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Fermi (Nvidia Next Gen) GCPU Architecture: Thread of promises, waiting and 2010

Wow, if even half of that is true right now, the reign of nVidia might be passing. No more the way it's meant to be played.

I have always managed to buy a new ATI card with a new PC and then later replace it with a mid-range nVidia card once new games started pissing on ATI.

I wonder what this means for Apple, since they've been running with nVidia cards in their machines for quite a while now?
 
glaurung said:
I wonder what this means for Apple, since they've been running with nVidia cards in their machines for quite a while now?

It means, that we finally get Unibody MacBook Pros with superior ATI chips. The 9400M get fuck right off.
 
W-T-F I hope that is not true. I have already made plans for a 5850 but I don't want a market dominated by a single company.
 
I wonder how this will affect Sony's plans?


While moving it mobile-friendly GPU's would certainly help with a PSP2, is the PS4 going to be left in the cold?
 
Onix said:
I wonder how this will affect Sony's plans?


While moving it mobile-friendly GPU's would certainly help with a PSP2, is the PS4 going to be left in the cold?

Who says the PS4 would have a NVidea GPU anyway?
 
Gorgon said:
Who says the PS4 would have a NVidea GPU anyway?

I think there was an announcement of a contract being signed a few years ago. Some speculation at the time tied the contract to the PSP2.

A quick Google should shed some light on this contract.
 
Gorgon said:
Who says the PS4 would have a NVidea GPU anyway?

While not written in stone, that appeared to be the direction Sony was going.


A few years back, they signed a long-term commitment with the assumption nVidia would supply parts for a number of future devices. Part of the commitment also involved some tech sharing iirc (from Sony, eDRAM expertise that nVidia wants ... from nVidia, shader expertise that Sony wants).


With that in mind, the speculation was that nVidia likely would help with a PS4 GPU as well as for the PSP2. What it came down to was GS2 versus outsourcing. Since Sony didn't have expertise with shaders, they decided to go outside. Eventually, that lead to nVidia.






TouchMyBox said:
Really, the PS3 at one point almost didn't have a GPU at all.

From some discussions with devs here ... that rumor appears to have actually been a myth. A dual-CELL based architecture was never seriously considered.
 
Fermi could be a complete disaster, and they could be dumping everything to save money, but Nvidia's not gonna go bankrupt just because of one cycle, no matter how disastrous. Assuming the article has some semblance of truth in it, natch.
 
Onix said:
From some discussions with devs here ... that rumor appears to have actually been a myth. A dual-CELL based architecture was never seriously considered.

Ah, I suppose I stand corrected then, thought it sounded a bit too bizarre even for Kutaragi.
 
TouchMyBox said:
Ah, I suppose I stand corrected then, thought it sounded a bit too bizarre even for Kutaragi.

An internally developed GPU (GS2) was supposedly considered though iirc.
 
Onix said:
While moving it mobile-friendly GPU's would certainly help with a PSP2, is the PS4 going to be left in the cold?
I suppose it's possible that Nvidia could custom design a scaled-down version of Fermi's successor for Sony to use in the PS4, and just not release it as a consumer-level PC GPU. Building a GPU for a console is probably a safer bet than targeting the consumer PC market.
 
wasn't there some rumors going around that Sony would seriously consider using Larrabee for PS4?

Personnally I'd rather see Sony going the Intel route because Larrabee supposedly gives developers lots of freedom for shader programming.
 
OK, thanks for the info. I may have read about that but I honestly can't remember anything about it.

If that was true than it will be interesting to see what happens with the PS4. Intel or AMD, maybe.
 
Tarin02543 said:
wasn't there some rumors going around that Sony would seriously consider using Larrabee for PS4?

Personnally I'd rather see Sony going the Intel route because Larrabee supposedly gives developers lots of freedom for shader programming.

That would be a very un-orthodox move for Sony. They always tend to stick to their own route, ignoring the PC market all together. I don't actually think that they even used any PC components in their consoles until the RSX.

And since Larrabee is a, basically, an x86 processor (consisted of many x86 cores actually), with some additional hardware, such a move would provoke a huge retribution by Warlord Kutaragi. :lol
 
Hopefully that nVidia news isn't completely true. The fact is, I simply don't like using ATI hardware. I suppose if nVidia goes under support would improve, but as it stands, ATI cars are always the ones having issues with games. Often these issues seem minor, but they add up and could be quite an annoyance. When it comes to performance and compatibility you were better off with nVidia most of the time (outside of the awful GeForceFX lineup).

