NVIDIA GF100 & Friends speculation

Do you think video decoding improvements are interesting anymore as a USP? On the PC space do we need to decode more than 2 1080p streams in hardware or have we past the point of diminishing returns?

 

Maybe not 7x, and as we all know there is premium for top "Halo" performance parts. Part of the problem is there is no competition, meaning there is no reason for ATI to drop prices being that they are most likely selling all 5900 series parts at the price the market will bare.

http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/hardware/grafikkarten/2010/test_ati_radeon_hd_5670/5/
shows 5970 is only 5X faster then the 5670. Though I don't doubt under extreme resolutions (2560x1600 8X AA 16AF) the 5970 would perform close to or over 7X faster then the 7X cheaper 5670.
http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/hardware/grafikkarten/2010/test_ati_radeon_hd_5670/13/
for example shows that in Crysis (1680x1050 8xAA/16xAF) is 6.77X faster and most definitely would show a greater perfromance increase at 1900/1920/2560 resolutions.. so to answer your question. Yes the 5970 can be up to 7X faster though it cost 7X as much.

((If anyone can point me a link or 3 showing someone brave enough to run the 5670 @ 1900 - 2560 resolutions with 8X AA 16AF I'd be grateful, and again I don't doubt that the 5970 would show 7X performance increase))

I think someone already mentioned it, when comparing the GF200 and previous products (G92 etc) at 8X AA and saying the "new" generation product is X times faster, I don't think that is all THAT great when you look at how badly the GF200/G92 are at 8X AA.. the bar is set soo damn low that any % increase is going to look great. I do commend NV on their ability to finally match ATI's 8X AA performance, as the performance drop from 4X to 8X closely resembles what ATI has been doing now for a couple of generations.

 

One thing to keep in mind, NV is only quoting a small portion of Unigine/Heaven for their numbers, and those are by far the most tessellation heavy portions of the benchmark. They are specifically not quoting the whole benchmark numbers. Think there is a reason for that? They don't even show numbers for heavy tessellation WITH other things going on. Hmm......

To me it appears to be a great GPGPU architecture with some graphics tacked on. I can't for the life of me figure out why a 2:1 SPP FP ratio is good for gaming, nor ECC capabilities, but then again, does that cost them anything other than die area, yield, and power?

From what my sources are saying, you can safely extend that to many INSIDE Nvidia.

-Charlie

 

well then we can always talk about synthethics where the the g100 will be upwards of 3 times + faster in shader synthetics in 3dmark tests, why didn't nV really talk about those, I have info that shows some tests are 5 times faster, come on they could have easily used to those if they wanted a pure PR stunt.

To answer some of your Q's about demos used, Heaven portion was heavy tesselation, they wanted to show you gaming DX 11 performance wasn't compromised because of the crazy notion of silicon being used for GPGPU.

Hawx, was used to show how the the new architecture can extend its lead over todays cards on today's games. Far Cry 2, older games still have performance increases.

Come on can't have everything and these arguements are pointless.

 

I like Charlie. First, he starts with the assumption that NVIDIA engineers don't know what they're doing. Therefore, anything that NVIDIA engineering does is bad. The latter is then used to demonstrate the initial premise.

The logic is perfect! A perfect circle, in fact.

 

not for nothing but there is a pretty big gap between the msrps. Its $259 vs $379 or a $120 price diffrence.

I can see AMD being able to lower the price of the 5870 a bit. Perhaps down to $325 and make a profit.

 

What relevence do any of these calculations of margins, yields, die size ect. that you keep prattling on about have without including the professional side of things into the equation? The real bottom line is that Nv is generating a larger gross profit from Quadro alone than ATI is from its entirety.

 

The difference aligns with turning off 2 SMs either both in the same GPC or 1 in two different GPCs. But then again, we all know how *in*accurate some of nvidias descriptions and diagrams have been in the past...

For all we know the raster and setup units are right next to each other and output to a LL queue that the SM read from and the grouping they are showing doesn't really exist. Hopefully people still remember then trying to pass off x8 simd as 8 seperate cores, right?

