ATI... erm, AMD vs nVidia!

[MadFrog]

Well, I kind of enjoy the fact that the need to upgrade has halted a little. Gives a PC a much longer gaming lifetime. I'z lovez it.

[Mystical_Titan]

Um... which planet do you live on? The need to upgrade is stronger than ever!

[MadFrog]

Um... which planet do you live on? The need to upgrade is stronger than ever!

Nay... The WANT to upgrade is stronger than ever.

[Mystical_Titan]

Need / want... when it comes to gaming, they're so close.

[ADT]

Need / want... when it comes to gaming, they're so close.

Nope ATI vs Nvidia, haha nvidia needs to up their game a bit , because ATI is dominating ATM

[MadFrog]

Need / want... when it comes to gaming, they're so close.

Nope ATI vs Nvidia, haha nvidia needs to up their game a bit , because ATI is dominating ATM

Give it time. A few years ago, it seemed that ATI was destroyed, now they are tops. nVidia can turn the tables again. This is why the war between ATI and nVidia is even more exciting thn the one between AMD and Intel.

[ADT]

Need / want... when it comes to gaming, they're so close.

Nope ATI vs Nvidia, haha nvidia needs to up their game a bit , because ATI is dominating ATM

Give it time. A few years ago, it seemed that ATI was destroyed, now they are tops. nVidia can turn the tables again. This is why the war between ATI and nVidia is even more exciting thn the one between AMD and Intel.

True true

[Mystical_Titan]

The basic pattern for both AMD vs. Intel and ATI vs. nVidia battles is that each dominates at some point before being overtaken by the other one before dominating again after a while. Sometimes one side just stays on top a bit longer than the other, that's all. That's how it's always gone and I don't see it changing anytime soon.

[D3PART3D]

You know, from a marketing perspective, they may even need each other. In an industry as fast-paced as the GPU market, the appeal is a whole lot about having the latest and greatest, and there's nothing better at proving how awesome your GPU is than having it defeat a rival company's awesome GPU.

At least that's how it is for me, anyway. Since AMD got nuked by Intel my desire to upgrade my CPU every year has shrunken.

[Mystical_Titan]

Mmm... good observation...

+1

[A person]

Mystical_Titan I need a new os and just wanted to know wtf is DSP

[Mystical_Titan]

DSP is when an OS that is sold with a new machine. The OS can only be installed and used on that specific PC. I think DSP and OEM is basically the same thing. Then you get FPP, which is Full Packaged Product. It's the same OS, but you can install it on any PC you want (obviously only one PC at a time).

[R3D]

i for one loves the fact that the race between manufactures has been very close this past two years. from a pricing perspective its brilliant cause when the GT200 series came out they were all but unbeatable but once the RV770 came out their prices dropped dramatically. same will go for the newer breed of GPU's cause for now ATI can charge what they want for the RV870 cause simply there is no GPU that can compete on performance or price. But that will change one the new Fermi GPU's are out. im counting on that so i can purchase a strong single GPU fermi.

[Puento]

hope them fermi's will arrive soon. . .

[justinufo]

Nvidia’s Next-Generation Graphics Processor in Volume Production – Company.

Nvidia GF100 Graphics Chip Finally In Mass Production

[01/08/2010 07:34 PM]
by Anton Shilov
At the Consumer Electronics Show Nvidia Corp.’s chief executive officer said that the highly-anticipated next-generation graphics processor known as GF100 (aka NV60, G300, GT300) had finally entered mass production. The company remained tight-lipped regarding the release time frame of the future product, which was first shown over three months ago.

“Everyone is dying to know when they can buy GF100. Happy to tell you that it is in volume production, ramping very hard and you can get a sneak peak of it here at CES,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia, at a press conference during CES 2010.

Earlier Nvidia said that it would ramp up production of its next-generation graphics processing units (GPUs) based on Fermi architecture starting in late January, hence, the comment by Mr. Huang may mean that the company is a couple of weeks ahead of the rather pessimistic scenario that the CEO presented back in November ’09. Still, the GF100 chip in general will be at least several months late to market compared to the company’s original plan.

Quite ironically, the announcement of the initiation of GeForce “Fermi” mass production coincides with the claim of arch-rival ATI, graphics business unit of Advanced Micro Devices, regarding shipment of second millionth DirectX 11 graphics processing unit. Nvidia hopes that its next-gen graphics chip will outperform ATI’s Radeon HD 5870 in video games and will also offer better functionality, which will make the delay justified.

The leading supplier of graphics processors has reportedly notified its partners that it would officially launch the GeForce “GF100” graphics chip in March ’10, according to a previous media report. In addition, Nvidia plans to release a rather mysterious code-named GF104 chip in Q2 2010. The GF104 graphics processing unit will target the high-end market, according to the media report.