I've given ATI a shot twice and they let me down both times. Even the 9700 Pro, which was considered an amazing piece of hardware, was suffering from issues that the lower end GeForce3 and 4 cards were not (games with display errors, missing effects, slower performance, etc). Many recent game releases suggest that this type of thing is still occurring today with ATI cards.
 
dark10x said:
Hopefully that nVidia news isn't completely true. The fact is, I simply don't like using ATI hardware. I suppose if nVidia goes under support would improve, but as it stands, ATI cars are always the ones having issues with games. Often these issues seem minor, but they add up and could be quite an annoyance. When it comes to performance and compatibility you were better off with nVidia most of the time (outside of the awful GeForceFX lineup).

I've given ATI a shot twice and they let me down both times. Even the 9700 Pro, which was considered an amazing piece of hardware, was suffering from issues that the lower end GeForce3 and 4 cards were not (games with display errors, missing effects, slower performance, etc). Many recent game releases suggest that this type of thing is still occurring today with ATI cards.

My gaming experience with the 19XX series was generally pleasant once I switched to the Omega drivers... no big complaints looking back (across hundreds of games), other than the friggen CCC software which is so bad it could give you nightmares.

I agree nVidia had ATI beat w/ drivers by a large margin, but all my games ran on my 1950 card fine, and I have a ton of games I ran with it, old and new.
 
rohlfinator said:
I suppose it's possible that Nvidia could custom design a scaled-down version of Fermi's successor for Sony to use in the PS4, and just not release it as a consumer-level PC GPU. Building a GPU for a console is probably a safer bet than targeting the consumer PC market.

It may be safer for nVidia, but isn't safer for the costumer (Sony). It would likely drive up costs, as well as have the potential for not being particularly competitive.

So while nVidia may offer a product to Sony, it's quite possible the situation may make Sony look elsewhere.
 
Lagspike_exe said:
That would be a very un-orthodox move for Sony. They always tend to stick to their own route, ignoring the PC market all together. I don't actually think that they even used any PC components in their consoles until the RSX.

The world of console gaming is not the isolated affair it once was. Until the PS2 some games where multiplatform but console gaming in general had it's own world. Now, after the original Xbox and the PS3/360 the games are pretty much the same across the board and once PC-exclusive developers are on the console bandwagon to stay. Sony would be shooting themselves on the foot if they don't make it easy to third parties. They already learned a big lesson this gen.

The PS4 will most likely be an updated and multicore version of Cell (something like 4 general purpose cores with an X number of SPEs around them, which means less money spent on R&D and a natural migration for devs without any new exotic architecture), a unified memory pool (ditching the XDR for GDDR) and certainly a third-party GPU from Intel, NVidea (if still an option) or AMD.
 
Nvidia skipping a generation more likely. They need to go back to the drawing board and design on efficiency basis. Fermi seems interesting.
 
I think what will happen with the next consoles depends on how much the general purpose GPU stuff progresses before their release. There is certainly a lot of technical neatness in a single-chip single-memory homogeneous design (Larrabee/Fermi-like). Of course BC would be extremely challenging.
 
Actualy if you think about it, it would be best for Nvidia and AMD to collude on timing. Both of them stagger there product releases so both have half a generation to themselves.
 
Minsc said:
My gaming experience with the 19XX series was generally pleasant once I switched to the Omega drivers... no big complaints looking back (across hundreds of games), other than the friggen CCC software which is so bad it could give you nightmares.

I agree nVidia had ATI beat w/ drivers by a large margin, but all my games ran on my 1950 card fine, and I have a ton of games I ran with it, old and new.
See, it's not that games didn't RUN on my ATI cards, rather, it's that there were often little things missing or odd performance issues that nVidia users were not experiencing.

It also seems that, even with powerful hardware, ATI often underperforms in many games. Like, you see a benchmark for a select few games where ATI excels, but the majority of software actually runs slower. It's like owning a PowerVR or Rendition card instead of a Voodoo back in the 90s. I tried those solutions and, while they worked well enough, they were simply no match for the sheer compatibility of the Voodoo. Voodoo cards just worked...with virtually everything. You were going to see the best possible visuals with the smoothest performance. Only a select few marquee games would offer better performance on alternate solutions. It was like a revelation for me when I switched from PowerVR to 3DFX...
 
dark10x said:
See, it's not that games didn't RUN on my ATI cards, rather, it's that there were often little things missing or odd performance issues that nVidia users were not experiencing.

