Launch date for GTX 480/470 March 26

[Phil1977]

Why does everyone use the "got a source" line, knowing that there aren't any official figures out...

We are allowed to speculate and that's why we got this forum...

I also agree with one of the above posts, that ATI was not in such a good position since they had the Radeon 9700pro and 9800pro. I had a Radeon 9800 but before and after I had Nvidia. Now I have a Radeon again.

And I have also read a few times that Nvidia didn't reach their clock targets and that Fermi will be clocked quite low...

 

[GaiaHunter]

Why are you and V8envy saying that "I know damn well" and "you know it very well" ???

You are both a little too touchy for my taste. Please calm it.

English isn't my main language, so sometime it is hard to understand all the subtleties and different values of expressions - if that sounds threatening/aggressive I apologize.

So let me rephrase it:

That particular benchmark simply reflects the raw tesselation performance. It isn't a game and uses tesselation for everything which isn't exactly expectable for a game to do.

Considering that, while the overall performance of the card might be in-line with those results, we don't know as we haven't seen real game results.

I think no one in their right minds will evaluate a card based on a single synthetic benchmark that is focused in a single aspect, regardless of its importance.

We need the full picture.

I could pick Bioshock and Grid benchmarks and declare a 4850 is faster than a GTX 260 and it clearly isn't.

On the other hand, hardware specs only aren't enough either, as we have seen today with the 5830.

EDIT: I notice you changed your previous post. If you wish I'll delete this one keys.

 

[Phil1977]

ATI has a dedicated tesselator.

Nvidia doesn't and uses their "general purpose processors".

So ATIs tesselator will always be working 100% no matter what the stream processors do.

Nvidias tesselator performance depends greatly on what else is going on...

From all the games I have seen so far, Tesselation is a feature on top of all the normal DX stuff.

So either Nvidia will have low Tesselation performance in games, or gaming performance will drop more when you turn tesselation on (because Nvidia will load balance)...

Hope this makes sense.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

OMG this pisses me off. I have been waiting for an nvidia card (sorry, but I like that whole physx thing) and am running an 8800 320 at 1920x1080. So now I am in a wait another month or two or jump and get an ATI 5850.

Ouch. I was running this exact card in my old XP rig while getting my new Win7 rig up and running (moved the 4890 there) and it was painful

 

[GaiaHunter]

ATI has a dedicated tesselator.

Nvidia doesn't and uses their "general purpose processors".

So ATIs tesselator will always be working 100% no matter what the stream processors do.

Nvidias tesselator performance depends greatly on what else is going on...

From all the games I have seen so far, Tesselation is a feature on top of all the normal DX stuff.

So either Nvidia will have low Tesselation performance in games, or gaming performance will drop more when you turn tesselation on (because Nvidia will load balance)...

Hope this makes sense.

Yeah - it depends how/if the resources are required to work in several things.

Keys posted some slides where apparently the tesselation is handled by "polymorph engines". We will have to see if that polymorph engine has other uses or is there solely to handle all the tesselation.

 

[Schmide]

We will have to see if that polymorph engine has other uses or is there solely to handle all the tesselation.

From all information so far, Polymorph handles the vertex geometry processing. (transform, tessellation, indexing, etc)

 

[ViRGE]

ATI has a dedicated tesselator.

Nvidia doesn't and uses their "general purpose processors".

So ATIs tesselator will always be working 100% no matter what the stream processors do.

Nvidias tesselator performance depends greatly on what else is going on...

From all the games I have seen so far, Tesselation is a feature on top of all the normal DX stuff.

So either Nvidia will have low Tesselation performance in games, or gaming performance will drop more when you turn tesselation on (because Nvidia will load balance)...

Hope this makes sense.

2 things:

1) I'm not sure where this "NVIDIA doesn't have a tesselator" meme comes from. It's very clear in the GF100 articles that NVIDIA has a hardware tesselator; 16 of them in fact.

2) DX11 tessellation impacts the shaders by design. Hull and Domain shading in the tessellation process runs on the shaders. So you're going to impact the shaders on any architecture when using tessellation.

 

[GaiaHunter]

2 things:

1) I'm not sure where this "NVIDIA doesn't have a tesselator" meme comes from. It's very clear in the GF100 articles that NVIDIA has a hardware tesselator; 16 of them in fact.

I guess it comes from the fact all the 5xxx cards have the same tesselator unity (correct me if I'm wrong) and it isn't directly tied with number of shaders (although cards with less shaders will be much less capable of then doing the work to keep up with the extra triangles created by the tesselator) while GF100 tesselator is bound to lose some of those tesselators as the cuda cores go down in number.

 

[Keysplayr]

English isn't my main language, so sometime it is hard to understand all the subtleties and different values of expressions - if that sounds threatening/aggressive I apologize.

So let me rephrase it:

That particular benchmark simply reflects the raw tesselation performance. It isn't a game and uses tesselation for everything which isn't exactly expectable for a game to do.

Considering that, while the overall performance of the card might be in-line with those results, we don't know as we haven't seen real game results.

I think no one in their right minds will evaluate a card based on a single synthetic benchmark that is focused in a single aspect, regardless of its importance.

We need the full picture.

I could pick Bioshock and Grid benchmarks and declare a 4850 is faster than a GTX 260 and it clearly isn't.

On the other hand, hardware specs only aren't enough either, as we have seen today with the 5830.

EDIT: I notice you changed your previous post. If you wish I'll delete this one keys.

Sorry about that then. You're right. All too often, text doesn't translate well.

 

[bryanW1995]

keys, I don't understand your abrasiveness on this subject. It is a safe bet that you've seen the hardware canucks review. that "review" was basically a controlled nvidia demo, and any reasonably unbiased 3rd party observer would agree that nvidia is highly likely in such a scenario to put their best foot forward. Taking that into account and seeing that they were still not as fast as a 5970 (in fact, they didn't even show a 5970 in the test) seems to make a pretty strong case that gtx 480 will NOT beat a 5970 and will in fact probably not even come close to it in performance.

 

[Keysplayr]

Why does everyone use the "got a source" line, knowing that there aren't any official figures out...

Because he said "Will not". Not "I don't think it will."
It even appeared that V8envy thought he had a source that possessed a card and that he had info that he couldn't divulge. Or at least that is what his text translated over to me.

Phil, I'm not knocking anybody at all for speculating. But when you say something that sounds like you know it for a fact, I'm keen on knowing how. That's really all it is.

 

[cbn]

So either Nvidia will have low Tesselation performance in games, or gaming performance will drop more when you turn tesselation on (because Nvidia will load balance)...

Well this does sound like it will make for a very smooth gaming experience.

ATI is apparently working on sideport for its dual GPU cards, but I am not sure how much this would affect minimum frame rates? I have a feeling it wouldn't have any effect at all (other than to remove micro-stutter)

 

[cbn]

Unless the card has improved significantly in that time I don't believe it can be faster than a 5970.

I don't think Fermi will be faster than a HD5970 either, but I think the real potential exists for Fermi to deliver a better subjective gaming experience.

I am really excited about this product. Hopefully ATI can come up with something competitive for N. Islands.

 

[mgon154]

I don't think Fermi will be faster than a HD5970 either, but I think the real potential exists for Fermi to deliver a better subjective gaming experience.

I am really excited about this product. Hopefully ATI can come up with something competitive for N. Islands.

For some reason I kept thinking the 480 was dual gpu lol that's why I felt it had no excuse for being slower but now I understand. I do expect 2 480's definitely to be faster though.