nVidia GTX 350 Coming?

[Ninja Prime]

If you look at Radeon HD 2900 from 80nm to Radeon HD 4870's 55nm, that is 45% shrink from 80nm to 55nm process but not the die size! HD 2900 packed 320 shaders on 700m transistors at 80nm 408mm² die size and HD 4870 packed 800 shaders on 956m transistors at 55nm 260mm² die size that is 56% smaller than HD 2900 die size. If AMD want to make HD 4870 on 55nm at the size of HD 2900 die, they can pack 400 more shaders to make 1200 total shaders on 1434m transistors on 55nm at about 390mm² die size.

GT200 die size is 583.2mm² on 65nm then the same chip die on 55nm will be about 51% smaller at 385.7mm² and have 197.5mm² free space. From GT200 die pic, the 240 shaders fit a quarter of the pic, worked out nearly 350m transistors and less than 145.8mm² space so it have enough space to pack 240 more shaders on 197.5mm² free space.

ATI's shaders are a lot denser and simpler.

[rage10]

but arent there ROPs bigger and faster?

[Digital_Trans]

I wonder if it will be out this year? I sure would like to use my EVGA step-up program to take advantage of that technology.

[methimpikehoses]

I wonder if it will be out this year? I sure would like to use my EVGA step-up program to take advantage of that technology.

So you have what, 90 days?

[walterman]

http://austin.net.au/ProductList/ProductDetail/tabid/104/ProductCode/GCGTX3502G/Default.aspx
Nvidia GeForce GTX 350 (Q4 2008) GT300-GPU 55nm PCI-E2.0 2GB GDDR5 512-bit

:confused:

[Viral]

Could be an GX2 card hence the 2GB memory, and as such, 2x256-bit. Not sure how they'd go cutting down the pipelines.

[CaptNKILL]

http://austin.net.au/ProductList/ProductDetail/tabid/104/ProductCode/GCGTX3502G/Default.aspx
Nvidia GeForce GTX 350 (Q4 2008) GT300-GPU 55nm PCI-E2.0 2GB GDDR5 512-bit

:confused:

Yes, that's what this thread is about. :lol:

[walterman]

Yes, that's what this thread is about. :lol:

Yeah, but i was surprised this morning when i read that.

I also think that it's going to be a GX2 style card, but, if it ends as a single gpu card, with GDDR5 on a 512bit bus ... :drooling: It could be the perfect card for my needs :)

[CaptNKILL]

I agree. If its a single GPU card with these specs I will buy one unless its more than $650. That's my "limit". :lol:

[nekrosoft13]

if it is really a single chip card, this could be like second coming of G80.

[rage10]

and unless they changed the name scheme thats the mid range. I cant wait till some GTX 380 specs are leaked!!

[Dreamingawake]

i for one am starting to care less and less about the 'next big gpu' because
they're all the same, and they're all let downs. as if the specs on this are true,
and even if they are WOW we can play ONE SINGLE F'N game with better than
we could before.

Nvidia and AMD need to slow down a little.

[CaptNKILL]

i for one am starting to care less and less about the 'next big gpu' because
they're all the same, and they're all let downs. as if the specs on this are true,
and even if they are WOW we can play ONE SINGLE F'N game with better than
we could before.

Nvidia and AMD need to slow down a little.

Wait...

So they're let downs but nvidia and AMD should slow down? :p

IMO they aren't going fast enough. As I've said in other threads, 2006 had 3 large nvidia card releases and the last one (the 8800 GTX) doubled the performance of previous cards. It took a dual-chip ATI card to finally double the performance of the 8800GTX across the board after almost two years. We should have had single chip cards as fast as the 4870X2 at the beginning of this year, but even now we're only seeing 20%-70% improvements from single chip setups in most cases.

We need a monster single-GPU card to really stir things up again like the 9700 Pro, 6800 Ultra and 8800 GTX did.

[Xion X2]

Wait...

So they're let downs but nvidia and AMD should slow down? :p

IMO they aren't going fast enough. As I've said in other threads, 2006 had 3 large nvidia card releases and the last one (the 8800 GTX) doubled the performance of previous cards. It took a dual-chip ATI card to finally double the performance of the 8800GTX across the board after almost two years. We should have had single chip cards as fast as the 4870X2 at the beginning of this year, but even now we're only seeing 20%-70% improvements from single chip setups in most cases.

