ATI next gen tapes out

CaptainRAVE · 23 Apr 2010 at 13:51

mrix said:
I guess you have not played Battlefield Bad Company 2

Cheers
mrix

Or Metro, Just Cause 2....the list goes on.

Greebo · 23 Apr 2010 at 13:53

DeeJayCee said:
I don't get what all the excitement is about. Charlie has indeed been right on a number of points but he has also been proved wrong on so many too!!!

Fermi isn't really a flop as such, I plan to get a couple myself.

The ATI refresh isnst really that big a deal either as it's just going to be the same old architecture team red will spew out with some very minor modifications to the pipeline, hopefully bringing much needed tesselation and AA performance.

As for prices, not much wi change and things will be compatible. ATI will be cheaper as they don't include much innovation in their engineering, opting for high click rates. And you will still, as always, have to pay higher for the added engineering efforts for an nvidia card.

Value consumers will still go for atiand enthusiasts will sti go for nvidia.

And at the end of the day we will all be happy with our buying choices and will still be playing some cool games!!

Who genuinly cares about any of this crap? Sun is shining and there is cold beer available

There's as much untruth and venom in that post as Charlie does in his! Are you Nvidia's equivalent of Charlie?

CaptainRAVE · 23 Apr 2010 at 13:59

DeeJayCee said:
Value consumers will still go for atiand enthusiasts will sti go for nvidia.

Um, NO. Fanboys will go with their respective brand and the people with common sense will go with the one that suits their needs e.g. 2D/3D performance, price, temps etc.

jorzeh · 23 Apr 2010 at 14:04

CaptainRAVE said:
Um, NO. Fanboys will go with their respective brand and the people with common sense will go with the one that suits their needs e.g. 2D/3D performance, price, temps etc.

+1

People who care to Evaulate the products they are purchasing will allways go for Cons / Pros to price point.

They call us Free thinking people.

jigger · 23 Apr 2010 at 14:12

Zarf said:
You are assuming, here, that yields are around 15%, when even back on the A2 revision of the die in november they were getting around 25%. (http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2010/1/21/nvidia-gf100-fermi-silicon-cost-analysis.aspx)
The shipping A3 is almost certainly better than that, up above 30%. which puts usable chips at a cost of at most $150. $20 for the PCB, $20 for board components, $40 for 12 GDDR5 chips, $25 HSF, $10 assembly, $10 packaging. My estimate puts it at around $275 to manufacture. With a $349 rrp on the GTX470 and $499 on the GTX480 there's a profit margin on both cards. Those margins may be slim compared to what nVidia is used to, but they arn't bankrupting themselves by losing hundreds of dollars on every card.

Until someone leaks the final yield numbers there's no way to work out what the actual total manufacturing costs are.

Your manufacturing numbers are just way off I'm afraid.
The A2-A3 rework did nothing to improve the very poor yields, so its more likely Nvidia are more sub 20% than over 30%, with the 470 making up the majority of the numbers.

jigger · 23 Apr 2010 at 14:18

What sort of performance increase should we expect ?

We seen a decent performance jump from the 4870-4890 refresh, but this sounds like a quite a major rework this time.

SirCanealot · 23 Apr 2010 at 14:41

I personally hope that NVidia sort Fermi out for 28nm. I mean, as much as we like hitting on NVidia now they're down, as people say, it won't be good for us if they fail.

I mean, imagine if Fermi had been a MASSIVE success... We'd be looking at £150 5830s and £180 5050s already! Instead we're just looking at more price increases

I also think both companies really need to consider that we're going to get a console refresh in the next couple of years or so, too. Imagine if they made Playstation 4 tomorrow, I'm sure Sony could easily drop in something like a 5750 and it'd be cheap, cool, power sipping and FAST (compared to the 7800 gt in the Ps3, anyway

). Fermi is exactly the sort of processor that would never go into a console. It's power hungry, so it'd require a console to have a large PSU, and the larger PSU and the larger processor itself would add TONS of heat.

