News - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 Specifications Revealed?

[scaryjim]

3x the amount of shaders is quite insane

Even with the drop to 28nm I can't see them fitting 3x the GTX580s shaders onto a viable die. So *if* this rumour is true it would suggest that the shaders have gone on a considerable diet to make that possible - a fact alluded to in the VR-Zone article.


Larger number of simpler shaders - sound familiar anyone? It would appear AMD and nvidia are learning tricks off each other...

[brasco]

Is this the flagship card? Or will there be a 690 (single gpu) later on? Not quite as figure busting as I'd expected hehe. The extra stream processors will of course help a big boost, but is that not quite a low core clock? Look forward to see how it pans out

brasc

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

[UseItNow]

I want to know how will this perform?

What would the AMD counterpart be?

[Tunnah]

That and NVidia drivers are so much better across the board.

[scaryjim]

I want to know how will this perform?

What would the AMD counterpart be?

That's what we all want to know

No way of telling until launch and reviews happen. If the rumoured number of shaders is true it means nvidia are shifting to a smaller, simpler shader than the ones they've been using & tweaking since G80. That means that there's nothing comparable to try to guess from. It's a bit of a radical shift: AFAICT AMD didn't actually change their shader design much when they moved to GCN, they changed the way data was fed into it. The basic float unit stayed pretty much the same. Nvidia appear to have massively simplified the arithmetic unit (again, *if* the rumours are accurate), which sounds to me like a bit of a gamble. Be *very* interesting to read the tech details in the reviews when it lands...

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

which sounds to me like a bit of a gamble.

Don't worry!!

[Scribe]

Even with the drop to 28nm I can't see them fitting 3x the GTX580s shaders onto a viable die. So *if* this rumour is true it would suggest that the shaders have gone on a considerable diet to make that possible - a fact alluded to in the VR-Zone article.

Larger number of simpler shaders - sound familiar anyone? It would appear AMD and nvidia are learning tricks off each other...

Given that most of what was new about Fermi was its management of data flow, I expect the biggest changes here. It's possible the shaders will be dumbed down but given the close pairing with the ever increasing functionality of the CUDA programming language I can't see this happening.

I'm going to go for a combination of 28nm, larger die, more efficient use of space for resource management, smaller memory controller i.e. generally reduced overheads in the circuitry managing the stream processors.

[kalniel]

That and NVidia drivers are so much better across the board.

Sadly not in my experience

[edvinasm]

That and NVidia drivers are so much better across the board.

Sadly not in my experience

You are doing it wrong

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

[llbdtiberio]

Am still quite happy with my 580GTX, I can't keep help but see AMD and Nvidia's new cards as pointless for gamers as the vast majority of PC games are ports anyway and can run on old hardware. Then again, I hope Nvidia's new cards help drive down the prices on AMD.

[Phage]

I'm wondering why there's nothing at CeBit ?

[Noli]

Pity AMD has pricing strategy that matches that of monopoly. No wonder everyone is waiting for NVidia.

To be fair their mid-range are priced amongst the higher end nvidia cards and they are 28nm and more power efficient, quieter etc. Only an idiot would of a company would not put a premium on their prices if they temporarily lack competition. First console of a new generation does the same. Nvidia would do the same.

[Agent]

Sadly not in my experience

I always seem to find it's a bit of a draw with these things. I've had bad experiences from both camps, but my general 'feeling' is that nVidia have been better for me over the last few years.

Then again, a friend with on board nVidia graphics on her laptop had nothing but issues, to which I needed to mess about with hacking config files to update them

Either way though, I think both camps have come in significantly compared to a few years back. I remember the days where a new driver update would trigger the 'Please don't BSOD' feeling

And Mooseman - the right image in a thread can be funny, but lets not overdo it with old images that have been around for yonks

[Jimbo75]

Here is the best image for this thread



Driverssmivers.