Friday, April 9, 2010

GPU News Update : Nvidia GTX 470 and GTX 480

Its all around the web now, reviews, critics, fanboys between two big companies yapping who is best currently !
Like I expected, Nvidia is gonna do something within Q1 of 2010 else they're loosing a big piece of action in the current graphic card profit cake, AMD is gonna make big bucks out of their absent in this competition.

Ever since AMD launched their HD5850 and HD5870, the gaming scene went mad with DX11 support which adds numerous new capabilities compare to previous generation graphics card, especially tessellation, DirectX 11 and anti-aliasing by maintaining performance

Nvidia GTX 4xx series, a direct competition to the AMD HD 5xxx series, especially the HD5850 and the HD5870. The Nvidia GTX480 will be competing against the AMD HD5870 and the Nvidia GTX470 is a head on to the AMD HD5850.

Based on a few review sites, there's a mix reaction on the new Nvidia Fermi architecture based cards. The performance of the new GTX4xx cards score around 10% faster than the AMD HD5850 and HD5870 on most tests, especially performing faster on high resolution with high anti-alias on, however the cards is pretty warm (or Hot !) around 95 Degree Celsius on full load. (quite normal for high-end card to reach 90c on full load, but not good enough comparing to some equally performing cards)

The new Nvidia cards doesn't fully feature the full 512 Stream Processors as promised before, somehow only 480 are activated on the GTX480 due to some yield problem with the current Fermi chip. Nonetheless, it performed well on most tests....excluding its initial pricing and temperature performance(not impressive).

Now, we can see the specs below :

Graphics cards NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 1,536MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 1,280MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 1,792MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 1,024MB ATI Radeon HD 5970 2,048MB ATI Radeon HD 5870 1,048MB ATI Radeon HD 5850 1,024MB
General clock 700MHz 607MHz 576MHz 648MHz 725MHz 850MHz 725MHz
Shader clock 1,401MHz 1,215MHz 1,242MHz 1,476MHz 725MHz 850MHz 725MHz
Memory clock (effective) 3,696MHz 3,348MHz 1,998MHz 2,484MHz 4,000MHz 4,800MHz 4,000MHz
Memory interface and size 384-bit, 1,536MB GDDR5 320-bit, 1,280MB GDDR5 896-bit (2 x 448-bit), 1,792MB, GDDR3 512-bit, 1,024MB, GDDR3 512-bit (2 x 256-bit), 2,048MB 256-bit, 1,024MB, GDDR5 256-bit, 1,024MB, GDDR5
Memory bandwidth 177.4GB/s 133.9GB/s 2 x 111.9GB/s 159GB/s 2 x 128GB/s 153.6GB/s 128GB/s
Manufacturing process TSMC, 40nm TSMC, 40nm TSMC, 55nm TSMC, 55nm TSMC, 40nm TSMC, 40nm TSMC, 40nm
DirectX/ Shader Model DX11, 5.0 DX11, 5.0 DX10, 4.0 DX10, 4.0 DX11, 5.0 DX11, 5.0 DX11, 5.0
Vertex, fragment, geometry shading (shared) 480 FP32 scalar ALUs, MADD + MUL  448 FP32 scalar ALUs, MADD  + MUL  480 FP32 scalar ALUs, MADD + MUL  240 FP32 scalar ALUs, MADD + MUL  3,200 FP32 scalar ALUs, MADD + MUL 1,600 FP32 scalar ALUs, MADD + MUL  1,440 FP32 scalar ALUs, MADD + MUL 
Single-precision GFLOPS (single-issue) 1,345 1,088 1,192 708 4,176 2,720 2,088
Texturing 60ppc bilinear
30ppc FP16
15ppc FP32
56ppc bilinear
28ppc FP16
14ppc FP32
160ppc bilinear
80ppc FP16
40ppc FP32
80ppc bilinear
40ppc FP16
20ppc FP32
160ppc bilinear
80ppc FP16
40ppc FP32
80ppc bilinear
40ppc FP16
20ppc FP32
72ppc bilinear
36ppc FP16
18ppc FP32
ROPs 48 40 56 32 64 32 32
GPixels/s throughput 33.6 24.28 32.26 20.74 46.4 27.2 23.2
GTexel/s bilinear 42 33.99 92.2 51.84 116 68 52.2
Board power (max) 250W 215W 289W 183W 294W 188W 170W
Multi-GPU Three-way SLI Three-way SLI Two-way SLI Three-way SLI Two-way XFire Four-way XFire Four-way XFire
Board length 10.5in 9.5in 10.5in 10.5in 12in 11in 9.5in
Connectors (native) 2x dual-link DVI
Mini-HDMI
2x dual-link DVI
Mini-HDMI
2 x dual-link DVI, HDTV-out,HDMI 2x dual-link DVI
HDTV-out
2x dual-link DVI
Mini-DisplayPort
2x dual-link DVI
HDMI, DisplayPort, 
2x dual-link DVI
HDMI, DisplayPort, 
Etail price  £440+ £299+ £350 £285 £550 £310 £225

*taken from Hexus.net

As you can see, it sucked so much power until you'll need at least an 600 watts PSU, if not mistaken with at least 40 amps for the direct power feed from PSU to the card.

Still, it proved to be the most fastest single GPU graphics card on the market side to side or even above the AMD HD5850/5870 cards in terms of performance.

If Nvidia starts to roll out some mid ranged cards, the current card prices will plummet and soon, people with 2 year old cards are able to upgrade at bargain price, especially the high end AMD HD4890 and the Nvidia GTX275 series cards.

On the price, you have to convert back to your currency for estimation and also the price may vary due third party manufacturer's pricing.

Well, I'll post some proprietary tech used by AMD and Nvidia to convince people buying their stuffs soon, especially how they works and why you need and wont need.