Geforce 8900 GTX has 25 per cent more shaders

[JPB]

Some more garbage for all to read.....

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37610

Although im sitting here with salt between my thumb and pointer finger 8)

 

[40sTheme]

Interesting news.
Why must you hate on the Inquirer in everything you post from them? They've been right what, a billion times now? No offense to you, but it just kinda irks me how people always are so cautious about them when they have told very few lies.

 

[Creig]

Sounds too bizarre to me. First of all, if the shaders are already present in the 8800 series, why would Nvidia deliberately disable them? That would mean that every G80 sold has been deliberately crippled by Nvidia to make it slower in shader intensive applications.

Most refreshes concern themselves with die shrinks, increased memory speeds, cooling changes and other such things. The GPU design itself is changed minimally, if at all. Bug fixes and minor tweaks would be about it.

 

[lavaheadache]

If it is true.... then I will be using my step up after all.

 

[zephyrprime]

<announcer voice>Now with 25% more shaders!</announcer voice>

 

[crazydingo]

They cant even convert inches to centimeters.

 

[Yregouth]

Originally posted by: Creig
Sounds too bizarre to me. First of all, if the shaders are already present in the 8800 series, why would Nvidia deliberately disable them? That would mean that every G80 sold has been deliberately crippled by Nvidia to make it slower in shader intensive applications.

roughly guessed, bad initial yield and the ability to disable defective units. Plus: There was no ultimate need for 160 shaders cos they took the (single-GPU-)performance crown from ATi anyway back in November.

 

[ebeattie]

What I want to know is how do we find out the true nature of the G80, and if they DO have disabled shaders, how do we unlock them?

A very interesting idea here, but have we possibly found the next 9700 Pro?

 

[chizow]

Originally posted by: ebeattie
What I want to know is how do we find out the true nature of the G80, and if they DO have disabled shaders, how do we unlock them?

A very interesting idea here, but have we possibly found the next 9700 Pro?

I looked into this a while ago, as I'm sure many others have way before but I checked in RivaTuner and opened up NvStrap to see if there was any Easter Eggs in there. I was able to find the 2 disabled shader units (16 shader cores in each), but that only brings the total to 96+32 = 128, same as found on the GTX.

So, if there's anything hidden in the G80, its either not listed in the BIOS or not all cores have the extra shaders. Personally I think the Inquirer is wrong here. I'm pretty sure I read NV wasn't planning a core revision until Q3 and the next refresh was going to be a simple speed bump and GDDR4 for the G80 around the time of R600's launch.

 

[hemmy]

The inq has told very few lies? That is news to me. They may not consider them lies, but just look at their speculation for past high end cards and if they make 20 news posts about them, 14 of them are wrong

 

[Munky]

I personally think the Inquirer is dead wrong. What I expect from a 8900gtx is a smaller die, and higher clocks. The Inq has been wrong on so many accounts, I'm not even sure why anyone would continue to site them as a source of information.

 

[Cookie Monster]

They probably think the missing MUL = 25% extra shaders.

When nVIDIA enables the missing MUL, we can expect some sort of a performance boost.

 

[Wreckage]

A die shrink, higher clock and 25% more shaders would pretty much ruin the R600 launch.

 

[thilanliyan]

nm.

 

[ebeattie]

Originally posted by: Wreckage
A die shrink, higher clock and 25% more shaders would pretty much ruin the R600 launch.

Yeah, I could see that as some pretty major rain on ATI's parade.

btw, what is the defacto name to call ATI now that AMD has aquired them? ATI, AMD/ATI, AMD? very confusing.

 

[memories2002]

MADATI? DAAMIT?

 

[Painman]

I'm waiting 'til the very last day to register my eVGA GTX and enroll for StepUp regardless... but yeah.

 

[otispunkmeyer]

Originally posted by: Creig
Sounds too bizarre to me. First of all, if the shaders are already present in the 8800 series, why would Nvidia deliberately disable them? That would mean that every G80 sold has been deliberately crippled by Nvidia to make it slower in shader intensive applications.

Most refreshes concern themselves with die shrinks, increased memory speeds, cooling changes and other such things. The GPU design itself is changed minimally, if at all. Bug fixes and minor tweaks would be about it.

yeah but, the shader pipelines are simple, and highly scalable...... this time round it may actually be very easy to simply tack some more onto the end

 

[Lonyo]

Originally posted by: ebeattie

Originally posted by: Wreckage
A die shrink, higher clock and 25% more shaders would pretty much ruin the R600 launch.

Yeah, I could see that as some pretty major rain on ATI's parade.

btw, what is the defacto name to call ATI now that AMD has aquired them? ATI, AMD/ATI, AMD? very confusing.

ATi, IMO.

 

[nrb]

Fuad is not a native English speaker, of course; but I wish he would brush up on his language skills a bit. :roll:

Anyway, presumably what he means by this is that 8900GTX will have 25% more shader-capability than 8800GTX and that this apparently contradicts the earlier rumour that the 8900GTX chip is simply a higher-clocked G80. He then goes on to say that the only way both rumours can be true is if the existing G80 product has somehow been crippled, and that new functions are about to be unlocked. (The infamous "missing MUL"? But I don't think Fuad himself buys that theory.)

All we should take away from this is that (according to this rumour) 8900GTX will have 25% more shader-capability than 8800GTX. If that's true it means that we'll have an interesting competition between 8900GTX and X2800XTX. (And ATI may be in trouble).

 

[R3MF]

all i want from the 8900 generation is a GTS product:
> manufactured in .65u lithography
> on a 7950GT sized PCB (read: small)
> with 128 enabled shaders, but lower clocked than the GTX version (much like the 6800 and 7900 series)
do this and i will be delighted.

 

[Keysplayr]

If this is true, which I doubt (unless nvidia is in full on war mode) then it has to be a different core. I don't believe there is anything hidden in the current G80 core. History suggests that the 8900 "should" be just a die shrunk (80 or 65nm, most likely the former) G80 clocked higher along with memory that runs in high orbit speeds (GDDR4)

THE ONLY thing that I might believe may be hidden on G80 (if anything at all) would be that it is actually has a 512-bit memory controller but only using 384 bit until 512 is needed. Longshot I know, but who knows.

 

[jim1976]

Originally posted by: Cookie Monster
They probably think the missing MUL = 25% extra shaders.

When nVIDIA enables the missing MUL, we can expect some sort of a performance boost.

Correct

 

[ebeattie]

How long do you guys think it will be before we know the full truth about the current capabilities of the 8800 series? Or have we already found everything we are going to find about these things? Kind of redundant questions on my part I know, but Im curious as hell to see what my cards potential is!

 

[StopSign]

Originally posted by: zephyrprime
<announcer voice>Now with 25% more shaders!</announcer voice>

But wait! If you call now, we will give you an extra 25% shaders, absolutely free!