Widescreen Gaming Forum

According to Fudzilla, it will be demonstrated today. :)

http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15741/1/

Talked about, maybe. Huang will talk about how awesome nVidia are and how bad ATi are. Actual silicon demonstrated? Possibly, but I'll believe it when I see it.

(In four hours, I'll happily eat those words if he does actually have working silicon on demo...)

"Fermi has a lot of cache and supports instructions that use to be common only for CPU and many people believe that this is a hybrid between a graphics card and a CPU. This might be the direction that Nvidia will be heading."

Makes sense given that DX11 will treat a GPU more like a CPU with multi threading and physics. I get the feeling ATI is going to wish they'd gone this direction with their 5000 series and they may soon. Perhaps the 6000 series.

So it was a cGPU. :) Interesting for someone that loves new tech like me.

AMD have worked for years with their Bulldozer and Intel with their Larrabee, so the concept is old, but at least someone got out something concrete.

It won't do anything for DX11 I think. DX11 can runs some tasks on shaders via Directx compute and a cGPU won't make any difference. All computers have both cpu and gpu, so its more a matter of reducing overhead in programs that can handle it. It looks like Nvidias path will be to introduce cuda plugins for common program, so they will accelerate faster. Question is how much extra it will give if programs will be made more for DX11 and opencl. I find it interesting, since cGPU can reduce a lot of overhead and streamline GPGPU much more. It won't give much extra for gaming though, I believe. But gaming isn't all we do on computer.

This is only the beginning. We've seen little of what Fermi can do yet, so I wouldn't jump to any conclusions as for now. This conference had mostly to do with GPGPU and not so much for gaming in general. I bet Nvidia will focus more about what it can do for gamers later.

Looks like [H] was right though, that it comes in Q1 2010. By then, we might get some news about Larrabee and Bulldozer also. I think that Fermi might push the releases a bit forward if everything goes well.

2010 might be a fun year for GPGPU with opencl and dx11 when cards come that brings GPU and CPU closer together. :D

Most important bit of that keynote?

Real-time ray-tracing.

Within a year.

Win.

Other thoughts:

That said, this looks awesome for computational purposes... we thought the GT200 cards folded well...

...still no idea about gaming performance, though. I guess that'll depend on how much of that core is taken up with transistors to deal with all the DirectCompute/OpenCL/C++/C/Fortran/Java/Python things it's also supposed to be able to do.

These all sound amazing, but they're gonna need programs to take advantage of it.

No real detail on the graphics, though, although it's likely to be a monster just from the specs revealed. Nothing that obviously competes against EyeFinity, either. I guess nVidia are working on the idea of Matrox TripleHead working better with their cards. Who knows?

Pics of card. However, forgive me for not believing that it'd work if you plugged it in. It's also Tesla, rather than a proper GPU.

OK, the Radeon 5000 series can't do as much 'DirectCompute' stuff (on paper) as this is supposed to, but ultimately ATi is the graphics division of AMD. nVidia only has vid cards, so they need to do "everything" while AMD have Bulldozer and Intel have Larrabee...

...

Still, exciting times. Exciting times... :)

Update:

I've found the nVidia whitepaper about Fermi's architecture. It's linked to in this article: http://vr-zone.com/articles/nvidia-fermi--arriving-in-q1-2010/7786.html?doc=7786

The 48 ROPs thing has me worried, a bit. Sure, 512 shaders is more than double that of GT200, and four times that of G80, but the ROPs have only increased by 1.5x...

I'm currently thinking that Fermi will be a GPGPU monster, but not what it could be for games. Maybe 1.5-2x a GTX285. Going by ROPs we're looking at 1.5x, but the shader boost will probably mean it'll have excess shader power for normal GPU load... resulting in it probably be about 1.8x a GTX285. Of course, that also depends on clock speeds.

The ECC and on-chip DRAM are interesting as well - they're only really useful for cGPU/GPGPU, not that useful for graphics... or not as useful for graphics. Seems nVidia is betting a lot on GPGPU this time around. If the market picks it up, they gain a lot of ground over ATi, as their GPGPU implementation is easily a generation ahead of ATi. If the market is cautious and doesn't jump in with both feet, nVidia could find itself in trouble.

...

Given that Fermi supports DirectCompute and OpenCL as well as CUDA... I'm hopeful that the market will pick the open standard for GPGPU rather than risk potential fragmentation of the market. Of course, it depends how well Fermi does each of them. The interesting thing about the shader count is that it's probably got more than enough to do high-level PhysX calculations in-shader while still having more than enough grunt for the graphics side...

...

