Summer will bring a GPU war
 

Analysis PR teams gear up for carnage

By Charlie Demerjian: Friday, 02 May 2008, 5:05 PM

THIS SUMMER WE are going to see an large scale GPU war, something we
haven't really seen for a few years now. Nvidia may have all the
headlines today , but ATI has been plotting and rebuilding for the 7xx
series launch.

Last year, the mere suggestion of ATI doing well was laughed at, but
the firm took the outright lead with the X2 cards and forced NV into
the reactionary GX2. ATI can do three and four-way adequately, albeit
with the the Broken OS, while NV can only do it in name. Same with the
bucket called 'hybrid' for both power and frame rate.

ATI has been plotting a comeback, and the R770/R700 parts should take
the outright lead once again. The trick to the cards is what we told
you almost two years ago, no more big GPUs.

You saw a little of that with the 3870X2, but the bridge was a simple
PCIe switch. The real magic this time is a bridge that shares memory,
GDDR5 in this case. Yup, you will have 2 GPUs with one set of memory.

This simplifies designs, lowers chip cost, and speeds time to market.
You get two full variants for the design cost of 1.25, and you are on
the happy end of the cost/area curve for fabbing silicon. While the
early word on GT200 is that it is again 500mm^2+, ATI will have 2x
chips that are much smaller, which translates into a huge cost
advantage.

The other nice thing is that the bridge should keep the GPUs hidden
from the system. This has a disadvantage of hard-wiring in the
Crossfire modes leaving a little performance on the table, but when
you have two of them in the system, it looks like two GPUs, not four.
One look at the 1 - 2 - 4 scaling rates will show what a win that
is.

What it comes down to in the end is that ATI looks to have built up a
technological lead that NV is reacting to. It is the same thing that
happened about the time when NV first released SLI, it had all the
answers and ATI had to catch up. Now the tables are turned.

Another interesting change is on the PR side. NV has been mouthing off
to anyone who won't run away fast enough while ATI has been silent.
Some minor reshuffling at the ATI PR camp says that they are prepping
for an outright hot war. As you know, it is always the silent ones
that are the most trouble.

This summer we will see both trends come to a head, a new resurgent
ATI technological lineup with a PR team willing to beat heads to get
the job done. NV will be playing catchup with a long list of paper
technologies and a few real ones.

The shouting should be pretty intense, and with Intel flipping sides,
things will be all the more interesting. µ

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquir...-bring-gpu-war

Summer will bring a GPU war
 

More than likely summer will bring another round of incrementally better
GPU's at prices that inspire no-one to rush out and upgrade. I doubt the
flagship G100 512bit Shader 5.0 card will be out in Q3. And when it does, I
expect it'll cost more than the 8800 Ultra when introduced.

Summer will bring a GPU war
 

On May 2, 9:40 pm, "Augustus" wrote:
More than likely summer will bring another round of incrementally better
GPU's at prices that inspire no-one to rush out and upgrade. I doubt the
flagship G100 512bit Shader 5.0 card will be out in Q3. And when it does, I
expect it'll cost more than the 8800 Ultra when introduced.



GT200 won't be a Shader 5.0 card, it's still DX10.1 Shader 4.0 (or
4.1, i forget)

It'll be the first significant upgrade of the G80 / GF 8800 since fall
2006. Every card Nvidia has released since has been a minor tweak.

GT200 should be to G80 / GF8800 what G70/GF 7800 was to NV40/GF 6800.

Summer will bring a GPU war
 

It remains to be seen whether this is a good thing or not. Redundant memory
means memory bandwidth scales with the number of GPUs. The 2x256-bit memory
interface on the 3870X2 is thus a close equivalent to a 512-bit interface.
This is how they quote the 115 GB/s bandwidth numbers. It's a benefit
recognized since the 3dfx Voodoo1 days. The benefit will be lost with shared
memory, though with high-clocked GDDR5 the pain will be less acute.

--
"War is the continuation of politics by other means.
It can therefore be said that politics is war without
bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed."

"AirRaid Mach 2.5" wrote in message
...
You saw a little of that with the 3870X2, but the bridge was a simple
PCIe switch. The real magic this time is a bridge that shares memory,
GDDR5 in this case. Yup, you will have 2 GPUs with one set of memory.

