The Fermi Thread - Part 3

[LordEC911]

I think you missed my point. I am saying we can't expect great performance from fermi when it was obviously rushed to the market and little time was available to optimize drivers. You of all people who has been a strong charlie supporter, thinking NV didn't have working silicon till somewhat recent times.

Since this was response to someone who said they had for months to optimize drivers for fermi so we should expect great performance off the bat, if your saying their going to be work being done on AMD hardware because there are still some changes(hence the 6-7 month time frame), well on something completely new as in fermi, your going to have to do alot more work; atleast more work than what was needed to get the performance jumps on the 5xxx series anyways(which still took months to get).

The thing is current drivers for for anything AMD supports everything based on 2900xt and up, which is why its far easier for AMD to get gains since they are all based on the same architecture or r600.

Fermi is completely new but shares drivers that are primarily for g80 based architecture. As a result of this specialization, its harder to make drivers that give fermi based cards a boost while not hurting performances of cards from g80 to g200. Some of the biggest gains from AMD drivers when they decided to abandone driver support for 19xx and older generation and the reasons are obvious.

The amount of work to get fermi drivers up to its maximum potential is likely going to be one of the most complex driver projects out there because they still have to cater to the architecture before fermi and the complexity of fermi itself. We both know this, hence a 4 month time to write drivers that wring out alot of performance from fermi is not enough, it might take years. Ideally the plans to skip should have the real 40nm g200 refresh should have come sooner, as fermi in its current state is a beta project with little driver development. The potential for fermi to perform is really there as some benchmarks show as its biggest gains are in programs which have been in the past AMD friendly.

So you are saying Nvidia had working GF100 silicon in May? I'm a Charlie supporter when his sources/rumors seem to support info I heard from a different source. Nothing more or less. If you want to look back, I actually disagreed with Charlie quite a few times over the last year or so.

You also missed what I am trying to say... Evergreen is a new architecture, in the sense of drivers, the same Fermi is. Did AMD/ATi have working silicon before their Sept launch, more than likely, did Nvidia have working silicon before the end of 2009, more than likely, I never said any different. The point is, to say that AMD/ATi should have already optimized the performance from Evergreen before it's launch, or shortly therefore after, is wrong. It will take months to correct and optimize, sort of like how it took +6 months for G80 to get stable drivers in certain games(though not the same).

I think the SLI driver performance shows how much time Nvidia really had to prepare GF100. The performance scaling is quite good and somewhat surprising, though that might be only my opinion.

So Nvidia dropping supporting for pre-G200 is of no consequence to you? We will see...