Also a bit worried about that line "DirectX 11 is of course supported, though Tesselation appears to be software driven through the CUDA cores."... that smacks of software T&L back in the DX7/8 transition days. :( Is this a sign that Fermi isn't going to comply 100% with the DX11 specification?

@Tamlin,
Irregardless of the acronyms used and technical definitions, I always thought of Larrabee and Bulldozer as being CPUs with minimal graphics capability onboard, vs a monster GPU that has CPU tendencies. To me that is not the same at all. The main thing that's kept Larrabee and Bulldozer from being talked about a lot by the gaming community is they know there's no gaming potential in the current projects for both.

I also think such a GPU should make well use of DX11 since DX11 will have much more going on inside the GPU. Of course it depends on how well devs make use of DX11 in games.

PS may have made the most telling comment regarding a possible imbalance in ROPs to shaders. However this architecture combined with DX11 may require less ROPs, though I must say it has me worried too. Also, from what I've read the memory bandwidth has not vastly increased as have the transistor and shader count.

Nvidia have on occasion made GPUs that don't make much sense for gaming, like the 5700 that had way higher clock speed than the Ti 4200, but couldn't perform any better than it due to very minimal memory bandwidth. I sincerely hope they haven't gone down that road again with the GT300 series because there's no way I'm sticking with ATI.

@Tamlin,
Irregardless of the acronyms used and technical definitions, I always thought of Larrabee and Bulldozer as being CPUs with minimal graphics capability onboard, vs a monster GPU that has CPU tendencies. To me that is not the same at all. The main thing that's kept Larrabee and Bulldozer from being talked about a lot by the gaming community is they know there's no gaming potential in the current projects for both.

Its been back and forth about how much CPU and how much GPU (the same with launch dates). Newest might be ATI Llano:

CPU + GPU is the ultimate fusion. If word on internet is anything to go by then we’ll see the first AMD Fusion chip by mid 2011. Dubbed as Llano, the combination of AMD processor and ATI graphics will be a native chip with either a dual or quad core, allowing users to derive tremendous computing power from the fusion.

http://techlime.com/graphics-card-memory-power-supply-cooling-devices/amd-llano-fusion-cpu-gpu-coming-2011

I also think such a GPU should make well use of DX11 since DX11 will have much more going on inside the GPU. Of course it depends on how well devs make use of DX11 in games.

I agree, DX11 will benifit most from GPU with Directx compute especially for GPGPU. For games, I believe that tesselation will be big and give us a lot better textures.

Nvidia have on occasion made GPUs that don't make much sense for gaming, like the 5700 that had way higher clock speed than the Ti 4200, but couldn't perform any better than it due to very minimal memory bandwidth. I sincerely hope they haven't gone down that road again with the GT300 series because there's no way I'm sticking with ATI.

I think Nvidia should have learned that by now. :) We've seen little of its gaming capabilities yet, but they will come when Nvidia choose to focus more on that. For now, it was more about programs (realtime rendering ray-tracing programs for professionals and similar that Nvidia offered)
http://www.trustedreviews.com/graphics/news/2008/08/15/nVidia-Demonstrates-GPU-Acclerated-Ray-Tracing/p1

Basic software that shows that GPGPU in general can do.

What I am curios about, is what the cGPU from Nvidia can do extra besides software and what benifits the cGPU can give us compared to an ordinary CPU+GPU setup (Like I7 with gtx285). :)

Argggh, I don't like that Nvidia are catering first to the business crowd with these workstation graphics accelerator demos instead of their bigger market niche, consumers. As far as ray tracing goes, I agree with John Carmack that Intel are being a bit unrealistic wanting to use exclusive ray tracing vs a reasonable mix of using it for the more obvious light and shadow effects and rasterizing for the rest. No one would even see the difference unless they wandered slowly through every map and gawked at everything as if in a slow poke adventure game anyway.

That being said, it is rather remarkable that Nvidia somewhat outdid Intel by showing an HD full ray tracing demo at 30 FPS. Carmack had speculated some time ago it may take a 3GHz GPU to pull that off. What it really comes down to is whether the average gamer notices the difference enough to warrant it and the expense of the hardware R&D and game development behind it, not to mention if consumers would want to pay potentially higher prices because of it. I also fear it would further perpetuate the trend of devs favoring eye candy over substance in story and gameplay in their titles.

For games, I believe that tesselation will be big and give us a lot better textures.

herrr .... not really, textures are not improved at all by tesselation ..
it's the number of polygons that's increasing while keeping less triangle data & compute time around ..
which means better 3D, better "bumpmap" (kind of) ...