The Fermi Thread - Part 3

[saaya]

ive read up the last 30 pages since i last posted here, pheew
very amusing read though...

lol@:
1.) chiphell benchmarks from a few days ago...
2.) the perf advantage of gtx480 over 5870 people claimed in this thread steadily decreasing from 50% to 13% in the last 30 pages
3.) high res super low fps numbers that aimed to show %tage advantages
4.) paper launch and no cards in retail for 2-3 weeks at least
5.) no 3d vision soround support in review drivers
6.) 50% perf hit on gtx480 with physix set to high in baa
7.) still no angle independant filtering, same as gt200
8.) bad scaling to 2560x1600 for the 480 (wtf?)
9.) identical perf of 480 and 5870 in vantage (wtf????)
10.) 55W idle and 85W video playback
11.) 60W higher power consumption than 5970 (295W tdp) in unigine


my impression of gtx480 vs 5870
the good:
very fast in tesselation
10-15% faster than 5870
higher perf boost from ocing on air than 5870

the bad:
+100$
+125W load
+10-15C load

the ugly:
+7dba load
identical perf to 5870 in vantage
not available

if your gaming on a display below 1920x1080 or 1920x1200 res, current cards are enough for you in 95% of all games, and you should really upgrade your screen before upgrading your vga

if your gaming on a 1920x1080 or 1920x1200 screen there isnt a big difference between a 5850, 5870, 470 or 480... they cost about the same and perform about the same, only thermals are better for ati, which means less noise, less heat, less power consumed... but i doubt many will care about this.

if your gaming on a 2560x1600 screen, your either not a real gamer or your an idiot and should downgrade your display instead of spending tons of cash on multi gpu solutions to actually be able to play the latest and greatest games without multi gpu drawbacks such as stutter, huge power consumption, noise and bugs.

the only reason i can see for buying a 480 is if you either dont like ati or catalys drivers or like nvidia or their drivers... slightly more perf you wont notice in games for a higher price and more heat... id call it a draw at best...
if your into folding at home, then a 480 or 470 sounds great too...

i totally agree with sof! its a shame that there are no water results for 480s and 470s... i could imagine that a 470 on water would get close to a 5970 if not higher, and that at almost half the cost and its a single gpu...

The driver gains are going to be insane with fermi. I have never seen a card with such inconsistent performance. Forget 10% performance gains, we are going to be seeing 20-30 percent performance gains. Especially with titles like Quake and crysis, which are typically NV favoured, the heaviest gains are going to be seen here. I have guessed that when making the latest drivers NV focus on their weakness first and will later focus on their strengths. With strong performances in games like dirt 2, hawx, battleforge and unreal, which are usually AMD favoured, this card should be killing in games like crysis and quake wars. Its not those and at this point one has to suspect drivers(assuming the recent leaked charts are true).

so if i like playing crysis and quake i should actually buy a card that is not performing well in those games because in the future it might perform very well there... lol what?

They signed NDA... I really dont know why they broke it...Maybe for some website traffic....

and how exactly would you know who signed an nda with nvidia and who didnt? 0_o

Honestly it sounds like almost everything Charlie said about Fermi has been wrong, with the exception of silicon revisions and release timeframe. He has said 5% faster than the 5870, castrated to 448 SPs for the top bin GPU with 600/1200 (core/sp) clocks, 300W TDP, 70C at idle while running at 70% fan speed, etc... All of that seems to be nowhere near reality.

448sps was for tesla cards, nvidia purposely mislead everybody about final specs and he was still very close, gtx480 consumes MORE than 300W in furmark and 260W in games, and the 70C idle at 70% fanspeed isnt too far off either, 65C at 60% iirc, and thats with low ambient temps...
charlie was right about heat, lower clocks than anticipated, lower perf than anticipated, lower mem clocks than anticipated, very late q1 launch and no 512core part. he claimed lower clocks and at some point less cores... but while he wasnt spot on, he was pretty close considering how uptight nvidia was about fermi and at the same time spread misleading info on purpose...
who was more accurate than him? who gave nearly as many hints about fermi before it came out as him?

Regardless PhysX games are superior, atleast experience wise on NV hardware, so those games will be a given regardless.

this is highly subjective... i wont argue with what some people think of physix, but can we agree that this is subjective? physix does NOT necessarily improve the game play experience... not at all...

yeah but completely disregarding the new architecture argument, even ATI has been able to bring 5800 cards' performances up by an avg of 10% just with drivers. At least the same should happen to Fermi's.

well, ati needed 6 months for this 10% boost, right? and how long as nvidia been tweaking fermi drivers? about the same 6 months... rv870 didnt tape out that much before gf100... how much was it? 2 or 3 months?

