The GT300/Fermi Thread - Part 2!

[saaya]

Tue but the way information flows through the GF100 is quite different from the GT200.

Also, at this point in time everything will be "evolutionary" versus "revolutionary" since the unified shader-based architecture will be with us for some time.

yeah... and looking back its hard to think of any gpu architecture in the past as revolutionary, the only ones i can think of are r300, r600, nv30 and G80... those are what id call really different architectures, everything that followed them were more like intel style tocks, a shrink with tweaks...

No Fermi is the first mass market GPU architecture to have:

#1: Parallel geometry setup
#2: Generalized, coherent read/write caching

Both are huge deals because of the engineering effort required and make a lot of things easier to do. Of course it doesn't mean squat if you just care about the fps that comes out the end.

right, ill give you that, that is pretty revolutionary... but the fact that this isnt really all that useful for games says a lot, doesnt it? as a gpu, fermi isnt really revolutionary imo and is more of a GT300... if youd use it for gpgpu then calling it GF100 makes sense... but thats just semantics

Does anyone think dual GPU Fermi is possible at all (GTX470, and downed clock speeds like the 5970) without requiring a nuclear power plant and generating as much heat equivalent to the surface of the sun?

definately, even with two full blown 480 chips its definately possible... but it would run at very low clocks and the final result wont be that much faster.

Fermi is a complete arch redesign, like g80 & r350. Focus on cache, compute, & gpgpu programmability. cypress is rv770 with alu's & rops doubled and scheduler & setup redesigned to effectively use new resources.

mhhh i wouldnt say complete... its more than the last step from g92 to gt200... id say the rv770 to rv870 step is about the same as the g92 to gt200 step.

http://bbs.expreview.com/thread-27750-1-1.html

Farcry2 2560 x 1600 Ultra 8xAA Max

5870: 17/32/55
GTX4x0: 30/40/67

yeah but how representative is farcry2 performance?
everybody knows by now that gf100 rocks in fc2, but that game is not exactly brand new, everybody played it already, its not a game youd want to play two or three times as its really repetitive the first time already, and it runs perfectly fine on even a gts250 at pretty high res and max details.
2560x1600 8aa perf is nice, but who has that big of a display?
why would anybody spend so much on a big display for games? at that res you depend on sli or xfire to get enough perf to play the top graphics games on the displays full res... so cool, you will be able to play fc2 at that res, more or less, but what about other games such as metro 2033, hawx, crysis warhead, crysis2...?

i dont see the point in showing off 2560x1600 8aa performance... its better than the competition but still not good enough to actually play with that setting...

its like showing off 8fps vs 1fps at some insane resolution and claiming you are 8x faster... yeah but whats the point?

- If the 480GTX comes in at close to its current price/performance to deny any signficant marketshare. If the 480GTX comes in at 5-10% higher performance than the 5870 would the average upgrader still choose it if the 5870 was 25% cheaper (probably not)?

you mean would people chose a 300$ card or a 400$ card if the 400$ card is 5-10% faster? how can you say they probably would??? its pretty obvious that they would go for the 300$ card, isnt it?

- If AMD/ATI counters with a 5875 (or whatever 5870 rev2) at the same price point of the current card (to retain "performance crown"), the "old" 5870 wouldn't sell at all at the current price.

I'm inclined to say that its very likely AMD/ATI would price cut, I'd probably bank on it being closer to $50 though (I would be quite happy if it was $100).

while lots of people bashed charlie for claiming that there will only be 5-10.000 cards at launch, thats what everybody is reporting now, and even nvidias ceo admitted that they wont REALLY launch until the second half of this year... so why should ati drop their prices and cut their margins if all nvidia can do is offer 5-10.000 cards in a few months which is what ati probably sells per DAY!