We need a monster single-GPU card to really stir things up again like the 9700 Pro, 6800 Ultra and 8800 GTX did.

I think the current lineup is stronger than you give it credit for. I don't think it's that current-gen cards aren't much stronger as much as it's that they really don't have much to stretch their legs on except a few newer titles like Crysis, Clear Sky and Grid. Development has been slow. If you look at these 3 newer games, they play much better on the newer hardware.

If you look at Crysis, for example, it plays almost twice as fast as it does on an 8800gt on the 280 and almost 3x as fast on the 4870X2. Tripling the performance of the prior high-end champ isn't too bad.

http://img440.imageshack.us/img440/2121/pcghfc7.png

[Vanzagar]

That's some strange test results, I've never seen the 4870x2 beat the gtx280 in Crysis by that much (why no min fps)??... usually they're pretty close, often times the 280 beats the 4870x2...

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=117697
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3372&p=6
http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/1541/9/sapphire_radeon_hd_4870_x2_in_crossfirex/index.html
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2327868,00.asp
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/HD_4870_X2/9.html
http://techreport.com/articles.x/15293/8

What's different, they finally fix the drivers? Any more test results at higher resolutions with latest drivers?

Vanz

[CaptNKILL]

I think the current lineup is stronger than you give it credit for. I don't think it's that current-gen cards aren't much stronger as much as it's that they really don't have much to stretch their legs on except a few newer titles like Crysis, Clear Sky and Grid. Development has been slow. If you look at these 3 newer games, they play much better on the newer hardware.

If you look at Crysis, for example, it plays almost twice as fast as it does on an 8800gt on the 280 and almost 3x as fast on the 4870X2. Tripling the performance of the prior high-end champ isn't too bad.


I see what you're saying, but that's only one test. And 27fps average isn't really anything to be happy about anyway. I wouldn't play any game with that kind of performance.

The 4870 x2 is a very strong card, that I'll never dispute. I haven't used one, but I think its generally accepted that SLI and Crossfire are not "transparent" to the user yet, so having a multi-GPU setup of any kind puts them in a different category than single chip cards. At least for most people.

Back in 2006, nvidia doubled the 7900GTX's performance (and in many cases the 7950 GX2's performance because it didn't work) across the board with a single 8800GTX GPU after only 8 months.

It took another 16 months for them to release the 9800GTX with nearly identical performance and 50% LESS memory, and then another 3 months for them to release the GTX 260 and 280 which are good solid cards but seldom offer more than a 50% improvement. Sure, 50% is fine, but after so long it'd be nice to get a monster GPU (ie, ONE chip) that can give us the kind of massive performance increases we've seen in the past.

[walterman]

...
We need a monster single-GPU card to really stir things up again like the 9700 Pro, 6800 Ultra and 8800 GTX did.

I second that :D

The 9700Pro was a powerful GPU, and it introduced the 256bit bus with awesome results for the time.

The difference between the 6800Ultra & 7800GTX wasn't so spectacular, but, the 7800GTX512 & 7900GTX with the fast memory chips, did the job.

No comments about the 8800GTX/Ultra with 100GB of bw. Best card that i have own :) I really doubled my scores from the 7900GTX.

About the last GT200, well, the gpu really doubles the shading power of the G80, but, the bandwidth did not grow enough to double the performance of the applications that i run.

I guess that nVidia will go cheap, and they will use a GDDR5 256bit bus, in the next GPUs, but, i really hope to see an high end monster gpu with GDDR5 512bit, in the future :)

[josiahsuarez]

maybe the delay of TSMC 40nm has changed nvidias plans. sounds sort of like GTX350 could be a refresh akin to FX5800->FX5900. double shaders would certainly give it more punch though!

[CaptNKILL]

People are probably getting sick of hearing this from me, but I think fill rate is really being neglected these days. SPs do all the processing of shaders, but no matter how fast they are processed the framerate is still going to be limited by the GPU's ability to push the pixels to your display. That involves pixel fillrate, texel fillrate and memory bandwidth.

I'm no engineer, so I don't know all about how a GPU works, but the numbers seem to fit the performance in all but the most shader-heavy situations.

