Nvidia 480-Core Graphics Card Approaches 2 Teraflops 261
An anonymous reader writes "At CES, Nvidia has announced a graphics card with 480 cores that can crank up performance to reach close to 2 teraflops. The company's GTX 295 graphics cards has two GPUs with 240 cores each that can execute graphics and other computing tasks like video processing. The card delivers 1.788 teraflops of performance, which Nvidia claims is the fastest single graphics card in the market."
But will it run Crysis?... (Score:5, Interesting)
480 core? (Score:5, Interesting)
Color me doubtful but I suspect it's 480 stream processors which isn't anywhere NEAR the same thing as the "cores" on the CPU or even the core of the GPU.
Why has the press suddenly started to call stream processors "cores"? Marketing?
Re:Power Requirement (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, the soft g ("j") pronunciation is correct and illiterate computer types abominated it with a hard g. "Back to the Future" wasn't wrong, we are.
Re:Power Requirement (Score:3, Interesting)
You're definitely wrong about the pronunciation of gif: http://www.olsenhome.com/gif/ [olsenhome.com]
Pissing contest indeed (Score:3, Interesting)
Compare this to the Radeon 4870 X2 : 2 55nm RV770 GPUs on the same PCB connected by a PCIe bridge although the card has a "Crossfire X Sideport" interlink ( which I think is Hypertransport, although I may be wrong ) that directly connects the two GPUs, which isn't enabled in their drivers at the moment. (you can see it on the PCB -- a set of horizontal traces directly linking both GPUs ) One might wonder if they've delayed enabling the direct link because they knew Nvidia would respond this way.
Anyway, it's always great when two companies battle it out, as the consumer always wins.
jdb2
Re:But will it run Crysis?... (Score:4, Interesting)
No game is made for gamers in the future.
Game sales are extremely front loaded.
After a month, 50% of games are in the bargain bin.
Re:But will it run Crysis?... (Score:5, Interesting)
This used to be true, but actually seems to be less true now than it was. When I went to buy a game at Best Buy recently, some of the games with good stock, good display space, and $30+ prices were more than a year old.
The development cost on a tier-1 computer game is high enough now that not many of them get released. There isn't another game to put in the shelf slot if they take down Crysis, and there won't be for another year or so.
Re:I'm sticking with ATI (Score:3, Interesting)
Well ATI recently anounced that they want to start supporting open source drivers again. It's just a matter of time, I hope. Otherwise I'll have to go with Intel for my next chipset.
Re:480 cores and no user's manual (Score:3, Interesting)
Well but if you only have a binary only interface you can still only do what the manufacturer allows you. And if the manufacturer says that you cannot do whatever you are doing, it can simply stop you from doing that.
But of course you are right, there is a large chance that CPU-based rendering might make dedicated GPUs obsolete again.