Earlier this week AMD threw down the performance gauntlet with their dual-chip Radeon HD6990. Today, NVidia answers their challenge with some help from EVGA thanks to the new GeForce GTX460 “2Win”, which contains dual GF104 Fermi chips.
EVGA has just set loose the details of a new GTX 460 2Win graphics card, which ticks along at 700MHz, has 672 cumulative CUDA cores served by 2GB of GDDR5, and reportedly collects more 3D Marks than NVIDIA’s finest card out at the moment, the GTX 580. The company also gleefully reports that pricing of the 2Win model will be lower than the 580′s. It’s interesting that NVIDIA is opting for a pair of the older-gen GF104 Fermi chips here, but then again, those have been big winners with critics and price-sensitive gamers alike, with many touting the use of two GTX 460s in SLI as a more sensible solution than the elite single-card options
No word on performance yet, but it definitely sounds attractive.
One of my great disappointments with NVIDIA’s Fermi is that we know it has 512 streaming processors. Unfortunately, none of the graphics cards, whether for professional or gaming purposes, that have been released by NVIDIA enable all of these streaming processors. The GeForce GTX 480 has only 480 streaming processors. In the professional realm it is even worse. The Quadro 6000 has only 448 streaming processors.
A user over in the [H]ardOCP forums has collected some nice NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 rumors. Among those rumors are that the GeForce GTX 580 will have all 512 streaming processors enabled.
Nvidia has released their latest WHQL (Windows Hardware Quality Labs) graphics driver. Guru3D has taken a deeper look into the driver and has found that it mentions new middle-range and low-end graphics cards. The driver also mentions several variants with an “M” on the end. One can suppose that those will be mobile versions of the graphics chips.
Expreview.com has a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 that comes with 512 shader processors. The core clocks in at 701 MHz, while the shader processors run at 1401 MHz, and the memory runs at 924 MHz. The card comes with 1.536 GB of memory size. It also has two DVI outputs along with a mini-HDMI output. Who knows? This may turn out to be a new GTX 485. Personally I would love to see a GTX with all the shader processors enabled.
As screenshot shown, the yellow tantalum capacitors cover the whole PCB comes first, and the card uses a 8 phase power design, as well as a 8pin+8pin power adapter; Meantime, the card carries 12 GDDR5 granularity, it’s equipped 1536MB of memory size paired up with 384bit memory interface; It packs dual DVI+mini-HDMI connectivities too, the former interface adopts metallic shield design to reduce electromagnetic interference.
Since the Fermi chipset came to reality in the GTX480 card, high end graphics professionals have had a difficult choice. They can take the latest and greatest technology, the GeForce GTX480, or go back a generation for a QuadroFX 4800 (or similar). Several of the newer CUDA applications for professionals, like the Adobe CS5 applications, only works on Quadro cards. The added performance of the Fermi chipset, tho, makes it worth it in certain applications. It’s been a difficult decision time for Quadro fans.
Today, NVidia has announced that this is a difficult decision no more. They’ve just announced the newest generation of their popular Quadro cards using the newly designed ‘Fermi’ technology and combines it with the rest of the Quadro ecosystem to bring to bear a card that truly is top of its class. The core of the new offering is three new Quadro Cards:
Yep that’s right. The Quadro 6000 sets a new record for video memory with 6GB available on a single card. In addition to these three, there will be a new Quadro 5000m design, which packs the regular Quadro 5000 into a mobile form factor suitable for high-end laptops without compromising functionality. Also, if you really need power, you can get the new QuadroPlex system which contains 2 Quadro6000′s for truly amazing power.
NVidia gave me one of the Quadro5000′s to review, and you can read my results below. Read more…
We have told you recently that NVIDIA would soon be releasing their GeForce GTX 460. This new graphics card will not be based on the same chip, the GF100, that powers the GeForce GTX 480 and 470. Instead this card will be using the GF104. The question that has been left unanswered, until now, is how would the new graphics card perform?
Anandtech as posted a two part review of the new NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460. In the first part, they look at the architecture of the new graphics card, and then run benchmarks on it. In the second part, they take a look at the different cards that the vendors are offering. So how does it perform? Take a look at the quote below for your answer.
Today NVIDIA is back in the saddle with something entirely new: GF104 and the GTX 460. The second member of the Fermi family is ready for its day in the sun, and in many ways it’s nothing like we expected. Designed from the start as a smaller chip than GF100, GF104 is the basis of the GTX 460 line of products which fix the GTX 465’s ills while delivering the GTX 465’s performance. It’s what the GTX 465 should have been, and it’s priced as low as $199. And as we’ll see, it’s the first NVIDIA card in a long time that we can give a glowing review for.
