Final Words
On a final note, we’ll end with a quick look at Supersonic Sled, NVIDIA’s big “kitchen sink” demo for GF100. Supersonic Sled is a comically-themed simulation of a sled with a rocket attached (or perhaps the other way around) based on some real 1950’s US Air Force tests. It uses tessellation, DirectCompute, PhysX – every new thing NVIDIA could throw in to a demo and still have it run. We had a chance to see this in action on a 3D Vision Surround setup at CES, and we have to give NVIDIA’s demo team credit here, they rarely disappoint.
NVIDIA did give us a small (7MB) recording of it in action that we’ve posted here, in case you haven’t had a chance to see any of the recordings from the CES showfloor.
With that out of the way, there’s only so much we can say about NVIDIA’s new architecture without having the hardware on-hand for testing. NVIDIA certainly built a GPU compute monster in GF100, and based on what we now know about its graphics abilities, it looks like it’s an equally capable GPU gaming monster.
But the big question is just how much of a monster will it be, and what kind of monster price tag will it come with? Let’s make no mistake, at 3 billion transistors GF100 is going to be big, and from NVIDIA’s hints it’s probably going to be the single hottest single-GPU card we’ve seen yet. Barring any glaring flaws NVIDIA has what looks to be a solid design, but at the end of the day it almost always boils down to “how fast?” and “how much?”
NVIDIA has taken a big risk on GF100, first with its compute abilities for GPGPU use, then on its geometry abilities for gaming, and now the risk is time. Being 6 months late has hurt NVIDIA, and being 6 months late has hurt consumers through uncompetitive pricing from AMD. By no means is the situation dire, but we can quickly come up with some scenarios where it is if NVIDIA can’t convincingly beat AMD in gaming performance.
NVIDIA has shown their cards, and they’re all in. Now in the next couple of months we’ll see if they’re bluffing or if they really have what it takes to win. Stay tuned.
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Stas - Tuesday, January 19, 2010 - link
all that hype just sounds awful for nVidia. I hope they don't leave us for good. I like AMD but I like competition more :)SmCaudata - Monday, January 18, 2010 - link
The 50% larger die size will kill them. Even if the reports of lower yields are false they will have to get a much smaller profit margin on their cards than AMD to stay competetive. As it is the 5870 can run nearly any game on a 30" monitor with everything turned up at a playable rate. The target audience for anything more than a 5870 is absurdly small. If Nvidia does not release a mainstream card the only people that are going to buy this beast are the people that have been looking for a reason not to buy and AMD card all along.In the end I think Nvidia will loose even more market share this generation. Across the board AMD is the fastest card at every price point. That will not change and with the dual GPU card already out from ATI it will be a long time before Nvidia has the highest performing card because I doubt they will release a dual GPU card at launch if they are having thermal issues with a single GPU card.
BTW... I've only ever owned Nvidia cards but that will likely change at my next system build even after this "information."
Yojimbo - Monday, January 18, 2010 - link
what do you mean by "information"?SmCaudata - Monday, January 18, 2010 - link
Heh. Just that it was hyped up so much and we really didn't get much other than some architectural changes. I suppose that maybe this is really interesting to some, but I've seen a lot of hardware underperform early spec based guesses.The Anandtech article was great. The information revealed by Nvidia was just okay.
qwertymac93 - Monday, January 18, 2010 - link
I really hope fermi doesn't turn into "nvidias 2900xt". late, hot, and expensive. while i doubt it will be slow by any stretch of the imagination, i hope it isn't TOO hot and heavy to be feasible. i like amd, but nvidia failing is not good for anybody. higher prices(as we've seen) and slower advancements in technology hurt EVERYONE.alvin3486 - Monday, January 18, 2010 - link
Nvidia GF100 pulls 280W and is unmanufacturable , details it wont talk about publiclyswaaye - Monday, January 18, 2010 - link
Remember that they talked all about how wondrous NV30 was going to be too. This is marketing folks. They can have the most amazing eye popping theoretical paper specs in the universe, but if it can't be turned into something affordable and highly competitive, it simply doesn't matter.Put another way, they haven't been delaying it because it's so awesome the world isn't ready for it. Look deeper. :D
blowfish - Monday, January 18, 2010 - link
This was a great read, but it made my head hurt!I wonder how it will scale, since the bulk of the market is for more mainstream cards. (the article mentioned lesser derivatives having less polymorph engines)
Can't wait to see reviews of actual hardware.
Zool - Monday, January 18, 2010 - link
Iam still curious why is nvidia pushing this geometry so hard. With 850 Mhz the cypress should be able to make 850mil polygons/s with one triangel/clock speed. Now thats 14 mil per single frame max at 60fps which is quite unrealistic. Thats more than 7 triangels per single pixel in 1920*1050. Making that amount of geometry in single pixel is quite waste and also botlenecks performance. U just wont see the diference.Thats why amd/ati is pushing also adaptive tesselation which can reduce the tesselation level with copute shader lod to fit a reasonable amount of triangels per pixel.
I can push teselation factor to 14 in the dx9 ATI tesselation sdk demo and reach 100fps or put it on 3 and reach 700+ fps with almost zero difference.
Zool - Tuesday, January 19, 2010 - link
Also want to note that just tesselation is not enough and u always use displacement mapping too. Not to mention u change the whole rendering scene to more shader demanding(shadows,lightning) so to much tesselation (like in uniengine heaven on almost everything, when without tesselation even stairs are flat) can realy make big shader hit.If u compare the graphic quality before tesselation and after in uniengine heaven i would rather ask what the hell is taken away that much performance without tesselation as everything looks so flat like in a 10y old engine.
The increased geometry setup should bring litle to no performance advantage for gf100, the main fps push are the much more eficience shaders with new cache architecture and the more than double the shaders of course.