Blogs Nvidia says Fermi is great, but who knows?

Nvidia says Fermi is great, but who knows?

 

and my girlfriend is the most beautiful woman in the world...but I'm not gonna let you see her...

 

That's OK, I can do it with my eyes closed.

 

keep your hands where I can see them!

 

eyes closed bag over the head same net result

 

Its all good to see and I am sure fermi will be a very good card indeed but to say "hold off buying ati parts" is just out of order. Im still waiting as I have a hole burning in my pocket. Do I get 2x 5970 or do I get 3x fermi cards? Hell.. do I wait and get 2x fermi dual chp cards when they are released? I dont know! LIfes full of complications at the minute, its about time Nvidia pulled there fingers out ad got this all sorted.

Andy

 

Let me save your pockets by taking that money out of them and I...ahem...promise that you will get a significant return on it in due course.

Legal stuff - all of the above by me is a lie and it's more likely that I'll spend the dough and pair of swanky new 24" monitors to give me a 3 screen Eyefinity setup having decided a few months ago that I might as well get a 5850 and be done with worrying about what NVIDIA might produce one day as yet unannounced

 

the price of Fermi will be determining factor in whether it is a success. if they can manage a product that beats 5870 and release it at £240, undercutting 5870 by a lot, then it'd be a winner.

but then, it's nVidia we are talking about, with Fermi 2 being the same GPU as fermi 1, just a redesigned cooler

 

Fair enough. No point doing their advertising for them till some benchmarks are available after all. Even if you've got a wad of cash burning a hole in your pocket I don't see that it can hurt to wait a couple months and see what the competition can offer

 

If you had a product that beat the competition on performance would you sell it for 20% less as well, especially if the competition's product was still hard to find on shelves? There's no way nVidia will undercut ATI unless they need to match them on a price-to-performance level.

 

Well...if Fermi's good...the price of the 5870 will go down.
if Fermi's THAT good...I might buy one.
Either way, I win

 

Just to be clear, Nvidia never said 'don't buy ATI parts' - it's well aware that doing so would be out of order. But by saying its forthcoming product will be excellent, that's the implication (as i said, the inference is there).

 

just hope the yields are ok.. that's alot of transistors

 

There is no chance that the top end versions (GTX360/GTX380) will be that low. TSMC is having some problems with its fab process for these cards, and since the die is so gigantic, the number of chips good that Nvidia gets back is very little compared to the HD58xx chips.

There have been reports that the production is so complicated, Nvidia is having problems getting chips with all 512 CUDA cores in working order. We do not know if they are getting any back at all, and if they are, how many. As a result, the GTX360 will probably be using defective chips with only 448 cores enabled.

The general consensus on the XS forums is that the GTX380 will be around $650.

 

Was reading this on another site about fermi quite interesting
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I've got screen shots of the benchmarks but they aren't really indicative of final performance.

The drivers and firmware on the cards are very beta and sure to show decent improvement before launch. All the GPU itself, hardware wise needs, is a final fan and packaging. Fan and packaging can be finalized in a week so it's drivers and software that need polish.

Figure that for the first time they have parallel geometric processing and have to invent the way to use it correctly. Then think how long quads have taken for programmers to use the cores. Nvidia is doing that in a very short time frame without the benefit of the computing community in general contributing code.

That's a pretty daunting task.

Given the 80(ish)% increase in performance over GTX-285 with rough drivers and firmware, crappy game support for what Fermi brings to the table new, we are probably looking at a 100% performance increase in raw FPS.

Once game developers dip into the cornucopia that is Fermi we'll likely see further gains.

I know if I were in game developing I'd be drooling to get Fermi firing on all 8 cylinders.

A contact tells me that nothing will currently show off Fermi's Tessellation like Unigine's new bench so maybe Unigine had a clue into Fermi's design.

Rumors still abound about poor yield at the foundry but I was told that "Fermi will be surprisingly affordable" so I'm not sure if yield problems are an issue.

Nvidia didn't provide a slide deck on APEX which is their in house programmer GUI for PhysX that they just give away. We saw them put PhysX on a moving figure in about 4 minutes so it makes it easy to include PhysX into games. that might be a response to OpenCL on the horizon. They already support OpenCL but here's the hitch.

Game developers might not accept OpenCL as readily as PhysX because if something blows up who do they go to it's open source code. PhysX buggers up Nvidia sends an optimization team to support the in game implementation.

Personally I like both camps but lets face facts. 58xx is a good solid GPU but it was a throw twice as much components at the GPU based on the same design we already had for a long time solution. But it's a very good component stuff. The saving grace is ATI is due a core revamp and Tessellation and DX11 should drag long enough to give them time to develop a new core.

That's if the Geometry gamble Nvidia made pays off. There's the off chance that developers will look at it and say most games are console ports and we have no use for that. In which case Fermi still has an 80 - 100% performance increase.

In the mean time, at launch, they will have the new core revamp and take back the performance crown with a generational leap in core technology over ATI.

Gotta love competition it's good for everyone.
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Quadzilla i7

 

I can see that easy.. nvidia had issues with the 280 on release too with a batch of silicon that ran too hot.. for 650 in todays economy it better come with some tits

 

Nvidia SAYS alot, thats their problem.

 

I wouldn't be surprised if they keep ahead of fermi with the headstart they've had.. opencl is the only way to go

lol yeah dcyph3r exactly

 

you know how they say people who drive massive cars are just trying to make up for something? maybe fermi is all "hey look i got 3 trillion transistors!"

lol jk. they need to seriously get those cards out and push prices down.

 

Anyone else sometimes feel that having both ATI and Nvidia using TMSC, a crap manufacturer which simply cannot perform as required, is a bad thing?