I'll be insanely surprised if ATI (especially at 28nm, we're going to start getting crazy performance out of budget chips, imo!) don't have a very strong chip in the next XBox or PS, but I really hope NVidia start to compete properly before then...

p0rks0da · 23 Apr 2010 at 15:12

SirCanealot said:
I also think both companies really need to consider that we're going to get a console refresh in the next couple of years or so, too. Imagine if they made Playstation 4 tomorrow, I'm sure Sony could easily drop in something like a 5750 and it'd be cheap, cool, power sipping and FAST (compared to the 7800 gt in the Ps3, anyway ). Fermi is exactly the sort of processor that would never go into a console. It's power hungry, so it'd require a console to have a large PSU, and the larger PSU and the larger processor itself would add TONS of heat.

I'll be insanely surprised if ATI (especially at 28nm, we're going to start getting crazy performance out of budget chips, imo!) don't have a very strong chip in the next XBox or PS, but I really hope NVidia start to compete properly before then...

Xbox 360 is scheduled to have a 10 year lifespan now, so we have more like 5 years to wait unfortunately (yay 5 more years of shoddy ports coming to the pc!).

Also i don't think the Xbox 360 or PS4 will have a discrete GPU, with all the work AMD and Intel are putting into 'fusion' chipsets i think something along those lines will be more likely. There is quite a significant cost saving in going that route. Who knows what the landscape will look like in 5 years from now though, that's a hell of a long time!

TheRealDeal · 23 Apr 2010 at 15:24

p0rks0da said:
Xbox 360 is scheduled to have a 10 year lifespan now, so we have more like 5 years to wait unfortunately (yay 5 more years of shoddy ports coming to the pc!).

Also i don't think the Xbox 360 or PS4 will have a discrete GPU, with all the work AMD and Intel are putting into 'fusion' chipsets i think something along those lines will be more likely. There is quite a significant cost saving in going that route. Who knows what the landscape will look like in 5 years from now though, that's a hell of a long time!

A lifespan of 10 years does not mean new consoles will come out after 10 years of xbox 360 or ps3 it just means thats how long they will be on the market for. The ps2 had a lifespan of 10 years set by sony but is still being sold well after the ps3's launch and sony say it will still be sold until developers stop making games for it. I think 2013 has been rumored around the net as the time we may see the next gen xbox/ps but these are only rumours.

James J · 23 Apr 2010 at 16:10

Jokester said:
The problem is, in the FX days they were actually selling and making cards, that looks to not be happening in any significant quantity with Fermi.

We still havent seen the mid range fermi cards yet and these could prove to be the "make or break" cards for the company. I'm expecting them to be at LEAST as fast as the 5770 card and priced very similar which could make them very interesting for SLI users due to how SLI scales compared to xfire.

We shall see though.

James J · 23 Apr 2010 at 16:13

TheRealDeal said:
A lifespan of 10 years does not mean new consoles will come out after 10 years of xbox 360 or ps3 it just means thats how long they will be on the market for. The ps2 had a lifespan of 10 years set by sony but is still being sold well after the ps3's launch and sony say it will still be sold until developers stop making games for it. I think 2013 has been rumored around the net as the time we may see the next gen xbox/ps but these are only rumours.

Probably quite a plausable date as dx 11 will be fully established and there will probably be dx12/opengl 4+ cards out as well. All a console would need is some serious shading and tesselation power and it would be able to look as good as the top end pc's of today in the latest games (instead of muddy horrible textures and a res smaller than an oriental blokes todger -.-)

sjcf1 · 23 Apr 2010 at 18:23

James J said:
Probably quite a plausable date as dx 11 will be fully established and there will probably be dx12/opengl 4+ cards out as well. All a console would need is some serious shading and tesselation power and it would be able to look as good as the top end pc's of today in the latest games (instead of muddy horrible textures and a res smaller than an oriental blokes todger -.-)

That though would require a more complex GPU, more complex coding for the games, and more problems probably.

James J · 23 Apr 2010 at 18:35

sjcf1 said:
That though would require a more complex GPU, more complex coding for the games, and more problems probably.

sure but they have 3 years to crack on with it

JeffyB · 23 Apr 2010 at 20:18

James J said:
We still havent seen the mid range fermi cards yet and these could prove to be the "make or break" cards for the company. I'm expecting them to be at LEAST as fast as the 5770 card and priced very similar which could make them very interesting for SLI users due to how SLI scales compared to xfire.

