** The Official Nvidia GeForce 'Pascal' Thread - for general gossip and discussions **

[Boomstick777]

NVIDIA Pascal and Volta GPUs Now Supported By Latest GeForce 358.66 Drivers – Also Adds Preliminary Support For Vulkan API

Some surprising information has been found in NVIDIA’s latest GeForce drivers in regards to their upcoming Pascal and Volta GPUs. As we know, NVIDIA keeps on adding preliminary support for their new graphics cards in GeForce drivers and the recently launched GeForce 358.66 driver has exposed some new information about the next generation NVIDIA GPUs

Read more: http://wccftech.com/nvidia-pascal-v...rivers-adds-support-vulkan-api/#ixzz3qYGdA1jD

 

[LambChop]

I'm salivating already, come on Nvidia

 

[Seanspeed]

NVIDIA Pascal and Volta GPUs Now Supported By Latest GeForce 358.66 Drivers – Also Adds Preliminary Support For Vulkan API

Says site that is known for making stuff up when news is slow.

 

[Orangey]

Volta is a 10nm chip, it showing up in drivers doesn't mean it's suddenly coming out next week.

 

[Seanspeed]

Volta is a 10nm chip, it showing up in drivers doesn't mean it's suddenly coming out next week.

Nobody has 10nm chips. Not even engineering samples.

Intel will likely be the first to that benchmark and even they aren't there yet.

 

[Orangey]

Nobody has 10nm chips. Not even engineering samples.

Woosh.

 

[Troezar]

Before we go down the rabbit hole too far I'm really looking forward to these new Nvidia gpus and that's as someone who's only ever owned AMD gpus.

 

[pmc25]

Volta is a 10nm chip, it showing up in drivers doesn't mean it's suddenly coming out next week.

Volta isn't currently 10nm and certainly won't be at launch. It's been so heavily delayed that they need the HPC versions out ASAP, i.e. Q2 '17 at the absolute latest. They'll be trying to make Q1 if they possibly can. If it's not out by then it's probably useless as the lead it's meant to regain them in compute instead of being brief will already have been lost to AMD GPUs / APUs / FPGAs / Intel FPGAs by the time it's in customers' hands. Consumer could be 10nm, but it probably won't arrive until H2 '18.

 

[Orangey]

TSMC claim 10nm will be in volume late next year so I don't think they are exactly panicking, they have Pascal until then too.

 

[Seanspeed]

Woosh.

Are you going to explain it to me or just treat me like I'm some kid who cant understand what the grown ups are talking about?

 

[pmc25]

TSMC claim 10nm will be in volume late next year so I don't think they are exactly panicking, they have Pascal until then too.

I heard pigs fly and unicorns exist too.

 

[Rroff]

Are you going to explain it to me or just treat me like I'm some kid who cant understand what the grown ups are talking about?

nVidia have huge compute arrays that simulate the hardware they are developing, just because volta doesn't exist in hardware form doesn't mean software development of it isn't ongoing.

 

[Seanspeed]

nVidia have huge compute arrays that simulate the hardware they are developing, just because volta doesn't exist in hardware form doesn't mean software development of it isn't ongoing.

Possible, but equally ridiculous to proclaim that Volta GPU's are supported by 'x' driver in that case.

 

[bru]

Possible, but equally ridiculous to proclaim that Volta GPU's are supported by 'x' driver in that case.

Funny that I haven't seen anyone proclaim anything, a site has ripped apart the new drivers and seen what could possibly be a reference to future generations of GPU's that all.

 

[AdrianIscariot]

Deciding whether to upgrade now or wait for Pascal is tough. There is so much conflicting information. One source will say that Pascal is 10 times faster than the current generation of products, others list the actual, in-game increase as being akin to the jump from Fermi to Maxwell. I guess the sensible thing to do is wait and see, then make the call based on how much cheaper the Maxwell cards get upon release.

But thinking with the head when it comes to GPUs is hard!

 

[Rroff]

Deciding whether to upgrade now or wait for Pascal is tough. There is so much conflicting information. One source will say that Pascal is 10 times faster than the current generation of products, others list the actual, in-game increase as being akin to the jump from Fermi to Maxwell. I guess the sensible thing to do is wait and see, then make the call based on how much cheaper the Maxwell cards get upon release.

But thinking with the head when it comes to GPUs is hard!

For future DX12 heavy titles, etc. there is likely to be a substantial performance increase on the newer architecture, for contemporary and older games the performance increase will be much less.

The 10x faster is likely some silly performance per watt scenario highly specific to one application (I believe relevant to computing certain data structures) its certainly not going to be the overall ingame performance increase.

EDIT: The "realistic" on paper figures for a straight up rework to shrink a 28nm GPU design to 16nm FF+ ignoring any optimisation for the new process or architectural changes shows potential for a 45% performance increase (at the same power level) however looking at ARM's data it seems their Cortex reworks are currently showing a ~34% increase from 28nm to 16nm FF+ :S

 

[FoxEye]

Yeah the 10x thing was compute performance. And probably even then a specific benchmark within the realm of compute performance.

Most of us are expecting between +50% to 2x performance of Maxwell. Or at least this is what might be /possible/.

But if nV want Pascal to last two gens, they might give us +25% now, and another +25% in the 2nd iteration of Pascal (1100 series).

Thus there really is no way to know what perf increases are coming.

 

[Kaapstad]

Yeah the 10x thing was compute performance. And probably even then a specific benchmark within the realm of compute performance.

Most of us are expecting between +50% to 2x performance of Maxwell. Or at least this is what might be /possible/.

But if nV want Pascal to last two gens, they might give us +25% now, and another +25% in the 2nd iteration of Pascal (1100 series).

Thus there really is no way to know what perf increases are coming.

If small Pascal is first up it won't be much faster than the GM200 cards.

 

[Twincam]

Will pascal still be able to run on a pice 2 slot?. Although I'm thinking of a whole new PC mid next year anyhow. But if a new gpu extends my systems life I might leave it till the year after.

 

[Kaapstad]

Will pascal still be able to run on a pice 2 slot?. Although I'm thinking of a whole new PC mid next year anyhow. But if a new gpu extends my systems life I might leave it till the year after.

It should do as PCI-E is backwards compatible but you may need to upgrade the bios on your motherboard when Pascal arrives.