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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Zool - Tuesday, January 19, 2010 - link
There are still plenty of questions.Like how tesselation efects MSAA with increased geametry per pixel. Also the flat stairs in uniengine (and very plastic, realistic after tesselation and displacement mapping), would they work with collision detection as after tesselation or before as completely flat and somewhere else in the 3d space. The same with some physix efects. The uniengine heaven is more of a showcase of tesselation and what can be done than a real game engine.
marraco - Monday, January 18, 2010 - link
Far Cry Ranch Small, and all the integrated benchmark, reads constantly the hard disk, so is dependent of HD speed.It's not unfair, since FC2 updates textures from hard disk all the time, making the game freeze constantly, even in the better computers.
I wish to see that benchmark run with and without SSD.
Zool - Monday, January 18, 2010 - link
I want also note that for the stream of fps/3rd person shooters/rts/racing games that look all same sometimes upgrading the graphic card doesnt have much sense these days.Can anyone make a game that will use pc hardware and it wont end in running and shoting at each other from first or third person ? Dragon age was a quite weak overhyped rpg.
Suntan - Monday, January 18, 2010 - link
Agreed. That is one of the main reasons I've lost interest in PC gaming. Ironically though, my favorite console games on the PS3 have been the two Uncharted games...-Suntan
mark0409mr01 - Monday, January 18, 2010 - link
Does anybody know if Fermi, GF100 or whatever it's going to be called have support for bitstream of HD audio codecs?Also do we know anything else about the video capabilites of the new card, there doesn't really seem to have been much mentioned about this.
Thanks
Slaimus - Monday, January 18, 2010 - link
Seeing how the GF100 chip has no display components at all on-chip (RAMDAC, TMDS, Displayport, PureVideo), they will probably be using a NVIO chip like the GT200. Would it not be possible to just put multiple NVIO chips to scale with the number of display outputs?Ryan Smith - Wednesday, January 20, 2010 - link
If it's possible, NVIDIA is not doing it. I asked them about the limit on display outputs, and their response (which is what brought upon the comments in the article) was that GF100 cards were already too late in the design process after they greenlit Surround to add more display outputs.I don't have more details than that, but the implication is that they need to bake support for more displays in to the GPU itself.
Headfoot - Monday, January 18, 2010 - link
Best comment for the entire page, I am wondering the same thing.Suntan - Monday, January 18, 2010 - link
Looking at the image of the chip on the first page, it looks like a miniature of a vast city complex. Man, when are they going to remake “TRON”……although, at the speeds that chips are running now-a-days, the whole movie would be over in a ¼ of a second…
-Suntan
arnavvdesai - Monday, January 18, 2010 - link
In you conclusion you mentioned that the only thing which would matter would be price/performance. However, from the article I wasnt really able to make out a couple of things. When NVIDIA says they can make something look better than the competition, how would you quantify that?I am a gamer & I love beautiful graphics. It's one of the reasons I still sometimes buy games for PCs instead of consoles. I have a 5870 & a 1080p 24" monitor. I would however consider buying this card if it made my game look better. After a certain number(60fps) I really only care about beautiful graphics. I want no grass to look like paper or jaggies to show on distant objects. Also, will game makers take advantage of this? Unlike previous generations game manufacturers are very deeply tied to the current console market. They have to make sure the game performs admirably on current day consoles which are at least 3-5 years behind their PC counterparts, so what incentive do they have to try and advance graphics on the PC when there arent enough people buying them. I am looking at current games and frankly just playing it, other than an obvious improvement in framerate, I cannot notice any visual improvements.
Coming back to my question on architecture. Will this tech being built by Nvidia help improve visual quality of games without additional or less additional work from the game manufacturing studios.