Over at Nvidia’s nTersect blog, Drew Henry has written a nice short post acknowledging some of the public’s comments about the incredible power consumption and heat dissipation of the GTX470 and GTX480.
We wanted to let you know that we’ve also heard your concerns about GTX 480 with respect to power and heat. When you build a high performance GPU like the GTX 480 it will consume a lot of power to enable the performance and features I listed above. It was a tradeoff for us, but we wanted it to be fast. The chip is designed to run at high temperature so there is no effect on quality or longevity. We think the tradeoff is right.
Nothing too impressive there, but if you read down in the comments, Drew responds directly to user’s comments with more interesting details:
When asked about Denmark release:
We’re building a lot of them right now, so hopefully it hits Denmark fast. BTW, you can download our new Design Garage ray tracing app and it will work on your GTX 295. Check it out!
When asked about why the new architecture:
We knew a few years ago that it was time to build a new GPU architecture. Some of today’s games (with our first set of drivers) show it off better than others. Believe me, as we tune this baby, she’s just going to go faster on many games. But we did build it thinking about the future, less so the past. We want tessellation perf to rock since we deeply believe that PC games should have the same geometric complexity as movies (think of the cool characters in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies). Explosions should be physics based, not animated. Clothing should act like fabric, not rubber. And finally, you should be able to feel like your inside the game … 3D Stereo! Time to “Crank Up” games!
When asked about the missing 512 core card:
We decided not to do the 512 version at this time, John. Might in the future. Thanks for being a long time fan. I hope we can change your opinion as more and more people get to experience the product.
And lots more.. go check it out.
via nTersect Blog – GTX 480: A Passion for the Future of PC Gaming.
