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Nvidia GF104 goes for high frequency with 256 shaders

Final8y

Final8y

Final8y

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GF104 will be the first fresh graphics circuit of Nvidia's Fermi family. The GF100 GPU found in the GeForce GTX 400 series house 512 CUDA processors through 16 multiprocessor clusters. GeForce GTX 480 uses 15 of these for 480 CUDA processors and little brother GTX 470 settles for 13 clusters and 444 CUDA processors. Even if you shut down parts of the circuit the transistors are still there and result in high manufacturing costs, and makes the chip unnecessarily complicated. With GF104 wee how Nvidia makes changes on the transistor level with GeForce Fermi.

With 8 multiprocessor clusters and 256 CUDA processors the circuits becomes less complicated and a lot cheaper to manufacture. According to our sources the CUDA processors has been optimized for the rendering portion of the chip.

Beside reducing performance Nvidia cuts GF100 more or less in half and this has a lot of positive side effects. The circuit becomes cheaper to make and the power consumption easier to handle. Thanks to 40 nanometer technology and a less complicated GPU the frequencies can be boosted a lot higher than with GF100. According sources GF104 will be capable of 900 MHz and up when overclocking, and even if we don't expect these kind of clocks from factory it bodes well for overclockers wanting to take a swing at Nvidia's new card.

Exactly when GF104 will appear and what the cards will be called is less certain. There have been stories about GeForce GTS 4x0, but also GeForce GTX 460. More information isn't available at the time of writing, but GF104 should be capable of high frequencies for a mid-range circuit.
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nordichardware
 
Very interesting, seems to move them more towards ATI's idea of smaller dies at higher frequencies.

Take the following with a pinch of salt, of course we dont what the final specs will be:

So 256 cores at 900mhz compared to 480 cores at 700mhz so very roughly the GF104 has ~69% the performance of GTX480.

So GTX490 (2xGF104), given a 70% sli scaling factor, would be ~117% the performance of a GTX480.

Techpowerup reports the 5970 is 128% the performance of a GTX480@1920x1200 so I suppose GTX490 wont be faster than the 5970
 
Less, MUCH less, its 900Mhz suggested WHEN OVERCLOCKING, its probably 800Mhz at stock, if that, meaning its a half speed part give or take 5%, and because of lower bus, less memory, it will be worse at high res and run out of memory much sooner.

SLI/xfire scaling reduces when using a 2xgpu on one card type situation, I expected a dual core gf104 based card would have trouble beating a 480gtx properly in most situations. Its a fairly viable card for producing a 480gtx type performance card, at a significantly reduced cost in noticeably higher quantities, but if gf104 is another 2 months away from supply on shelves, and the gf104 dual cpu card even further away, well, you start getting VERY close the 6xxx series refresh.

Its also not at all a move towards smaller dies at higher frequencies, AMD uses lower frequencies, the vast majority of Nvidia's core is running at, 480gtx, at 1400Mhz, last gen, 1500-1600Mhz, AMD, 850Mhz. Likewise, this is the MIDRANGE card Nvidia are bringing, not a new high end. AMD's midend card is half the size of the 5870, and therefore, will be massively smaller than the GF104.
 
straxusii said:
Very interesting, seems to move them more towards ATI's idea of smaller dies at higher frequencies.

Take the following with a pinch of salt, of course we dont what the final specs will be:

So 256 cores at 900mhz compared to 480 cores at 700mhz so very roughly the GF104 has ~69% the performance of GTX480.

So GTX490 (2xGF104), given a 70% sli scaling factor, would be ~117% the performance of a GTX480.

Techpowerup reports the 5970 is 128% the performance of a GTX480@1920x1200 so I suppose GTX490 wont be faster than the 5970
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The thing is using higher frequencies scales much better than more clusters due to efficiency reasons. And SLI often sales more than 70% (don't know the latest figures but in some games I have seen 90%...).
 
As always, price is the key. If Nvidia launch these at £100 to £110 they will fly off the shelf.

But that's unlikely.............
 
wolvers69 said:
There's no way NV would release a dual chip card that is slower than the 5970. It just aint gonna happen.
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They haven't got much choice have they?

A 5850 matches a gtx470 and a 5970 is better than two 5850's so unless they are going to release a dual chip card which is better than two gtx470 glued together, I can't see that happening.
 
Dutch Guy said:
Maybe SLI is more efficient than CF ??
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Its not, and it won't have 2x470gtx's on it, that would make for a max tdp of well, not much shy of 500W, probably 420-430W in most games. At BEST it will be 2x470gtx's heavily downclocked, in reality its very unlikely to be 470gtx's, but more like 465gtx's if it was something based on the gf100 core, if its infact based on the gf104, then it hasn't got a hope in hell of being fater than a 5970.
 
GTX470 in SLI does beat the 5850 in CF in many if not all cases and generally matches or beats the 5870 in CF - especially with 256+ drivers. However even if they could get the equivalent of 2x fullspeed 470 cores on a single PCB it wouldn't be spectacularly faster than the 5970 and a lot later to the market, more expensive and a lot more power demanding making it fairly unattractive in comparison.
 
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Greebo said:
They haven't got much choice have they?
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I'm sure they'll just skip the dual chip card this gen. I can't see how it's going to be viable.

Rroff said:
GTX470 in SLI does beat the 5850 in CF in many if not all cases
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That's a typically green tinted view Rroff. They trade blows depending on the game, for example BC2 and Dirt is a win for 5850cf, and considering the price difference that's a win for the 5850s as well.
 
Depends on the benchmarks you look at. Any recent benchmarks on 197 or 256+ drivers show the GTX470 in SLI beating the 5850 CF in BC2 and Dirt 2 and only losing to the 5870 CF.
 
Well the Hardocp one uses 197 drivers so that ruins that theory! :p In fact, in SC:C 5850cf opens a can of woop ass on 470SLI. :D

It appears that it's only in NV sponsored games that SLI scales better than CF, I suspect that it's more likely that CF is impeded in some way in those games. There's no getting away from the fact that 5850CF is way better VFM.
 
The hardocp results are iffy at best. i.e. they hide away the fact that you can double the AA quality and get the same or very close performance as the 58xx CF in a good number of titles and the apples to apples results are handpicked to show the result they want.

EDIT: am I missing something or have hardocp pulled most of their apples to apples results for the GTX4x0 SLI cards and re-run a lot of the highest playable setting results?
 
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Are you suggesting that the article is biased towards the ATI set up? Have you read their conclusion?

You're still ignoring the fact that two 470s are, at the very least, 565 squids.
 
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