X2 and RV770 X2, there was always a counter, with which NVIDIA took it back.
 
Do you think that repeating that "real tessellation" thingy, somehow makes it true ?

It's incredible that at this stage, with architecture specs and all, some people are still hanging on to some FUD spreading"articles"...

Its not imposible to run tesselation in software. Try out this nvidia dx10 SDK sample caled instanced tesselation. Its pure software tesselation and looks good and runs fine. http://developer.download.nvidia.com/SDK/10.5/direct3d/samples.html#InstancedTessellation
It runs on my radeon too 4850.

Edit : The joke is that this tesselation SDK demo runs better than the ATI tesselation demos. I reach vsynced 60fps even at the max 32 tesselation levels.(thats shitload of geometry)
 
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just a minor rectification of this error - the geforce 3 predated the 8500 by over 6 months. The 8500 was meant to be a geforce 3 killer, but early driver issues meant it took a while to achieve it's true potential. In the end, at very high AF, it was able to challenge the gf4 4200.

edit: meh, didn't notice chalnoth's post, and can't delete :)

Yeah, the geforce 3 predated the 8500. But the GF3 and the Ti500 are different SKUs. First, the geforce 3 was launched. Than, almost at the same time as the 8500, Nvidia launched the Geforce 3 ti500 (to compete with the 8500) and ti200 (lower cost SKU).

In fact, Nvidia didn´t need the Ti500: in august of that year, a new driver was released wich increased the GF3 performance by 30%.
 
Why are people babbling about Geforce 3, Geforce 4, Radeon 8500 and other irrelevant graphic cards for this particular thread?

More GF100 news / rumours please.
 
Just wanted to say I'm amused that you can say "It is not FUD" and then immediately follow it up with an assertion that's backed up by nothing. Carry on. :)

You can´t deny the fact, that GF100 does not have one fixed tesselation unit. :D

I must admit that I am really interested to see the smaller and the smallest chips of the Gf100 generation, to see how the tesselation capability scales with the reduction of the SPs, compared to the Radeon chips.
 
Also with regards to this image :

9vgvt4.jpg



It is fake , look at the catalyst(or catalytic :p) driver version .. here is an old legitimate one ..:

markone-albums-dd-picture411-ati-radeon-hd-5970-grafikkarte-benchmark-crysis-warhead-3-png.png

I don't know if it's been said already, but this is definitely a fake. Here's our official statement wrt this matter:
http://www.pcgameshardware.de/aid,7...70/480-Benchmarks-im-Umlauf/Grafikkarte/News/

(obviously in german, but google translate will get you the gist).


PcGamesHardware would never benchmark with an old driver , they will use 10.3 at least !
actually, 10.3a is what we've used. It's internal number is 8.712.3.

You can see our Testing-Lineup (sans Fermi) here:
http://www.pcgameshardware.de/aid,7...orbereitung-auf-GTX-470/480/Grafikkarte/Test/
:)
 
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No, I'm talking all over. From the compue side - what feature is there that is actually different in terms of the capabilities that it brings vs potential performance differentiations?

In terms of raw, hardware feature differentiation, what does it bring? Does it do more displays on a single board? No. Hell, does it even bring HBR Audio?
Hell, it's a graphics board. If I'd want more audio than my onboard solution from realtek, I'd buy an X-Fi :)
What about open standards support out of the box with certified, regular drivers? I know, i know: It's a software feature. But one I'd really like to have.
Don't get me wrong: I like my HD 5870 and won't exchange it for Fermi anytime soon!

Anything that needs flops, rops, or texture sampling has scaled as expected.
I was under the impressione that especially the last two would need bandwidth, too. And if that's stagnating…

Exaggerated example: how hard is it, to put a couple of thousand DP-ALUs on a die, when you don't have to care about getting them fed with data?
 
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Hell, it's a graphics board. If I'd want more audio than my onboard solution from realtek, I'd buy an X-Fi :)

What about open standards support out of the box with certified, regular drivers? Last time i checked with GPU Caps Viewer from Ozone3D, my HD 5870 didn't have support for Open CL. Actually, that was two minutes ago. But then - I only have Catalyst 10.3a - maybe the WHQL'ed 10.3 fixes that. :) I know, i know: It's a software feature. But one I'd really like to have.

Don't get me wrong: I like my HD 5870 and won't exchange it for Fermi anytime soon!

Try installing the STREAM SDK? IIRC it's required for OpenCL atm regardless of driver version
 
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