I'm really bored, so I used this wiki page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_NVIDIA_Graphics_Processing_Units) and made a little chart showing what I'm talking about. Beware, there is some retarded oversimplification of numbers here, so don't take the percentages too seriously.

6800 Ultra = 6.4Gpixel ; 6.4Gtexel ; 33.6Gb
7900 GTX = 10.4Gpixel ; 15.6Gtexel ; 51.2Gb ---87% increase average from 6800 Ultra
8800 GTX = 13.8Gpixel ; 36.8Gtexel ; 86.4Gb ---112% increase average from 7900 GTX
9800 GTX = 10.8Gpixel ; 43.2Gtexel ; 70.4Gb ---8% decrease average from 8800 GTX
GTX 260 = 16.1Gpixel ; 36.8Gtexel ; 111.9Gb ---16% increase average from 8800 GTX
260 216 = 16.1Gpixel ; 41.4Gtexel ; 111.9Gb
GTX 280 = 19.2Gpixel ; 48.1Gtexel ; 141.7Gb ---23% increase average from 8800 GTX

Obviously the shader processing power of these cards makes a huge difference in most tests or the current generation would just suck, but just looking at these numbers it seems pretty obvious that something is different with the latest cards. When there are bottlenecks in areas other than shader processing, its going to bring the performance much closer to the last generation of cards.

EDIT: Just for kicks, here are a couple from the ATI charts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_ATI_graphics_processing_units)...

HD 4850 = 10Gpixel ; 25Gtexel ; 63.5Gb
HD 4870 = 12Gpixel ; 30Gtexel ; 115.2Gb
4870 X2 = 24Gpixel ; 60Gtexel ; 115.2Gb --- 57% increase average from an 8800GTX (the memory bandwidth is a tough one, I don't think its really doubled since there is duplicate information being sent)

Obviously the X2 is a hell of a lot more than 57% faster than an 8800GTX in most cases, so again, don't take these percentages too seriously.

I'm just demonstrating a point that a lot of the specs of GPUs have sort of leveled off. I know its because games are getting more and more shader-heavy, but you just have to look at the benchmarks. Twice the processing power isn't making the current generation of nvidia cards twice as fast as the last generation in most cases and I think the info I posted above explains why.

BTW, if I'm completely wrong about anything feel free to correct me. I'm just thinking "out loud" with my keyboard. :p

[Xion X2]

That's some strange test results, I've never seen the 4870x2 beat the gtx280 in Crysis by that much (why no min fps)??... usually they're pretty close, often times the 280 beats the 4870x2...

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=117697
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3372&p=6
http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/1541/9/sapphire_radeon_hd_4870_x2_in_crossfirex/index.html
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2327868,00.asp
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/HD_4870_X2/9.html
http://techreport.com/articles.x/15293/8

What's different, they finally fix the drivers? Any more test results at higher resolutions with latest drivers?

Vanz

The difference is that the reviews you link were on release drivers. PCG&H and bit-tech below tested on the 8.8s.

http://img528.imageshack.us/img528/9559/crysispe1.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2008/09/03/sapphire-ati-radeon-hd-4870-x2/3

[Vanzagar]

Damn, looks like they've done a nice job on the drivers, scaling much better now...

[Xion X2]

I see what you're saying, but that's only one test. And 27fps average isn't really anything to be happy about anyway.

I didn't say it was. :) But there's a difference when you say that current cards are only a little stronger and then viewing proof that newer games, like Crysis, run nearly twice as fast as on prior-gen.

The 4870 x2 is a very strong card, that I'll never dispute. I haven't used one, but I think its generally accepted that SLI and Crossfire are not "transparent" to the user yet, so having a multi-GPU setup of any kind puts them in a different category than single chip cards. At least for most people.

Back in 2006, nvidia doubled the 7900GTX's performance (and in many cases the 7950 GX2's performance because it didn't work) across the board with a single 8800GTX GPU after only 8 months.

I think it's time that some of us come to the realization that G80 was the exception, not the rule. Before 7900gtx and 1900XT we had 1800XT and 7800GTX. That bump in performance wasn't huge, either.

Also, IMO, the 4870X2 is a different breed. Multi-GPU with Crossfire really is seamless this time around. There are next to no compatibility issues and most every game scales very well. Add to that a more-than-sufficient frame-buffer and, well, you have a winner.