NVIDIA GF100 & Friends speculation

Deg, I've just read the conclusion there for a (moderate only, true) laugh.

e.g

Remembered that 4870 vs GTX 260 review the did a while ago though

 

Yeah, it seems 470/480 is at best equal or a little faster than the 5850/5870, whilst using more power, being hotter, and noisier. The power/noise videos at [H] are completely off-putting just because of the noise alone. At the same time, it's not the fastest card you can buy - if frames are what's important, you can still trump the 480 with a 5970.

All in all, Fermi has turned out to be what I expected - a problematic product that was forced out the door late and compromised, and manages to only match the competition, but at the cost of more money, heat, power, and noise. It's a stopgap product to get Nvidia into the DX11 market, but it's costing them in terms of the larger die and poor yields. Nvidia will have to improve things over the next couple of quarters, either with a respin or improved TSMC process.

There is also no sign of mainstream products to compete with AMDs full range, while AMD may be able to bring out it's next generation by Q3/Q4, just as an improved Fermi and it's mainstream versions begin to come through in quantity. With lowered prices, factory overclocks, and two gig cards from AMD, competition will get even harder for 470/480.

 

If you take a closer look at benches they dont all run with same settings. For example in Metro 2033 GTX480 has 4xAA and 5870 has 'AAA' yet both perform about the same. Obviously GTX480 is doing a lot more.

And for DIRT2 benches all other sites point to better perfomance on GTX480 and again at Hardocp they got different settings. Seems a quite biased site that dont bench on equal terms.

 

All I care about is Rys and Alex's review. Where is it?!

 

Sum of review links which were posted above:
Anandtech: NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470: 6 Months Late, Was It Worth the Wait?
Bjorn3D: Nvidia GTX-480 (Fermi, GF100)
ComputerBase: Nvidia stellt GeForce GTX 480 und 470 vor
FiringSquad: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480/GTX 470 Performance Preview
Guru3D: GeForce GTX 470 & 480 review
HardOCP: NVIDIA Fermi - GTX 470 - GTX 480 - GTX 480 SLI Review
Hardware Canucks: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 Review
Hexus.net: NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 480 finally unleashed. Reviewed and rated.
Hot Hardware: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480: GF100 Has Landed
Legion Hardware: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480
Legit Reviews: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 GF100 DX11 Video Card Review
PCGamesHardware: Geforce GTX 480 and GTX 470 reviewed: Fermi performance benchmarks
PCPerspective: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470 Review - GF100 and Fermi tackle gaming
TechPowerUp: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 Fermi
TechPowerUp: GeForce GTX 480 PCI-Express Scaling
Tweak PC: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 (GF100 / Fermi) im Performance Test
Tweaktown: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 Video Card Tested
Tweaktown: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 400 Series - What you need to know

 

So far it looks exactly where most people thought it would be: between the 5870 and 5970. So not a hilarious farce but rather a pretty solid entry.

I wonder how ATI will respond to this.

 

Mixed thoughts. On the good side, it (GTX480) came up faster than the 5870 quite consistently. 13% faster by Tech Power Up. Given all the problems, that's quite an accomplishment.

On the bad there are a lot of problems. The low memory clocks turned out to be a bad controller by Nvidia, major problem there. The other big issue is actually less texture fillrate than GTX285. Both point to a rather borked/unbalanced design. Almost as if the GPGPU parts costs Nvidia so much they weren't able to put enough texture specs in and keep the card at reasonable power/size. The third big issue is power, which the card really struggles with already and is way higher than the AMD parts (320W 480 vs 212W 5870 on furmark). Oh yeah, and it is equaled or slightly exceeded by the 5870 on Crysis.

The alleged 5890 should be able to catch up to that +13% or close. But then if rumors are true Nvidia will have the 512 SP part (6.7% more shaders) and maybe higher clocks with B1, so it might be right back to 10-15% faster.

Overall this is not going to put any pressure on AMD to lower prices. If anything they could probably raise them a few bucks.

I have to wonder how texture/bandwidth limited the card is, and if Nvidia missed a good chance to blow AMD out of the water with a part that performed 2X GTX285. By the same token I often think "what if" for AMD, what if they didn't stick so stringently to their small die strategy and stick a few more quads or whatever in Evergreen, they might easily be the absolute fastest (single GPU) right now in which case Nvidia would have been really screwed.

 

Pretty disappointing when viewed solely in the context of gaming. Not really surprising given the route they took with double precision though.

I think you mean GTX 480's in SLI... you know, if frames are important.

 

Hmm, I'd like to see a comparison of Extreme Tessellation of the GTX480 vs the 5970.

AFAICT, HardwareCanucks did it in Normal mode where the 5970 still beats the GTX480.

[edit]And thus the HC server dies[/edit]

 

Not a single card though. As we must break these things down these days...single GPU, single card etc etc...

Also wouldn't dual 5970 be the absolute fastest?

 

How efficient is quad x-fire?

 

Well if you want to buy more than one card, you can buy two 5970s. Probably still cheaper when you take into account the server case and multiple PSU's you'll need to put them in when looking at running two 480s!

 

That's why I framed it as a question

Edit: I guess you could always throw 4X 480 in there? Probably need a small nuclear reactor for power...

 

Load temps, power and noise are WAY up there. Not good at all.

 

lol... sarcasm save fail.

/passes out fixed die

No fair, you're changing the rules.... frames are important, not cost or heat.

 

What is this?

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=2219145&postcount=1490

 

This "TDP: 250W" card is consuming more power than the 300w dual-gpu cards most places I've seen and like 120w more than 5870, so I guess it's "250W - as long as you get a really good handpicked sample" (like the one @ guru3d)

 

250W in PR talk?

 

10 bucks says they claim beta drivers

 

There's a hint of something special in the Anandtech review, though: minimum framerates. Check this out:
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3783&p=9

For the average framerates, in these benchmarks the 480 GTX is ~10% faster than the HD 5870, and quite a bit slower than the 5970. Ho hum, nothing special here.

But look at the minimum framerates!
The 4x0 cards just wipe the floor with the competition! The 470 GTX bests the 5870, and the 480 GTX is trading blows with the 5970! This means, to me, that despite the average framerates, the 4x0 cards, at least for Crysis: Warhead, are producing much better gameplay.

Now, the question is: is this unique to Crysis: Warhead? Or is this a pattern that repeats with other games as well? Is it something that only happens in newer games? Sadly, Anand doesn't help us here, as he only tested the minimum framerates in this one game. Did any other reviewers look at the minimums in a wider variety of games? I know Kyle over at HardOCP did, but it's difficult to tell where the cards stand due to how he tests.