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Nvidia 480-Core Graphics Card Approaches 2 Teraflops
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Friday January 09, @03:54PM
from the hotter-than-a-thousand-suns dept.
from the hotter-than-a-thousand-suns dept.
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."
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Firehose:Nvidia 480-core graphics card approaches 2 teraflo by Anonymous Coward
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But will it run Crysis?... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yes (Score:3, Informative)
The problem with video card review is they don't bother testing anything lower than 1920x1080 which is 2.25x bigger than 720.
Crysis takes a lot to run but it has already been tamed as long as you aren't running at 2560x1600 or some other absurd resolution.
Re:But will it run Crysis?... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:But will it run Crysis?... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, I do know what goes into a game like Crysis, being a 3D game programmer and all. Those programmers were very, very good, believe me. Some of the stuff they pulled off is just amazing.
The reason Crysis is slow is because of the artistic direction. Outdoor environments full of plants and shadows with a huge viewing distance is very hard to implement in a 3D engine. I mean really fucking hard. Making a game like that playable at all is a tradeoff between two scraggly trees on a flat green carpet that pretends to be grass, OR an enormous amount of research into optimization techniques that are very hard and time consuming to implement. The Crysis engine is pretty much the state of the art in optimization. And these guys managed to squeeze in fantastic shader effects on top of that, depth of field, and even some basic radiosity shadowing for the characters!!! That's just insane.
Most reviewers and players with the right hardware thought the game looked amazing, way better than its peers at the time, or even now. I thought the effects (especially in the spaceship) looked better than most Sci-Fi movies, which is a stunning achievement for a 3D game running on a $500 video card. I upgraded my PC just to play the game, and I thought it was worth it. Lots of people did too:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/10/15/ [penny-arcade.com]
Take your head out of your ass and stop belittling other people's achievements until you have some of your own to compare it to, OK?
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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.
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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.
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Re:But will it run Crysis?... (Score:5, Funny)
A year from now, people won't be talking about Crysis anymore. Bigger and better games will be out. Such is the nature of the gaming industry.
The fact that Crysis has great graphics doesn't mean its a great game. As an avid gamer for over 20 years, I can say without a doubt that on average there is no correlation between good graphics and good games.
In addition to my 20 years of gaming, I've got a 5 digit UID. I am therefore an authoritative source on the subject.
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Re:But will it run Crysis?... (Score:5, Funny)
Where can I get one of these five digit things you speak of? OMG, I am so behind the times!
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Power Requirement (Score:5, Funny)
1.21 Jiggawatts
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Re:Power Requirement (Score:5, Insightful)
If you really want to go back to the source, "giga" is Greek and uses a "j" sound. [wiktionary.org]
Consider the word "gigantic". It has the same root, "giga". Some people pronounce it with a hard "g", some with a soft "g".
The language is a mess.
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Re:Power Requirement (Score:4, Informative)
Apparently the US National Bureau of Standards decided in the 1960s that Jiggawatt was the one true pronunciation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giga [wikipedia.org]
And jif is only correct for the same reason, the developers decided "Choosy developers choose Jif" was a hilarious slogan they could use internally for the gif format.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gif#Pronunciation [wikipedia.org]
So yes, Jigabit, Jigabyte, Jigawatt, those are how we are legally supposed to pronounce them, atleast in the US.
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Contest... (Score:5, Funny)
Yet again, Nvidia showed ATI that it, indeed, has the biggest penis.
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Re:Contest... (Score:5, Funny)
Yet again, Nvidia showed ATI that it, indeed, has the biggest penis.
Yeah, but it's mega-floppy at that.
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Re:Contest... (Score:5, Funny)
Not quite - They proved they have the biggest number of penises... Making for some interesting crossover potential into the Hentai gaming market.
/ Wonders what "ultra realistic" means as regards H - "Wow, the fur on her tail looks almost real, and her breasts look like actual porcelain!"
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Great... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Great... (Score:5, Funny)
when can I get a video card that doesn't take up half my case and melts down after 6 months of use? Not to mention, doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
2006?
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Right now (Score:4, Informative)
One of the benefits of the technology war is that it produces good midrange and low end technology as well. This is particularly true in the case of graphics cards since they are so parallel. They more or less just lop off some of the execution units and maybe slow down the clock and you get a budget card.
Whatever your budget is, there's probably a good card available at that level. Now will it be as fast as the GTX 295? Of course not. However they'll be as fast as they can be at that price/power consumption point.
Don't pitch because some people need/want high end cards. Enjoy the fact that they help subsidize you getting good, cheap midrange cards.
If you want serious suggestions, tell me your budget range and what you want to do and I'll recommend some cards.
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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?
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Why do we bother... (Score:5, Funny)
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*sigh* (Score:5, Funny)
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Full Review with Benchmarks of The Card Here: (Score:4, Informative)
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I'm sticking with ATI (Score:5, Insightful)
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480 cores and no user's manual (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean seriously, as long as they don't publish the hardware specifications so you can write your own software for it, it's preety much useless. The only thing you can do with it is play games. And even then you have to fear every little software update as it might trigger some bug in the binary only drivers the manufacturer provides.
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Re:Sounds good but.. (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT072405191325&p=2
A single 8800 kill the cell and the video processor in the ps3 combined
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its not a problem to implement 52342525113 cores (Score:5, Informative)
Apart from, you know, link length.
The most important thing to understand is that these aren't actually 'cores' in the same sense that your Core 2 Duo has two of them. They're shader units. It works more like SIMD than parallelization, only instead of something like SSE that can perform a single operation per clock across 4 packed floating point values it performs the operation on thousands of them.
If they could slap a billion or a million or even a thousand shader units on a card without actually reducing performance they would, but they can't. At a certain point the bottleneck becomes link length. You can overcome it by increasing voltage but then heat becomes the issue. This is a large part of the reason transistor count is tied to transistor size. NVIDIA isn't "failing" in this respect, they're just succumbing to the laws of physics.
If they could improve performance by slapping 20 or 4 or even 2 of the *actual* cores on each card they would, but they can't. Because it's not an actual processor, it doesn't have fancy features like three levels of cache and a TLB and branch prediction and out-of-order execution. But even if they were engineered to work this way, you can't improve PC performance by slapping in a thousand Core 2 Quads either. A part of the reason Xeons have so much cache is so you can mitigate the penalty of having 8 processors using commodity RAM, but eventually you run up against that bottleneck. Shared resources become saturated much faster than most people expect.
The most efficient way of improving graphics performance is with SLI because you are replicating all of the hardware, the memory and the bus the *actual* core depends on. For the exact same reason, you can extract the most performance out of each CPU core by putting each one in a different machine.
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