Widescreen Gaming Forum

Well, tesselation means more realistic world modelling without upping the polygon count of the world and characters to ridiculous levels - see some of the enhanced Crysis model mods that PCGH has showcased occasionally that up the characters to a million polys... framerate nosedive... so in that respect I can't wait for tesselation as it can only mean things looking better.

Frag, I don't understand nVidia's demoing of this for business/CAD etc either - looking at nVidia's revenue figures, they made $1bn. last year... only $10mn. of that was from Tesla. That said, more people will be willing to take Tesla and CUDA up, now that the chips have ECC in them. That was the stumbling block before now.

Did you notice that that ray-tracing demo wasn't run on Fermi? In fact, it wasn't run on GT200 either, from everything I can figure out. From their spec sheet it seems like it's effectively a 7950GX2? :? That can't be right... :? I'm confused.

From what I've read, there was no confirmed working silicon at that demo for Fermi. Even the pro-nVidia camp at a couple of forums I lurk on are doubtful that Fermi is working... or at least working at clockspeeds that make it worth buying. Still, nVidia have got a few months before the crunch comes. It's entirely feasible that this paper launch (because make no mistake, that's what it was) was a kind of 'look what you'll be able to do, give us more time' thing.

Basically, Fusion, Larrabee, Fermi... all approach the same idea from different directions: Intel and AMD are approaching a unified CPU/GPU from the CPU side as that's what they do. nVidia is approaching a unified CPU/GPU from the GPU side as that's what they do.

nVidia have done an ATi on the GDDR5 front. They've starved the GPU of memory bandwidth. The 2900 series had too much memory bandwidth, while the 4870 was better balanced. The 5000 series has increased speed, but hasn't increased bandwidth enough. The 5870 gains even more speed when you overclock the VRAM a bit, from what little overclocking of it I've seen. Time will tell on the mix of shaders/ROPs - ATi have had excess shaders for a while, but given that they do shader-based anti-aliasing that's not too surprising.

nVidia, you're totally right, has made some odd decisions in the past with regards to their GPUs. The GeForce FX series was a complete mess from the get go. It was late. It was a new design on a new process which always leads to problems. This time, nVidia cut their teeth on the 40nm process with some mobile chips, but I don't think it's enough to give them a solid idea on how their architectures 'play' on a 40nm process.

If GT300 isn't everything for gaming, you can still get a GTX285/295/whatever, Frag. It's not like they're bad cards. Unless you're wanting to game on a 30" panel then except in a couple of instances there is no need for much more than a GTX285. If it wasn't for the fact that their latest drivers break PhysX when ATi cards are present, I'd probably go 5870 (perhaps CF when EyeFinity and CrossFire play together) with EyeFinity and an 8800GT I've got in another rig for physics... at least until they decide that having it platform-agnostic is better (I don't see the problem - it'd be like the ultimate teeth-kicker - let it run on ATi cards as well, but emblazon 'PhysX by nVidia' by the PhysX option in the game menu, and the Control Panel, etc etc... :lol:)

http://www.techpowerup.com/105052/NVIDIA_Fermi__Tesla_Board_Pictured_in_Greater_Detail_Non-Functional_Dummy_Unveiled.html

http://www.semiaccurate.com/2009/10/01/nvidia-fakes-fermi-boards-gtc/

Ouch.

Now, while I'm certainly not going to believe anything Charlie Dimerjian says about nVidia without basically having the proof sitting right in front of me, when TechPowerUp say it, I'm more inclined to believe it.

Justification for my suspicions about that card Huang was holding up wasn't a working card, despite what he said.

Yeah the pic that got my was the one showing the back end of the back side of the card.
The big blobs of solder for power connectors don't line up (like they do on my GTX280 & 8800GTX) and the 6 pin doesn't even have any!
And there appears to be 2 stickers just cut through in the d!

LOL I won't be waiting for this card, like my original plan, I reckon late Q1 at the earliest and it may not even have 'nFinity'

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Dipping bags at Mach1.9

Honestly, I think the talk about the mock-up and deceit are overblown. Nvidia were clearly intending primarily to demo the GPU itself onscreen, not unveil a card as if ready for market. The article explains they had trouble getting some of the parts for the production model, so they probably cobbled something together with less than ideal parts for onscreen demo purposes on a non production board, and showed a mock-up that looks closer to the final product on stage.

Keep in mind people, when Nvidia said "This puppy is Fermi", they're talking primarily about the radically changed GPU architecture itself. The actual workstation card using that chip is in fact called Tesla, as Nvidia cards of that type have been previously called. I suspect most of this knee jerk reaction to what is primarily a bit of an embarrassing setback, will die down once the Fermi and Juniper based cards are benched and ready for market.

