nVidia unveil at Pax East

[Vardant]

NVIDIA GTX 470 and GTX 480 to debut at PAX according to - http://ow.ly/1a58X - wonder what they'll show them off with?

http://www.metro2033game.com/en

Unexpected

[shadow001]

Originally Posted by Johnny C

It'll be interesting as well to see refresh cards from ATi, even if Fermi is 60% faster in tesselation, since the tesselator is a seperate unit in the 5000 series ATi could upgrade the tesselator without affecting anything else on die....lots of possibilities for both nV and AMD....

I'm just as excited for refresh cards as for Fermi's release....

The whole tesselation issue is being overblown in practical terms,since even a single Cypress GPU can aparently sustain polygon budgets as high as 14 million poly's per frame while able to sustain 60 frames per second,before the tesselator within hits it's performance limits.

Current games or any future title coming out in the next couple of years are nowhere near that amount in practical terms.


As for the refresh parts,it's a little cloudy what they are to be honest,as they could simply be higher clocked 40nm chips with no major changes,or that it might be using the same strategy that ATI did last year with the RV740(RV 670 shrunk to the 40nm process)....Basically taking a current architecture like Cypress and shrinking it down to the 32nm or maybe even 28nm fab process and adding the missing stuff that didn't make it into Cypress while using 40nm(a revamped memory controler and the crossfire sideport feature come to mind).


At 32 nm for instance,Cypress die size would shrink from 334mm^ down to about 230mm^,for which ATI then has to option to raise clock speeds and add even more features,while getting to know the new fab process at the same time,before taking the risk of a brand new architecture on a brand new fabrication process at the same time,which is what Nvidia attempted with Fermi,and it kinda backfired on them at least on the release schedule....We'll see about power use and performance in a few weeks.


Then again the above scenario could be what they have planned for late this year as the major release.....The main point here is that ATI has the options moving forward to continue being a pain in Nvidia's ass for the forseable future.

[shadow001]

Interesting quote here regarding performance on unigine at 1920*1200 with 4X AA and 16X AF with the GTX480 cards.

DX11 using Unigine Benchmark in 1920x1200 4x AA 16x in the AF test, result also close 30FPS, obviously surpasses 5870

http://babelfish.yahoo.com/translate...rUrl=Translate


Be right back with my result at those same settings...

[Revs]

Looking like it's gonna be an interesting year. Best get saving

[shadow001]

Made a run at those same settings and uploaded it to photobucket:





My result was 82 Fps,and of course tesselation is used and this particular synthetic benchmark is being heavily promoted by Nvidia to show off Fermi's tesselation abilities in a big way,so the bottom line is,to beat my score and this is assuming there is perfect scaling on fermi,users would need no less than a triple SLI GTX480 setup,which would theoretically hit 90 Fps,assuming of course that statement i linked to above is accurate,and a single Fermi does 30 Fps.(huge pile of salt of course).


Oh and my cards were running at stock speeds btw,(750/1000),even though they can run at 850/1200 very easily,but the cooling becomes noticably noisy at those clocks.


Bottom line is,even though it's supposedly Fermi's strongest point,i'm not exactly impressed here,and doesn't really make my cards no where near antiquated as Rollo stated earlier.

Originally Posted by shadow001

Made a run at those same settings and uploaded it to photobucket:





My result was 82 Fps,and of course tesselation is used and this particular synthetic benchmark is being heavily promoted by Nvidia to show off Fermi's tesselation abilities in a big way,so the bottom line is,to beat my score and this is assuming there is perfect scaling on fermi,users would need no less than a triple SLI GTX480 setup,which would theoretically hit 90 Fps,assuming of course that statement i linked to above is accurate,and a single Fermi does 30 Fps.(huge pile of salt of course).


Oh and my cards were running at stock speeds btw,(750/1000),even though they can run at 850/1200 very easily,but the cooling becomes noticably noisy at those clocks.