The flagship Fermi graphics processor will feature 512 stream processing engines (which are organized as 16 streaming multi-processors with 32 cores in each) that support a type of multi-threading technology to maximize utilization of cores. Each stream processor has a fully pipelined integer arithmetic logic unit (ALU) and floating point unit (FPU). The top-of-the-range chip contains 3 billion of transistors, features 384-bit memory GDDR5 memory controller with ECC and features rather unprecedented 768KB unified level-two cache as well as rather complex cache hierarchy in general. Naturally, the Fermi family is compatible with DirectX 11, OpenGL 3.x and OpenCL 1.x application programming interfaces (APIs). The new chips will be made using 40nm process technology at TSMC.

.......

[Anakha56]

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3721&p=1

NVIDIA’s GF100: Architected for Gaming

At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, NVIDIA had several things going on. In a public press conference they announced 3D Vision Surround and Tegra 2, while on the showfloor they had products o’plenty, including a GF100 setup showcasing 3D Vision Surround.

But if you’re here, then what you’re most interested in is what wasn’t talked about in public, and that was GF100. With the Fermi-based GF100 GPU finally in full production, NVIDIA was ready to talk to the press about the rest of GF100, and at the tail-end of CES we got our first look at GF100’s gaming abilities, along with a hands-on look at some unknown GF100 products in action. The message NVIDIA was trying to send: GF100 is going to be here soon, and it’s going to be fast.



Before we get too far ahead of ourselves though, let’s talk about what we know and what we don’t know.

During CES, NVIDIA held deep dive sessions for the hardware press. At these deep dives, NVIDIA focused on 3 things: Discussing GF100’s architecture as is relevant for a gaming/consumer GPU, discussing their developer relations program (including the infamous Batman: Arkham Asylum anti-aliasing situation), and finally demonstrating GF100 in action on some games and some productivity applications.

Many of you have likely already seen the demos, as videos of what we saw have already been on YouTube for a few days now. What you haven’t seen and what we’ll be focusing on today, is what we’ve learned about GF100 as a gaming GPU. We now know everything about what makes GF100 tick, and we’re going to share it all with you.



With that said, while NVIDIA is showing off GF100, they aren’t showing off the final products. As such we can talk about the GPU, but we don’t know anything about the final cards. All of that will be announced at a later time – and no, we don’t know that either. In short, here’s what we still don’t know and will not be able to cover today:
Die size
What cards will be made from the GF100
Clock speeds
Power usage (we only know that it’s more than GT200)
Pricing
Performance

At this point the final products and pricing are going to heavily depend on what the final GF100 chips are like. The clockspeeds NVIDIA can get away with will determine power usage and performance, and by extension of that, pricing. Make no mistake though, NVIDIA is clearly aiming to be faster than AMD’s Radeon HD 5870, so form your expectations accordingly.

For performance in particular, we have seen one benchmark: Far Cry 2, running the Ranch Small demo, with NVIDIA running it on both their unnamed GF100 card and a GTX285. The GF100 card was faster (84fps vs. 50fps), but as Ranch Small is a semi-randomized benchmark (certain objects are in some runs and not others) and we’ve seen Far Cry 2 to be CPU-limited in other situations, we don’t put much faith in this specific benchmark. When it comes to performance, we’re content to wait until we can test GF100 cards ourselves.

With that out of the way, let’s get started on GF100.

[Sojourn]

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/ha ... pe-17.html

As prev posters on this page shown... nVidia is hitting back at the market share they lost in the last 6 months.

[StarBound]

Atleast they finally are showing some stuff. Now we need to see prices, specs and benchmarks.

[Mystical_Titan]

Yeah, well, I'm sure the specs and benchmarks will be killer, as a new nVidia card usually is, but it's the price part I'm most interested in...

[StarBound]

I want specs, I want benchmarks, I want a price. But depending on how things look I will probably get a dx11 nvidia card. I dont want to loose phsyx.

[MadFrog]

I want... food?

[ADT]

And what has this to with graphics cards Mad??

[Mystical_Titan]

Well, if he wants one of the new nVidia cards, he'll have to go hungry for a year or two to get one...

[Rowan Kahn]

So the new cards will be coming out in March ...? Add on a few months for safety and we're looking at what? Maybe May/June. According to those articles Nvidia looks set to dominate. It says they designed their cards from the ground up to take advantage of DX11, whereas ATI took their existing cards and threw DX11 on top. Hmmm....I wonder if it's worth waiting? How much of it is just the usual marketing BS?

Nvidia's engineers always seem to have something over ATI's but ATI maybe just be able to beat Nvidia this generation. Oh ya, how good is physics? I haven't had a gaming pc for .... awhile. How much would you be willing to sacrifice for a physics capable card. And why hasn't ATI released one yet?

[Mystical_Titan]

Good thing I have some money coming in... so a awesome new GPU will be mine before long.