It also seems that, even with powerful hardware, ATI often underperforms in many games. Like, you see a benchmark for a select few games where ATI excels, but the majority of software actually runs slower. It's like owning a PowerVR or Rendition card instead of a Voodoo back in the 90s. I tried those solutions and, while they worked well enough, they were simply no match for the sheer compatibility of the Voodoo. Voodoo cards just worked...with virtually everything. You were going to see the best possible visuals with the smoothest performance. Only a select few marquee games would offer better performance on alternate solutions. It was like a revelation for me when I switched from PowerVR to 3DFX...

I think some of that has to do with Nvidia paying to have things disabled. But I'm with you. I've had a number of ATI cards (Including an 9800) and you'd get weird glitches, performance oddities that had nothing to do with Nvidia (looking at a level in KOTOR that ran at .0001 frames per second unless you used driver 4.2 or a handful of others), the CCC sucking, etc.

I also had an ATI HD capture card in that computer. It had an infamous bug where if you were recording, every 30 seconds the picture would momentarily drop out for a blink. It was well known and very common. I don't think ATI ever addressed it with driver updates. Somebody at the AVS forums finally wrote a 3rd party freeware program (watchhdtv) that allowed people to actually use the card bug free. He created a program that was like 160k and worked. Yet the legion of ATI engineers couldn't create a glitch free program of their own.

I've been ATI free for a number of years and I don't want to go back. Even if Nvidia was underperforming by 10 percent, I'd choose the Nvida card in a heartbeat.
 
1-D_FTW said:
I think some of that has to do with Nvidia paying to have things disabled. But I'm with you. I've had a number of ATI cards (Including an 9800) and you'd get weird glitches, performance oddities that had nothing to do with Nvidia (looking at a level in KOTOR that ran at .0001 frames per second unless you used driver 4.2 or a handful of others), the CCC sucking, etc.

I also had an ATI HD capture card in that computer. It had an infamous bug where if you were recording, every 30 seconds the picture would momentarily drop out for a blink. It was well known and very common. I don't think ATI ever addressed it with driver updates. Somebody at the AVS forums finally wrote a 3rd party freeware program (watchhdtv) that allowed people to actually use the card bug free. He created a program that was like 160k and worked. Yet the legion of ATI engineers couldn't create a glitch free program of their own.

I've been ATI free for a number of years and I don't want to go back. Even if Nvidia was underperforming by 10 percent, I'd choose the Nvida card in a heartbeat.
As much as I like, I hate people who are ignorant. Judging the present on the basis of (way) past is exactly that.
 
Doc Evils said:
If anything, I presume Intel would simply acquire Nvidia to stay toe to toe with AMD.
Intel wont be able to acquire Nvidia, it will be anti-competitive. Not going to happen.

(Intel is the market leader and so is Nvidia)

Besides Intel has already sunk quite a bit of cash in R&D for LRB that and they also own part of the Lucid Logix. ;)
 
irfan said:
Intel wont be able to acquire Nvidia, it will be anti-competitive. Not going to happen.

(Intel is the market leader and so is Nvidia)

Besides Intel has already sunk quite a bit of cash in R&D for LRB that and they also own part of the Lucid Logix. ;)

How did AMD get ATI?
 
irfan said:
As much as I like, I hate people who are ignorant. Judging the present on the basis of (way) past is exactly that.

That's how you judge. When you go from a lousy experience to a nice one, you're gonna hold it against them. At a couple hours a day, it took me a month to play KOTOR. And there was a feature I really used in the newer CC, but I had to go without because I needed to use an old version to play KOTOR.

And the HD thing was comical. The fact a guy could solve ATI's problem with a program that was 160k big and ATI would just twiddle their thumbs until it was discontinued says a lot.

Then I go back to Nvidia and haven't had any driver issues. The NView is night and day to the craptacular CCC, of course I'm gonna hold it against them. Why shouldn't I? What else should I use?

EDIT: Now if Nvidia is still in trouble a year from now, would I consider going back to ATI? Of course. But it'd be reluctantly.
 
1-D_FTW said:
That's how you judge. When you go from a lousy experience to a nice one, you're gonna hold it against them. At a couple hours a day, it took me a month to play KOTOR. And there was a feature I really used in the newer CC, but I had to go without because I needed to use an old version to play KOTOR.

And the HD thing was comical. The fact a guy could solve ATI's problem with a program that was 160k big and ATI would just twiddle their thumbs until it was discontinued says a lot.

Then I go back to Nvidia and haven't had any driver issues. The NView is night and day to the craptacular CCC, of course I'm gonna hold it against them. Why shouldn't I? What else should I use?

EDIT: Now if Nvidia is still in trouble a year from now, would I consider going back to ATI? Of course. But it'd be reluctantly.
Yes, I do. What you are illustrating here is the level of hatred as if ATI raped your puppy and then some. :lol

I bought a 8800GT two years ago and got burned by Nvidia for Vista drivers. Now if a really good deal comes along on GTX275 or GTX285, would I hold a puppy dog grudge to pass it up? No.