Summer will bring a GPU war
 

On Fri, 2 May 2008 21:20:46 -0700 (PDT), "AirRaid Mach 2.5"
wrote:

[snip]

This summer we will see both trends come to a head, a new resurgent
ATI technological lineup with a PR team willing to beat heads to get
the job done. NV will be playing catchup with a long list of paper
technologies and a few real ones.

The shouting should be pretty intense, and with Intel flipping sides,
things will be all the more interesting. µ

ATI is like that Japanese soldier stuck on an island that didn't hear
WWII was over.

I'm sure there are a few stragglers, but all my gaming friends and I
have recently upgraded to NVidia cards, mostly 8800GT's. ATI's problem
is that there is still nothing out other than Crysis that challenges
this card. Think any of us are going to be looking to upgrade in the
Summer to something faster, when what we've already had for 7 months
is powerful enough for everything on the market and now available and
bargain priced?

Hell no.

Don't call me an NVidia fanboy either, its the first non-ATI card I've
had since the GeForce 2ti.

Tim

Summer will bring a GPU war
 

GT200 should be to G80 / GF8800 what G70/GF 7800 was to NV40/GF 6800.

I'll believe that when I see some actual reiews. The card I owned previously
was an 7800GTX OC unit. It was replaced with an 8800GT OC unit. The
difference was in performance vast. I really doubt the GT200 unit, or
whatever moniker it's called, will be anything like that performance jump.

Summer will bring a GPU war
 

It was replaced with an 8800GT OC unit. The difference was in performance
vast.

Should read: "The difference in performance was vast" ........original
sounds like I'm channeling Yoda

Summer will bring a GPU war
 

You can never have enough... even my 8800GTS SLI is not good enough for me
:(

If only I'd wasted the money on Ultras :)

"Tim O" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 2 May 2008 21:20:46 -0700 (PDT), "AirRaid Mach 2.5"
wrote:

[snip]

This summer we will see both trends come to a head, a new resurgent
ATI technological lineup with a PR team willing to beat heads to get
the job done. NV will be playing catchup with a long list of paper
technologies and a few real ones.

The shouting should be pretty intense, and with Intel flipping sides,
things will be all the more interesting. µ

ATI is like that Japanese soldier stuck on an island that didn't hear
WWII was over.

I'm sure there are a few stragglers, but all my gaming friends and I
have recently upgraded to NVidia cards, mostly 8800GT's. ATI's problem
is that there is still nothing out other than Crysis that challenges
this card. Think any of us are going to be looking to upgrade in the
Summer to something faster, when what we've already had for 7 months
is powerful enough for everything on the market and now available and
bargain priced?

Hell no.

Don't call me an NVidia fanboy either, its the first non-ATI card I've
had since the GeForce 2ti.

Tim

Summer will bring a GPU war
 

"Augustus" wrote in message
news:KY_Sj.135$Yp.101@edtnps92...
It was replaced with an 8800GT OC unit. The difference was in performance
vast.

Should read: "The difference in performance was vast" ........original
sounds like I'm channeling Yoda


Vast the difference in peformance was, hmm?

Summer will bring a GPU war
 

On May 4, 12:14*am, "Rick Savoie" wrote:
You can never have enough... even my 8800GTS SLI is not good enough for me

Was that 512 or 640 MB version ?


:(

If only I'd wasted the money on Ultras :)

"Tim O" wrote in message

...



On Fri, 2 May 2008 21:20:46 -0700 (PDT), "AirRaid Mach 2.5"
wrote:

[snip]

This summer we will see both trends come to a head, a new resurgent
ATI technological lineup with a PR team willing to beat heads to get
the job done. NV will be playing catchup with a long list of paper
technologies and a few real ones.

The shouting should be pretty intense, and with Intel flipping sides,
things will be all the more interesting. µ

ATI is like that Japanese soldier stuck on an island that didn't hear
WWII was over.

I'm sure there are a few stragglers, but all my gaming friends and I
have recently upgraded to NVidia cards, mostly 8800GT's. ATI's problem
is that there is still nothing out other than Crysis that challenges
this card. Think any of us are going to be looking to upgrade in the
Summer to something faster, when what we've already had for 7 months
is powerful enough for everything on the market and now available and
bargain priced?

Hell no.

Don't call me an NVidia fanboy either, its the first non-ATI card I've
had since the GeForce 2ti.

Tim- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -