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New Nvidia card: Codename "GF100"

I've been holding out for a graphics card since my 8800 ultra is just about hanging in there, I'm not bothered about getting a new one until COD MW2 is released, I can live with lines down the screen for now..

Soo... Nvidia better have some information by then, because coming up to the 20th November is my card decision date :)
 
Notwithstanding absolute performance of the GF100, my main criteria will be idle power consumption, a minimum of three monitors per card, and integration of things like HDMI audio. So far, the 5870 looks very attractive from that criteria.
 
3.2Billion trannies? Won't that have a significant impact on heat?

I'd love to see how it'd perform though. :eek:

And won't the 5870X2 have a 512-bit memory?
 
LeJosh said:
3.2Billion trannies? Won't that have a significant impact on heat?

I'd love to see how it'd perform though. :eek:

And won't the 5870X2 have a 512-bit memory?
Click to expand...

Effectively, yes - the 5870x2 will have two channels of 256bit memory. So the total memory bandwidth will be similar to that of a single card running with a 512bit interface. Of course, by the same logic an "x2" version of this GF100 card would effectively have a 768bit interface.

As for heat, well yes - I think it's reasonable to expect that this card will consume a fair amount of power, given the number of transistors it has. I wouldn't be surprised if it came in at around 220W or so, but that's just my own personal speculation. Of course, all of this power must be dissipated as heat, so a good cooling system will be essential.
 
Ah, yeah. I see now, thanks for clarifying for me. :)

So is this basically their ultra-end card? I know it's all speculation but is it still on NV's behemoth of a chip or is it all dropping down to 40nm?
 
LeJosh said:
So is this basically their ultra-end card? I know it's all speculation but is it still on NV's behemoth of a chip or is it all dropping down to 40nm?
Click to expand...

Yep, this is Nvidia's high end GPU.

It's definitely on a 40nm process, no doubt about that (since it's being manufactured at TSMC). But still, at 3.2Bn transistors it's still going to be a beast of a chip. I would expect it to be similar in size to the original 65nm GTX280, which came in at 576mm^2. We'll have to wait to see the exact size, but somewhere in the region of 550 - 600mm^2 is about what you would expect given the number of transistors on a 40nm process.
 
About time NV went to GDDR5 to be honest. :p They've been on 3 for a long time.

Well time will tell in the future but it does sound like it will be a very very powerful card going by speculations.
 
From the sounds of it. This gfx chip is going to be hot and power thirsty.

Will be interesting to see some more facts from nV.
 
Fudzilla says that the GF100 will be shown today at the nvidia conference, probably at Jen-Hsun Huang's keynote at 1pm.

So, that translates to 9pm UK time. Lets wait and see if it happens, and if so, how much they actually reveal.
 
Duff-Man said:
As for heat, well yes - I think it's reasonable to expect that this card will consume a fair amount of power, given the number of transistors it has. I wouldn't be surprised if it came in at around 220W or so, but that's just my own personal speculation. Of course, all of this power must be dissipated as heat, so a good cooling system will be essential.
Click to expand...

I think i've seen somewhere that it uses 225W on its own.

Looks like all us 800W+ psu users will finally find something that justified our purchase especially if you get two or the GX2. ;)
 
well ive just bought 2 x 5870s, BUT if the new nvidia cards are better by a long way then i have the money in the bank waiting for them.
 
IceWind said:
well ive just bought 2 x 5870s, BUT if the new nvidia cards are better by a long way then i have the money in the bank waiting for them.
Click to expand...

And you had two GTX295s before that? :eek: Good to be you I guess!

I'm going to wait and see, but if the GF100 is MIMD capable then I will go for it in preference to the ATI cards (it will be useful my work...). Now that I have more spare cash, I might be tempted to get two. That might be overkill though, even for a 30" screen.
 
My guess is that they will be between 0-25% quicker than a 5870 with a 33% price difference (i.e. £400), making the 5870 better bang for buck. However, not everyone is interested in bang for buck and some people just want the quickest card. I can see Nvidea stealing the "fastest single GPU" crown by the middle of November.
 
haha, 3.2 billion transistors, considering it will be 50% bigger than ATi's core(minimum it would seem), and ATi have crap yields that have inflated prices by a good £50-100, just imagine what price the Nvidia cards will be.

There is no way, in a million years these will be cheap. Their problem being, if 2x5850's are cheaper, offer more peformance and will be far more widely available, whats the point of a £500 Nvidia card that might be great performance(might not be that good).

The problem being, its a huge monolithic core that from many many rumours, seems to be moving further into the gpgpu market and further away from being a dedicated graphics card. More shaders and paralel processing, but very possibly a lot less specific acceleration for graphics features, meaning it loses a lot of speed in lots of area's.

We've really got to see what happens when it launches as the one thing every rumour and Nvidia themselves agree in, its a completely new architecture, its impossible to say its got X amount more transistors than the GT200 so it will have X amount more performance, they won't be remotely comparable.

As for bandwidth, its really not important, theres only so much you need to move around, bumping memory speeds on the 5870 gives almost no performance increase, while clock speeds scale almost linearly, its not even close to bandwidth limited.
 
Responding to drunkenmaster above:

I agree they won't be cheap.

Why do you think that yields are crap? We have only one rumour to suggest that, which was explicitly denied by nvidia.

I agree that 2x5850s will probably offer better raw performance at a cheaper price. But we all know that a single GPU solution is preferable if possible. Also, for better performance (if needed) we can add a second GF100 GPU, but we can't add another two 5850s (short of buying two 5850x2s). In addition, we all know that SLI / x-fire scaling drops off significantly with more than two GPUs.

I'm not sure about GPGPU focus taking away from the graphics market. Designing a GPU to be ideal for GPGPU applications neccesitates better encapsulation and more cache per cluster. These things should also help push more pixels through, by improving efficiency (even if total theoretical FPU performance is not increased by much). But as you rightly point out, we will have to just wait and see. It's a completely new architecture, so we can't really draw many conclusions about performance based on specs.

Regarding bandwidth, it should become more relevant as the resolution increases. Also, do you have any links to show the effect of separate memory and core clocking with the 5870? I would be surprised if raising the memory bandwidth really does have such a small effect.

Thanks for the well considered post by the way - always nice to have alternate viewpoints floating around :)
 
From what has been leaked there is little point in comparing the RV870 to this new chip. It's 3.2B transistors can't be compared to ATI's card as the rv870 doesn't have cache and NV's card is designed to be a more general purpose card. It could very well have a massive advantage in GPGPU apps, but it might be no faster, or even slower than the 5800 series in DX11 games.
 
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