Bottom line is,even though it's supposedly Fermi's strongest point,i'm not exactly impressed here,and doesn't really make my cards no where near antiquated as Rollo stated earlier.

2 5970?

Nice.

[lee63]

The thing that bothers me the most, all the cards will be gone with in a day or two....and who ever chooses to wait until benchmarks and performance numbers are out probably wont get one.

I asked Rollo earlier in this thread on about availability...he didn't reply, so take that for what its worth

[shadow001]

Originally Posted by grey_1

2 5970?

Nice.

Yup,at stock clocks,wich technically places each GPU in the cards somewhere between the HD5850 and the HD 5870 cards performance wise,since the clocks are that of the HD5850,but the shaders and texture units are fully enabled,as in the HD5870 cards.


If i do overclock them to HD5870 speeds(850/1200),its' basically like having 4 HD 5870's working together,and i did a run like that earlier and scored 98 Fps at the same settings as what you see above,so there's not really any lack of tesselation power here.


Just something to put into perpective here if the 30 Fps value a single fermi managed to do at those same settings is accurate from that chinese site,so it'll take a triple SLI,maybe even a quad SLI fermi setup to beat my score...It's just my thinking until we have the final performance numbers from actual review sites of course.

[Rollo]

Originally Posted by Xion X2

Is there a confirmed release of a dual-GPU Fermi yet? If not, then shouldn't the 480 be considered Nvidia's high-end part and a more relevant comparison made to the 5970, which is ATI's high-end part?

The 5870 is not ATI's high end and is not in the same "market" as the 480. The 480 should sell at a significantly higher price tag than 5870 as well, given that the performance should be better and it was a more expensive part to manufacture.

Given the above, I don't understand your statement about 480 and 5870 being in the same "market."

Please, not another round of the ATi fan's favorite game:

"When ATi's single chip is losing to a dual GPU NVIDIA part, it's not a fair comparison. When ATi is winning with a dual GPU part, it's a fair comparison"

It was pretty clear I was comparing single GPUs, don't be an asshat.

[Rollo]

Originally Posted by lee63

The thing that bothers me the most, all the cards will be gone with in a day or two....and who ever chooses to wait until benchmarks and performance numbers are out probably wont get one.

I asked Rollo earlier in this thread on about availability...he didn't reply, so take that for what its worth

I didn't reply because I have no idea, so the only thing we can take from that is that I don't know. (sorry)

[shadow001]

Originally Posted by lee63

The thing that bothers me the most, all the cards will be gone with in a day or two....and who ever chooses to wait until benchmarks and performance numbers are out probably wont get one.

I asked Rollo earlier in this thread on about availability...he didn't reply, so take that for what its worth

Given that multiple sources now confirm that availability will be limited initially,if you really want to wait for reviews before making the pruchase,the most likely scenario is basically having to wait until later in april or even early may to actually buy one.


The first batch of cards seems to number in at about 10 000 between GTX470 and GTX480's worldwide,and to put that into perspective,when ATI launched the HD5850/5870 cards,they had 50 000 cards ready and available and 250 000 HD 5700 cards as well,and it all dissapeared within the first week of availability,and everybody complained about it for weeks afterwards about being near impossible to find one on store shelves.


Now imagine the situation with only 10 000 fermi cards available at launch.

[shadow001]

Originally Posted by Rollo

Please, not another round of the ATi fan's favorite game:

"When ATi's single chip is losing to a dual GPU NVIDIA part, it's not a fair comparison. When ATi is winning with a dual GPU part, it's a fair comparison"

It was pretty clear I was comparing single GPUs, don't be an asshat.

I think the intent of the post is mostly the price of the cards,assuming Nvidia wants to sell single GPU Fermi cards not much below the price of HD5970's of course,which is their high end product afterall.


If they do,great marketing strategy or not,it looks like it'll be one hell of an uphill battle for Nvidia basically.