NVIDIA Kepler speculation thread

I said assuming supply keeps up. The mystery is how are yields. All we know is they are better able to meet demand at launch then they were with the 680, but perhaps you're right and it's just 7 weeks of saving up and they'll fall behind with the 670 as well.

 

Seems like 680 could be pushing GK104's limits. It will indeed be interesting to see if 670 remains in stock.

I was thinking that it was originally planned to be the 560's replacement, but the way they popped out a dualie card so fast seems to indicate otherwise. Of course they could also just have lots of contingency plans over at NV. Big Kepler doesn't appear to be planned to make a Thermi-like appearance.

Things would surely be more interesting if Tahiti had turned out faster or if AMD had pushed 7970's clocks more.

 

I already detailed in the HD 7970 thread that these results are bogus because the test is broken. In actuality, HD 7970 is about twice the speed of GTX 680. I even detailed how to fix the test to give more reasonable results.

The test will be updated in a future AMD APP SDK release.

 

NVIDIA has cut nearly in half the performance of their OpenCL drivers when has introduced OpenCL 1.1 support over a year ago. The problem has never been fixed. I don't know but I would define this as a driver problem (i.e. not a problem of the benchmark).

Cycles (Blender GPU path tracer) is written in CUDA but it runs faster on the 580 than on 680 too.

Do you need more proof ?

Timo works for NVIDIA and he compares the 680 to the 480 in the results presented.

 

Am i right if i say that what Nvidia in doing is selling the huge mount of bad GK104 cores as 670 for 400US/EUR?

 

you realise the 480 and 580 use a nearly identical chip.

yes, releasing a Big Kepler geforce would have meant putting an unobtainable part on the market, and/or crippled or downclocked to get more availability. all where there's no competition from AMD.

 

Yes, yield could be more satisfactory if the chip frequency target was around 800-900 MHz.

In this case, hopefully, we could have seen a situation of much more affordable prices. Simply because Tahiti's performance could have been out of touch and NV could have decided to play its cards otherwise.

However, all we observe is the worst possible scenario for customers with low* performance cards at astronomical prices.

Yes, and that's why the smartest thing right now would be just to skip this generation, just give 'em time to fix the awful mess they created,

 

Yes, I agree, this is a driver problem. As I said earlier: evaluating architectures on a class of workload based on a single benchmark, with a known driver problem is silly. Just like evaluating Cayman "games" performance based on Civ5 performance with an old driver - it's not predictive of much.

Proof of what? That there exist applications which run slower on 680 than 580? I never said otherwise, especially if you take an application optimized for one architecture and run it on another, as Cycles did. To get optimal performance will require retuning the code. This problem is not specific to Nvidia.

I do, however, object to the statement that ray tracing is a workload that generally runs slower on a 680 than a 580. That's not true, as I pointed out with the existence proof of a ray tracer that runs significantly faster on GK104 than GF100.

Sure (notice I said GF100, not GF110), but the performance improvement from the 480 to the 580 is just clock speeds. Go ahead and adjust for them, you'll see the 680 is still beating the 580.

Not only that, but Timo's results are for the computationally most difficult part of ray tracing - they don't include shading, which is more regular and benefits more from Kepler's denser architecture, as seen in gaming benchmarks. So if you made a complete ray tracer out of Timo's engine, you'd likely see a bigger speedup over Fermi than his report indicates.

I'm not claiming Kepler is a wonder architecture with magic pixie dust that makes everything faster. Kepler definitely is a retrenchment towards traditional GPU workloads, away from Fermi's generality. But also, you should remember: you're comparing a mid range 104 part with a high end 100 part - to discuss the architecture changes it would make more sense to compare GK110 with GF100. Hopefully we won't have to wait much longer to learn about GK110.

 

Everyone does that or would if in that situation. A laughing smiley would be reserved for a company that didn't.

 

Hmm.
A driver problem? How about they decided for some weird reason (intentially of course) to give to ya much less performance?

 

over 90% the performance of a 680 for 80% the price, and higher performance per watt : the 670 is a good enough deal

it's not really a defective chip, it works as intended and in the end it feels like the difference between a 6800 GT and 6800 ultra (both had full chips)

anyway retail price does not need to be correlated to anything. why can't I buy windows Server 2008 R2 for the price Dell pays a windows home license, I don't know ; it's the same OS but one has disabled features.

 

My card has a default specs of 1058 Mhz base and 1124 Mhz boost clock. With stock settings it actully boosts to 1175 Mhz, at 70c it drops to 1162 Mhz, It pretty much stays at that 1162 in everything I've tried so far. In Heaven benchmark even at 80 % power target the clock mostly stays over 1100 Mhz.

Fan set on auto I can set the clock offset to about +70 Mhz and then the core clock seems to stay at 1230 Mhz when under load. In some applications this requires raising the power target a bit. Temps mostly stay under 80c in my case with the fan auto setting.

Memory seems to OC pretty well as 7 Ghz seems to work, but I haven't done much testing with it yet.

I've got 3754 points so far in 3DMark11 Extreme preset with nVidia beta drivers (3495 Graphics score)

http://3dmark.com/3dm11/3399486

I'm happy with the card and it's performance.

 

You must be very new to this hobby....

 

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5818/nvidia-geforce-gtx-670-review-feat-evga/18

Any logical explanation to why increasing it's maximum power target significantly increases it's power consumption but doesn't do jack to it's performance?

I don't know why neither how, but it increases a lot perf/watt with no downsides.

 

Nvidia clarifies - capacity, not yields are the problem.

 

Their guidance for Q2 is up. So capcity is going to rise and supply will get better. But of course it will be worse than at then EOL of 40nm, which is just natural.

 

http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/Nvidia_GTX_670/16.html

h/t Diltech over at XS

 

Does anyone know what's going on with the stuttering with the 680?

There is also a 24 page thread about it.

 

Look like problem is common... does the problem only exist with the last driver ?

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=362631



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Hopefully dont use v-sync stop it and it seems Nvidia is looking on a fix .. ( still annoying for some user i believe )

 

Which is precisely is why drawing conclusions based on how much AMD is complaining is misguided at best.

Adaptive-vsync and GPU-boost fluctuation?