While reading through that article where the guy was showing someone else's pics of the mock-up, I couldn't help but think he'd had too much of his favorite coffee roast while spending several paragraphs ranting on and on about the screws and power connectors on the mock-up. The guy just sounds totally full of himself. Don't pat him on the back people, he might spill some of that coffee on his E-penis.

I think it was deceitful, it was put out as here is a Fermi card. It was not, it was a mock up and they should have said so. I just think lying by omission is just as bad, a real dirty politician type trick!

http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15798/1/ 'confirmed fake' if Fud can be taken as confirmed ;)

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Dipping bags at Mach1.9

I think it was deceitful, it was put out as here is a Fermi card. It was not, it was a mock up and they should have said so. I just think lying by omission is just as bad, a real dirty politician type trick!

http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15798/1/ 'confirmed fake' if Fud can be taken as confirmed ;)

he was lying, i could of just held up a bundle of wires, said "hi this is Fermi card, honest there is a PCB under there somewhere", and everyone would of laughed, but at least i wouldnt of been lying

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That extremely poor effort on the mockup card makes me doubt any information nVidia provides about Fermi until I see cards in the wild.

Also, reports in other forums indicate that that system running 'Fermi' doing that demo was, in fact, G200b based cards. Not Fermi.

We'll see when they're released. Currently I'm not expecting them any time before mid/late-Q1 2010. We might get a paper launch in January. We might even get a couple of cards to review sites. But I doubt there will be any in the wild until February at the earliest. Which is a shame, as I'd have liked to see the 5870's maybe drop in price a bit before Christmas. Oh well, I suppose in the end holding off on the purchase saves me money...

...

Testing/engineering sample cards are usually covered with wires. He could have held up a GTX285 with a coupla hundred wires soldered on and we wouldn't have known different as long as the chip wasn't seen. But the effort into that mockup was just so terrible it'd have been better had they not bothered.

...

Although I must confess a strong sense of schadenfreude watching all the fanboys from both sides go into spasms... :lol:

on this page : http://www.hardware.fr/articles/772-7/nvidia-fermi-revolution-gpu-computing.html

there's a graphic which shows: "theoretical calculation power"
it's based on the fact that Fermi CUDA Cores would run @1600Mhz which is pretty conservative.
As you can see the progression from G200 is enormous
And even though cypress is superior in Floating Point simple precision, one has to keep in mind that Cypress vec4+1 architecture is less efficient and can't always be fully utilised ...

In double precision, Fermi wins.


I thought this could interest you guys, I translated the interesting bits to the best of my knowledge.

Also, reports in other forums indicate that that system running 'Fermi' doing that demo was, in fact, G200b based cards. Not Fermi.

If those were truly reports (eg: substantiated vs rumor), they'd have been backed up with some kind of proof vs sounding like more mere speculation. Let's be realistic here, you can't say the demo was run on a GT200 unless you know it was without sounding just as deceitful as you're accusing them of being.

It's obvious Nvidia were caught with their pants down, but I really think they were more trying to avoid people thinking they couldn't pull off Fermi at all by holding up that mock card after an unforeseen problem getting parts in time. The last thing you want to risk at such a conference is potential customers thinking you lack the confidence to provide what you've promised.

Everyone seems to be glossing over that they mentioned they couldn't get all the parts in time to build a complete working card, or that Fermi is in fact the GPU itself, not the entire card, which is Tesla. A political dodge none the less to say this is Fermi, when technically the card is supposed to be Tesla, but still, more a clever speech tactic than a lie.

In all of this what is perhaps most absurd though is despite it now being rather obvious Fermi and Tesla are aimed at HPC vs gaming, many including some of the more knowledgeable here are still clinging to the idea of using Fermi for gaming. Do you really think after what you've heard that any card with a Fermi is going to be anywhere near consumer grade affordable or well driver supported for games?

How many times does it have to be said, JUNIPER is going to be the consumer level chip. Regardless of how long it actiually takes Fermi to hit the market, we may see a scaled down GPU with all the gaming power and none of the HPC power before that happens at a much lower price.

I tell ya man, I'm really getting sick of the angst here over nothing more than what is mostly speculation. I thought people on this forum were more intelligent than that. It just goes to show that even some of the smarter consumers lose their heads when they don't look at things from a business perspective. :roll:

Actually hardware.fr mentioned several times that nvidia wouldn't comment on fermi 3D performances but they seemed to imply we could expect fermi to be the high end of the spectrum
At least that's how I understood it...

"Fermi", "Tesla" or "Fermi Tesla" ?
well hardware.fr mentioned that there's several "Tesla" out there:
-Fermi is the codename for the new GPU
-Tesla was the codename for the GT200
-Tesla also became a brand for Nvidia products aimed at the "massive computing market"

don't know if it's what you meant...