News - NVIDIA details next-generation Fermi GPU architecture

[Steve]

Thanks for informing me of that, however the rest still is right isnt it? R&D needs to be recopurated from somewhere and its going to be in the price of the cards, amd just tweaked there design and added more which is great (it shows) and in the end costs a lot less than changing the whole design!

Well the lower-end cards spawned from the architecture might help with the R&D costs a whole lot more than the high-end sales, given the volumes involved. But in all honesty I wouldn't know how AMD/Nvidia set their prices or how they balance them against development costs.

[TooNice]

I am guessing that Hexus will also talk about those features in the yet to be published article, but in the meantime, Anandtech has a pretty good article about this card: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3721&p=1

Though performance is still largely unknown, as is the price (but most likely higher than AMD's offering), the card does differentiate itself from AMD's offering in ways that could enhance gaming (PolyMorph Engine and some different AA technique).

Still, price aside, the suggestion that it may be the hottest single GPU card yet is scary, given how hot older cards are. The GT200 had that impressive low idle power consumption, are they going to U-Turn on that?

[chis]

What are the chances this will be damned expensive? Nvidia have been historically somewhat unconcerned with delivering any semblance of value, and only AMD/ATI's pricing have forced their hand in this area.

So I predict this will likely be technically superior to the current Radeon in many ways (it already seems that way), and yet will not perform as well as the extra outlay would suggest. No, we have no independant benchmarks, nor prices yet, and perhaps I'll be eating my words...

But Nvidia are late, appear unconcerned with specifically addressing game performance in favour of their fancy CUDA coding stuff, and unconcerned with the HUGE die sizes they've been using (and the thermal issues this brings with it).

[dangel]

In all honesty I hope it's very good for gaming but I agree, it's going to be stupid money which may make it far less appealing. Heat/power don't worry me (so long as idle consumption is very low) as i watercool but price is a big issue.