 

and lets be honest, if you are blowing 300W for the GPU in your system, you likely have a CPU that can easily decode 1080p. Only part of video that is at all interesting is encode, and until someone comes out with a GPU that runs x264, its not going to change much.

 

And each 5970 they sell is 2 lost 5870 sales, so in a supply constrained situation, it only makes sense for them to sell the 5970 parts at 2x the price of the 5870 parts.

 

Let's try to focus on GF100 speculation and not speculation about Charlie. We already have created a separate thread for that! Last warning!

 

Yep, they wanted to highlight their advantage in tessellation heavy scenes. Dastardly, ain't it?

Could you expand a bit on what you consider "graphics" to be exactly since you seem to think that it has been tacked on to Fermi. What specifically about the 16 tessellators, 4 raster units, 64 texture units and 48 rops that are all fully integrated with Fermi's memory hierarchy and shader cores speaks to this notion of yours? On one hand you're grasping weakly at Fermi's high DP performance as some sort of black mark yet at the same time ignoring the fact that there is vastly more silicon devoted to pushing polys, improving IQ and all the other goodies that we like to see in our games, not the least of which are all the cool new things we're gonna get to see thanks to those darned compute capabilities.

 

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=243190

You should take a look there, it debunks microstutter being a dual GPU only thing pretty nicely. When a single 5870 experiences the same oscillations, it's hardly what we think of microstutter...

Microstutter might be one of the most mis-understood, over-hyped, and un-important term we've seen in GPU land in the last few years

 

ATI added on ECC also. (although a useless version that can only detect errors and nothing else.)

 

EDC is not ECC.

 

Regarding these raw silicon costs, it doesn't make sense to me that they would simply divide the # of dies by the wafer costs. Would they not realistically expect a higher proportion of the wafer costs be ascribed to the higher bin parts to keep their margins relatively stable throughout the range of bins?

In addition to this, with Hemlock (sorry Dave I did think about writing R800) they would also expect that the highest bin Cypress parts would also be ascribed the highest proportion of the per wafer costs?

I know at this point Frankenstein has a greater chance of a fully functional brain than a Fermi board but even so the higher bin chips are actually worth more so I don't understand why they aren't priced as such on an analysis.

 

It is not the price they can ask for, but the price they have to pay for on average and how much they need to make money with a GF100. And as Charlie showed, NV is very unlikely to ever make money with a GF100, as it is not competitive compared to the Cypress / Hemlock and ATI can easily cut their prices so much, that NV will make a loss with every Fermi sold as a GeForce. because of that (and the numerous technical problems with the design), I would not expect to see many GF100 GeForce versions on the shelves till they reach something like 70% yield. So not before B2 or so, which means Seot or later.
All this teasing with Fermi whitepapers is just to show how desperate the situation is at NV. They are screwed and they know it. All they have is FUD to keep people from buying the superior and available ATI products.

Or some people just got fed wrong info by a not impartial source.

 

Do you know that GF100 will be sold in professional and HPC markets where the margins are sky high and AMD has next to 0% market share, despite having great consumer products?

GF100 will make a lot of money for nv as r&d for mainstream consumer market has been paid off already, and *profits* in quadro and tesla markets are worth a LOT.

 

Booooring...

Very interesting. Can you show us some real numbers?

Aaaand that benchmarks, performance analysis and other thoughts you're all posting here... Damn who do you think is interested?

Take it easy, it was just green goblins presentation for their best frineds. All cherry picked benchies.

And what about that video leaks... Do anybody here think it was real leak? ROFL... It's all just a game. Nvidias game with us, normal people, tech websites readers, potentioal buyers. "Can you read us [to my cam] that FPS numbers again?"

It was all just part of a plan, marketing. Every company is trying to sell their stuff, and this is preparation phase. Prepare people, let them speculate, then make a big boom release, then sell like hotcakes. Good marketing, nothing special.

Booooring...

 

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/770-23/dossier-amd-radeon-hd-5870-5850.html

you are absolutely right... this definitely puts the “up to 2x over GT200 @8xAA high res” in a different light now, does it?

Cypress is already almost twice as fast as GT200 - on average