We shall see though.

When you say compared to xfire scaling what do you mean? 5xxx series cards scale very well with a around 60% boost minimum and are very close to double the single card performance in some games.

Owenb · 23 Apr 2010 at 20:41

p0rks0da said:
I'm having a hard time understanding where these numbers come from, from the reports that were released recently operating income for AMD's graphics segment was $47m for Q1/2010 and $50m for Q4/2009. That means a total income of $97m for the last 6 months. If they shipped 6 million DX11 cards in the last 6 months then were are talking about less than $16 per card shipped average (considering that they would have also shifted a fair number of non-DX11 cards in the same period). Also bear in mind that operating income does not included taxes.

The $47m is profit, not revenue which is closer to $400m. Also ATi don't sell cards, they sell chips which probably vary from $15 to $100.

James J · 23 Apr 2010 at 21:07

JeffyB said:
When you say compared to xfire scaling what do you mean? 5xxx series cards scale very well with a around 60% boost minimum and are very close to double the single card performance in some games.

check the sli 480 results vs xfire'd 5870s. SLI still scales better at the moment(maybe drivers, maybe hardware - currently unknown why)

RavenXXX2 · 23 Apr 2010 at 21:10

Nah, it scales well in Nvidia titles but overall they are on par and according to the below review 5870's scale better.

This solution is particularly suited for resolutions beyond 1920 x 1200, more towards 30" displays with 2560 x 1600 pixels resolution. On lower resolutions, it tends to not offer much of an advantage over having the single card, or other competing single-card solutions such as the ATI Radeon HD 5970. The HD 5970 is the strongest contender, since it ends up being just 13% slower, with less than half the energy footprint. This is what makes performance figures of GTX 480 SLI less than impressive as a solution. With multi-GPU scaling, as expected, GTX 480 scales better with increase in resolutions over the single GTX 480. However, compared to Radeon HD 5870 in its 2-card CrossFire setup, the scaling is a little worse (overall 41% for GTX 480 SLI vs. 43% for HD 5870 CrossFire), an area that needs attention from NVIDIA.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_480_SLI/31.html

Rimsy · 23 Apr 2010 at 22:59

p0rks0da said:
Xbox 360 is scheduled to have a 10 year lifespan now, so we have more like 5 years to wait unfortunately (yay 5 more years of shoddy ports coming to the pc!).

Also i don't think the Xbox 360 or PS4 will have a discrete GPU, with all the work AMD and Intel are putting into 'fusion' chipsets i think something along those lines will be more likely. There is quite a significant cost saving in going that route. Who knows what the landscape will look like in 5 years from now though, that's a hell of a long time!

Which makes anyone with half a brain treat this whole NV/ATI performance GPU battle with a shrug of the shoulders.. who cares? There will be hardly any games coming out in the coming years that will push existing offerings. The golden age of PC gaming is over.. its all about mass apeal soulless console offerings now... :mad:

AMG · 23 Apr 2010 at 23:20

I have to agree there, its a big shame but not everyone knows how to turn on a PC and use it need alone install stuff, and troubleshoot problems...something that is everyday life for us.

but at the same time they do not know what they are missing.

I can see why console has its benifits, you just turn it on and play and it will unless its melted itself to the chassis( 360

) but thats long gone now.

I think I will miss this gen nothing is making my two HD4890s cry, the only thing crying seems to be the CPU :mad:

p0rks0da · 23 Apr 2010 at 23:42

Owenb said:
The $47m is profit, not revenue which is closer to $400m. Also ATi don't sell cards, they sell chips which probably vary from $15 to $100.

It's operating income like i said, which is not the same as profit, since it hasn't been taxed for a start. Who knows what the individual chips sell for, i have never seen those numbers listed anywhere, but if you divide their operating income for the last 2 quarters by 6 million (DX11 cards shipped) then you arrive at $16 a chip before tax. Considering they must have also sold a lot of non-DX11 cards then the average must be lower than that in reality.

You could argue their profits are much higher if you include R&D spending as profit, but that makes no sense. It's just another expense like anything else that's needed to run a business (wages etc..).