And let's not forget the 3DMark 03 cheating!Kaotik said:
Heh. I think by "hard evidence" he meant "mushy, unsubstantiated drivel".
I understand it's not a very titillating explanation, but what if Apple simply chose its components based on the technical merits of new generation? You know: forward looking instead of backward? For a company that puts battery life front and center, Fermi was not a very compelling product line. We don't know enough power numbers for meaning comparisons (especially since they are using GDDR5!), but with tons of others having chosen Nvidia for their notebooks as well, it's fair to say that their perf/W must be competitive against AMD.
A1xLLcqAgt0qc2RyMz0y
Veteran
Thus far GK107 is not exactly covering itself in glory in that area - in this case peak TDP difference lower than the performance differential and an idle power that is higher despite a smaller die size.
DDR3 will also be significantly lower power draw than GDDR5, and probably have more in common than most of the notebook implementations. The idle power is a very important factor for notebooks that are driving the display from the discrete graphics as well.
Oh please. Less yes, relative to the potential performance gain from having 2.5x the bandwidth... not much.Dave Baumann said:
The GT640m DDR3 isn't the only GK107 card. There is also the GT650m (which I believe Apple chose). Perhaps it would be prudent to wait for some benchmarks of the GT650m before condemning GK107 based solely on a single implementation.
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I will be honest i have no idea from where thoses things are coming, i m offtly on a french site who turn to be with a lot of Mac users..and half is a side mac site, I like how the guy in this article cite problems who date from 2009, when in reality im not even sure this was AMD related cause:
- monitors problem, it was impossible to say if it was from AMD as most monitors was just broken.
- Hard drive failure ( non amd related )
- overheating ? its not amd who is responsible of the design of the Imac of Apple.
- Monitor with side broken at delivery or the screen was damaged...
- the list is long.
- I dont even speak about the flash problem who was there with Apple since many years, causing the CPU to work at 100% usage. ( no acceleration on gpu ). Due to the faulty support of flash with Apple.
In fact the famous 27" Imac was just completely faulty at start... i have never read anywhere this was due to AMD gpu ... The most funny is i have never read anywhere those problem have occur with AMD HD4000 series at this time ... nor even with HD6970M used on new Imac, macbook ...
Most funny enough, is if Apple had change his contract with nvidia was coming from problem who look similar at thoses describe with previous Nvidia hardware on Apple laptop ( including the overheating problem and gpu dying .
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Well at idle the power draw savings are much more significant than the performance decrease
.I dunno though if idle power draw is still that important now that pretty much every notebook design has some sort of optimus or whatever nvidia, amd, apple call it (even the high-end chips this round...).
There's quite some benchmarks on notebookcheck already for the gt650m. Some with ddr3, some with gddr5 memory (though I think in some benchmarks they've got the wrong memory listed, I have no idea if apple uses gddr5 or ddr3), and quite surprisingly imho the practical performance difference isn't THAT big - something like 10-25% (which is of course more than the difference between ddr3 gt640m and ddr3 gt650m but still less than I expected). Maybe the ddr3 version clocks higher because the ddr3 memory uses less power or something.
DavidGraham
Veteran
I am sorry , but it's quite obvious that NVIDIA enjoys an advantage with their software suite , even their software AA (FXAA) works better and smoother and with less bugs than AMD's software one (MLAA).
Does THG explain somewhere how especially their load numbers are obtained? Wall power, after all, increases also with higher bus, memory and CPU load which in turn can be caused by a faster GPU that is not stalling the rest of the system as much.
For one, where on earth does this stem from? Second, exactly what relevance to Apple does this have?
That favours the power numbers of Verde more, as too would if GK107 is following GK104 it is limited to PCIe Gen 2 on X79 where Verde would be running Gen 3.
If we only look at 16x10 and 19x10 resolutions, a GT640 is 24% behind a 7750 in perf/W. (Assuming all tests run at the indicated power.) That's doesn't seem to be an insurmountable gap by switching to GDDR5, considering the large amount of ROP and shaders and pathetic bandwidth.
It's not as if one has to beat the other into submission. Competitive is sufficient. Difference in brand reputation, perceived driver quality, and pricing (smaller die, as you pointed out) can do the rest.
Edit: FWIW, the only straight comparison I could find between DDR3 and GDDR5 for otherwise identical cards, is this one. If you average the performance of gain for all 16x10 results, you get a speedup of 24.7%. (For this particular case, power consumption was surprisingly identical, but you need many samples to come to a firm conclusion on that one. That's true also for those THG results, of course.) It's a different architecture with different unit ratios, but it shows that a 25% improvement is not some number from lala land and it's better than pretending there is no difference.
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Probably - and I did not follow the agenda of making your argument invalid.
I just genuinely wanted to know if THG details it somewhere.It's GDDR5.mczak said:
UniversalTruth
Veteran
You are so lucky. Only 24 hours ago there was 0 in stock at newegg, now you can choose between 4 of them. Suddenly the demand dropped so much that you have something in stock.
Actually, the reaity shows something like: you have few days with non availability at newegg and only few cards available at hardwarevertsand, at the next period of few days things reverse- you have some models in newegg and nothing at hardwareversand.
I begin to forget when its launch was, so long ago.
