Applications of GF100’s Compute Hardware
Last but certainly not least are the changes to gaming afforded by the improved compute/shader hardware. NVIDIA believes that by announcing the compute abilities so far ahead of the gaming abilities of the GF100, that potential customers have gotten the wrong idea about NVIDIA’s direction. Certainly they’re increasing their focus on the GPGPU market, but as they’re trying their hardest to point out, most of that compute hardware has a use in gaming too.
Much of this is straightforward: all of the compute hardware is what processes the pixel and vertex shader commands, so the additional CUDA cores in the GF100 give it much more shader power than the GT200. We also have DirectCompute, which can use the compute hardware to quickly do some things that couldn’t be done quickly via shader code, such as Self Shadowing Ambient Occlusion in games like Battleforge, or to take an NVIDIA example, the depth-of-field effect in Metro 2033.
Perhaps the single biggest improvement for gaming that comes from NVIDIA’s changes to the compute hardware are the benefits afforded to compute-like tasks for gaming. PhysX plays a big part here, as along with DirectCompute it’s going to be one of the biggest uses of compute abilities when it comes to gaming.
NVIDIA is heavily promoting the idea that GF100’s concurrent kernels and fast context switching abilities are going to be of significant benefit here. With concurrent kernels, different PhysX simulations can start without waiting for other SMs to complete the previous simulation. With fast context switching, the GPU can switch from rendering to PhysX and back again while wasting less time on the context switch itself. The result is that there’s going to be less overhead in using the compute abilities of GF100 during gaming, be it for PhysX, Bullet Physics, or DirectCompute.
NVIDIA is big on pushing specific examples here in order to entice developers in to using these abilities, and a number of demo programs will be released along with GF100 cards to showcase these abilities. Most interesting among these is a ray tracing demo that NVIDIA is showing off. Ray tracing is something even G80 could do (albeit slowly) but we find this an interesting way for NVIDIA to go since promoting ray tracing puts them in direct competition with Intel, who has been showing off ray tracing demos running on CPUs for years. Ray tracing nullifies NVIDIA’s experience in rasterization, so to promote its use is one of the riskier things they can do in the long-term.
NVIDIA's car ray tracing demo
At any rate, the demo program they are showing off is a hybrid program that showcases the use of both rasterization and ray tracing for rendering a car. As we already know from the original Fermi introduction, GF100 is supposed to be much faster than GT200 at ray tracing, thanks in large part due to the L1 cache architecture of GF100. The demo we saw of a GF100 card next to a GT200 card had the GF100 card performing roughly 3x as well as the GT200 card. This specific demo still runs at less than a frame per second (0.63 on the GF100 card) so it’s by no means true real-time ray tracing, but it’s getting faster all the time. For lower quality ray tracing, certainly this would be doable in real-time.
Dark Void's turbulence in action
NVIDIA is also showing off several other demos of compute for gaming, including a PhysX fluid simulation, the new PhysX APEX turbulence effect on Dark Void, and an AI path finding simulation that we did not have a chance to see. Ultimately PhysX is still NVIDIA’s bigger carrot for consumers, while the rest of this is to entice developers to make use of the compute hardware through whatever means they’d like (PhysX, OpenCL, DirectCompute). Outside of PhysX, heavy use of the GPU compute abilities is still going to be some time off.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
115 Comments
View All Comments
chizow - Monday, January 18, 2010 - link
Looks like Nvidia G80'd the graphics market again by completely redesigning major parts of their rendering pipeline. Clearly not just a doubling of GT200, some of the changes are really geared toward the next-gen of DX11 and PhysX driven games.One thing I didn't see mentioned anywhere was HD sound capabilities similar to AMD's 5 series offerings. I'm guessing they didn't mention it, which makes me think its not going to be addressed.
mm2587 - Monday, January 18, 2010 - link
for nvidia to "g80" the market again they would need parts far faster then anything amd had to offer and to maintain that lead for several months. The story is in fact reversed. AMD has the significantly faster cards and has had them for months now. gf100 still isn't here and the fact that nvidia isn't signing the praises of its performance up and down the streets is a sign that they're acceptable at best. (acceptable meaning faster then a 5870, a chip that's significantly smaller and cheaper to make)chizow - Monday, January 18, 2010 - link
Nah, they just have to win the generation, which they will when Fermi launches. And when I mean "generation", I mean the 12-16 month cycles dictated by process node and microarchitecture. It was similar with G80, R580 had the crown for a few months until G80 obliterated it. Even more recently with the 4870X2 and GTX 295. AMD was first to market by a good 4 months but Nvidia still won the generation with GTX 295.FaaR - Monday, January 18, 2010 - link
Win schmin.The 295 ran extremely hot, was much MUCH more expensive to manufacture, and the performance advantage in games was negligible for the most part. No game is so demanding the 4870 X2 can't run it well.
The geforce 285 is at least twice as expensive as a radeon 4890, its closest competitor, so how you can say Nvidia "won" this round is beyond me.
But I suppose with fanboy glasses on you can see whatever you want to see. ;)
beck2448 - Monday, January 18, 2010 - link
Its amazing to watch ATI fanboys revise history.The 295 smoked the competition and ran cooler and quieter. Fermi will inflict another beatdown soon enough.
chizow - Monday, January 18, 2010 - link
Funny the 295 ran no hotter (and often cooler) with a lower TDP than the 4870X2 from virtually every review that tested temps and was faster as well. Also the GTX 285 didn't compete with the 4890, the 275 did in both price and performance.Its obvious Nvidia won the round as these points are historical facts based on mounds of evidence, I suppose with fanboy glasses on you can see whatever you want to see. ;)
Paladin1211 - Monday, January 18, 2010 - link
Hey kid, sometimes less is more. You dont need to post that much just to say "nVidia wins, and will win again". This round AMD has won with 2mil cards drying up the graphics market. You cant change this, neither could nVidia.Just come out and buy a Fermi, which is 15-20% faster than a HD 5870, for $500-$600. You only have to wait 3 months, and save some bucks until then. I have a HD 5850 here and I'm waiting for Tegra 2 based smartphone, not Fermi.
Calin - Tuesday, January 19, 2010 - link
Both Tegra 2 and Fermi are extraordinary products - if what NVidia says about them is true. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like any of them is a perfect fit for the gaming desktop.Calin - Monday, January 18, 2010 - link
You don't win a generation with a very-high-end card - you win a generation with a mainstream card (as this is where most of the profits are). Also, low-end cards are very high-volume, but the profit from each unit is very small.You might win the bragging rights with the $600, top-of-the-line, two-in-one cards, but they don't really have a market share.
chizow - Monday, January 18, 2010 - link
But that's not how Nvidia's business model works for the very reasons you stated. They know their low-end cards are very high-volume and low margin/profit and will sell regardless.They also know people buying in these price brackets don't know about or don't care about features like DX11 and as the 5670 review showed, such features are most likely a waste on such low-end parts to begin with (a 9800GT beats it pretty much across the board).
The GPU market is broken up into 3 parts, High-end, performance and mainstream. GF100 will cover High-end and the top tier in performance with GT200 filling in the rest to compete with the lower-end 5850. Eventually the technology introduced in GF100 will diffuse down to lower-end parts in that mainstream segment, but until then, Nvidia will deliver the cutting edge tech to those who are most interested in it and willing to pay the premium for it. High-end and performance minded individuals.