What is the fastest laptop graphics you can buy? Well, from the image to the right you could easily guess that it is the Nvidia GeForce GTX 480M. However, no one seems to have one just yet for testing, until now.
Anandtech has posted a review of AVADirect’s Clevo W880CU with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 480M. But what makes the 480M special? From the article:
NVIDIA’s GTX 480M uses the same cut-down—but still Fermi—core found in desktop GeForce GTX 465 cards. That means 352 of NVIDIA’s “CUDA cores” and a 256-bit memory bus connected to GDDR5 memory. The difference is that while the GTX 465 only gets 1GB of GDDR5, the GTX 480M gets a full 2GB in our review notebook. Clock speeds aren’t as comparable, though, with the 480M’s clock speed down from the GTX 465′s 607 MHz to just 425 MHz. The shader clocks get cut down, too, dropping from 1.2 GHz to 800 MHz. Probably the most alarming drop is the GDDR5: running at 3.2 GHz on the desktop card, the 480M has its effective speed cut to just 2.4 GHz, the lowest speed we’ve ever seen on GDDR5 and actually a slower effective clock speed than the GDDR3 on the desktop GeForce GTX 285!
Now you know the specs, but how does it perform? Hit the link below to find out.
The 3D Vision Blog finds a nice YouTube video for a cool 3-D setup. I will let them explain the details…
A video demonstrating an interesting project done by Maingear for Nvidia – a 3D Vision Surround racing simulator setup using a water cooled PC with two Fermi cards, 3x 120Hz monitors and a seat with “vibration” (they’ve probably used some parts of the system already done for a previous project with a single display). Looks quite nice, kind of Pimp My Ride MTV style, but I would’ve liked a bit more technical details too and also to see some footage of the building process, maybe some trouble they’ve had and how they overcame them etc.
Guru3D takes the new EVGA GeForce GTX465 (based on the Fermi Chipset) out for a spin and write up their results for us. In short, they love the performance and noise levels, but find it difficult to justify at the current price point. In particular, the overclocking potential is interesting:
So guys, there you have it. The GTX 465 is a nice enough card to play your games with. The overclock potential is really good, I mean we didn’t even voltage tweak this card. Then some of you (though we do not recommend it) even flashed a GTX 470 BIOS in these cards which in some cases seems to work fine. Heat levels are fine, noise levels are fine. Setup in SLI the scaling is really good, please check out an article on GTX 465 SLI performance right here.
They’re also careful to note that the base clock frequencies in the 465 are identical to the Radeon HD5830, which is available for a good 60 € less. So if CUDA & PhysX are critical to you, this card is a winner. Otherwise, you may want to shop around a bit more.
With the new flexibility of OpenGL4.0 and the Fermi architecture, Cyril Crassin decided to revisit some of the older A-Buffer algorithms and see what kind of improvements he could manage. What is an a-buffer, you ask?
Basically an A-buffer is a simple list of fragments per pixel [Carpenter 1984]. Previous methods to implement it on DX10 generation hardware required multiple passes to capture an interesting number of fragments per pixel. They where essentially based on depth-peeling, with enhancements allowing to capture more than one layer per geometric pass, like the k-buffer, stencil routed k-buffer. Bucket sort depth peeling allows to capture up to 32 fragments per geometry pass but with only 32 bits per fragment (just a depth) and at the cost of potential collisions. All these techniques were complex and especially limited by the maximum of 8 render targets that were writable by the fragment shader.
So, he rewrote the algorithms to exploit the new capabilities. How did it perform?
It worked pretty well since it provides something like a 1.5x speedup over the fastest previous approach (at least I know about !), with zero artifact and supporting arbitrary number of layers with a single geometry pass.
I would call that a resounding success! Find details and example code at his site.
Earlier this week AMD threw down the performance gauntlet with their dual-chip Radeon HD6990. Today, NVidia answers their challenge with some help from EVGA thanks to the new GeForce GTX460 “2Win”, which contains dual GF104 Fermi chips.
Guru3D takes the new EVGA GeForce GTX465 (based on the Fermi Chipset) out for a spin and write up their results for us. In short, they love the performance and noise levels, but find it difficult to justify at the current price point. In particular, the overclocking potential is interesting:
With the new flexibility of OpenGL4.0 and the Fermi architecture, Cyril Crassin decided to revisit some of the older A-Buffer algorithms and see what kind of improvements he could manage. What is an a-buffer, you ask?
VizWorld.com 
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