I'd like to see Shattered Horizon. A good looking game, and performs horribly.

i wouldnt call it a game... it looks somewhat nice, yes... but its more of an interactive benchmark than a game ^^

BTW, Charlie "i'm an idiot" dedknefuhrefuohreofmerijian was wrong in most of the hate he posted. The product has one flaw and that is power draw but all in all it's high clocked and a real great performer. Eat that C.

so who do you think was closer to reality? nvidia claiming 2x-2.5x perf gain over 285 and the same power consumption as a 285, or charlie claiming a minor perf bump over 5870 bundled with a lot of heat?

charlie wasnt spot on, but the overall picture he painted was pretty close to what im seeing now... Q1 is pretty much over and there are still no cards for sale, nvidia claimed NOVEMBER 2009 availability, then december 2009 availability, then january, february, march, and now MID april... once they come out they will be hot, power hungry and prices will spiral up and up... and there is no notable perf difference when actually playing games.

how about making one of jensen?
HE WAS RIGHT!
512SP/750MHz "same thermals as gtx285"
>GTX285*2 performance/november 2009 launch, "this is what you want for christmas"
"yields are perfectly fine" "gf100 taped out in march 2009"

its easy to rip on charlie for being wrong, but was there anybody remotely close to him when it came to giving us a headsup on where things were moving and what to expect? for most of the time it was charlie vs nvidia pr, and charlie was way more accurate than nvidia... so say what you want and nitpick on some details all you want, i believed charlies overall picture and while he painted things a bit darker than it turned out to be, it was still very valuable info and very interesting and entertaining to follow his stories

http://img.techpowerup.org/100326/Capture598.jpg

ill have a veal filet please, medium

Charlie never said 480SP. He first said 512, then said it was "castrated" to 448, then said it would be 512 again. He was never accurate on SP count

no, he said it was castrated to 448 on tesla cards and that there would be close to no 512 cards if at all. there he changed from none at all to few 512core parts... and most likely cause nvidia couldnt make up their mind about it.

and he was never accurate on clocks.

i think he reported what he was told, and es cards WERE clocked that low, and were running way hot... while he was wrong about final clocks, he wasnt wrong about the clocks per se...

His "no tessellator, it's going to be emulated, will suck" claim was 180 degrees wrong. Maybe tess. performance isn't as good as Nvidia claimed but it's definitely no worse than ATI.

who knows how much is really done in specialized tesselation hardware... i think not much, but thats actually smart... the trend is general purpose so having lots of dedicated hardware is stupid... i think his claim of emulating tesselation on the sps is partially right... he was completely wrong about tesselation performance though, yes.

nVidia surprised me:
- 700Mhz, and yet can OC a good 10% more!
- Surely nobody was naive enough to believe +60% on everything. But amazing performance in some games (FC2, BFDX11)tesselation, folding@home and few demos. Fearing only +10%, performance better than expected (depending on which review you read)
- *only* 250W.. better than 280W, but something around 220W would be better still.
- it actually works in all the games. Some 2560 and TRAA driver issues to fix, but overall pretty well polished. Nothing broken (ie Phenom,R600)

1 true
2 no, a lot of people believed nvidias huge %tage gains, and huge fps in fc2... so what? an old game people can now play again at 120fps instead of 80... whats the point? where it matters, ie 2560x1600 the perf is very close to 5870...
3 official 250W tdp, actual max power draw is above 300W...
4 nothing broken? how about 60W idle and 85W video playback? power management def doesnt work as planned if you ask me... same as r600...

the card crashes at 875Mhz almost instantly in '06, at 850Mhz it crashes in the second test but it should do 835/840Mhz core. I haven't pushed the memory yet. I'll do that now.

hey hey! long time no see QD!
nice! thanks for sharing!

Personally I've never heard anything about SLI scaling from anyone before the Fermi launch. And after it, several sites noted scaling better than Crossfire. I think the most interesting one was from HardOCP review - that review put Fermis in the worst light possible but strongly praised their SLI performance.

what? check anandtech, they did some great articles a while back on multi gpu scaling, same as xbitlabs... they compared single vs dual vs tri vs quad in lots of benchmarks and resolutions... anandtech concluded that xfire and sli scale about the same, with sli having a slight advantage. xbitlabs preferred the ati cards cause they were cheaper than comparable nvidia multi gpu solutions at that time.

another thing id reaaaallly like to see is somebody mounting a 480 heatsink on a 5870 and then comparing both cards maxed out on air clock and volts wise