Here is how I see it, I think its more fair than what your opinion is on this specific topic. I'll get the card that offers the best performance for a specific price. At this point in time both Nvidia and ATI are pretty competitive and the days of piss poor support are long gone.
 
dark10x said:
See, it's not that games didn't RUN on my ATI cards, rather, it's that there were often little things missing or odd performance issues that nVidia users were not experiencing.

It also seems that, even with powerful hardware, ATI often underperforms in many games. Like, you see a benchmark for a select few games where ATI excels, but the majority of software actually runs slower. It's like owning a PowerVR or Rendition card instead of a Voodoo back in the 90s. I tried those solutions and, while they worked well enough, they were simply no match for the sheer compatibility of the Voodoo. Voodoo cards just worked...with virtually everything. You were going to see the best possible visuals with the smoothest performance. Only a select few marquee games would offer better performance on alternate solutions. It was like a revelation for me when I switched from PowerVR to 3DFX...

I think ATI coming out on top in two straight generations now is bound to affect the situation. By the end of next year it will simply be suicide to release a game that performs poorly on ATI hardware, yet before the launch of the 4800 series ATI's marketshare really was pitifully bad. Just check out the Steam hardware survey results, both the 2xxx and 3xxx series really were a disaster in terms of marketshare, no way to sugar coat that. Yet, the 4800 series is currently the second most popular GPU range among gamers and will be taking the crown from the 8800 series within a few months. That really is an unprecedented turnaround, and ATI's DX11 parts certainly look to be contunuing that trend.

If anything, developers ignored ATI hardware because they could get away with it, the proportion of gamers it could affect was too low to invest a serious amount into sorting out the issues. That's just no longer going to be the case though, after such a serious turnaround in forunes.

Fwiw, I do agree with you, performance definitely is more "consistant" with Nvidia hardware and nHancer is like a gift from God after having to put up with CCC.


Doc Evils said:
If anything, I presume Intel would simply acquire Nvidia to stay toe to toe with AMD.

That ship sailed as soon as word of LRB's development hit. It never did make much sense anyway.
 
That would be really shitty if Nvidia throws in the towel for good. I have been an ATI owner for the last couple of card generations and while I certainly think ATI provides the better deal it would be a terrible thing for Nvidia to stop competing. Monopolies never help the end user.

If this means Nvidia taking a short break and coming back later with some really awesome stuff (and hopefully getting rid of proprietary crap like Physx) then that would be great, though.
 
I can't believe you guys are talking about Charlie's article :lol :lol

semi-accurate.com should honestly be banned because of all of the FUD it spreads.
 
brain_stew said:
Fwiw, I do agree with you, performance definitely is more "consistant" with Nvidia hardware and nHancer is like a gift from God after having to put up with CCC.
What's so "OMFG GIFT FROM THE HEAVENS" about nHancer? All i see is a buncha profiles i could've set up inside most games.

I don't have a SLI setup, i usually don't turn AA and Anisotropic on for most games (since it kills the performance on my 8800 gtx), VSync is forced on all games through nvidia control panel. So yeah, i might not use nHancer capatibilities that well, but since i don't use them, i don't know what's so hard about setting them up manually inside each game.
 
Iced_Eagle said:
I can't believe you guys are talking about Charlie's article :lol :lol

semi-accurate.com should honestly be banned because of all of the FUD it spreads.

He obviously hates Nvidia with a passion, but he has been quite accurate in the past.
 
drizzle said:
What's so "OMFG GIFT FROM THE HEAVENS" about nHancer? All i see is a buncha profiles i could've set up inside most games.

I don't have a SLI setup, i usually don't turn AA and Anisotropic on for most games (since it kills the performance on my 8800 gtx), VSync is forced on all games through nvidia control panel. So yeah, i might not use nHancer capatibilities that well, but since i don't use them, i don't know what's so hard about setting them up manually inside each game.

Like hell you could. You're lucky if a game has an msaa option these days, let alone settings for anisotropic flitering, transparency antialiasing, supersampling or other custom aa modes. nHancer lets you force aa in a lot of games that don't support it at all, Risen being a perfect recent example.

And, no, anisotropic filtering will not bog down your 8800GTX's performance, you should be able to enable 8xaf for practically free in most games and 2xmsaa won't have a noticeable hit in many games at all. Your GPU has dedicated hardware for this stuff, yet its going compeltely unused in your case.

Seriously, zero AF? I'm surprised you don't go blind from the blurry mess that your games must be.
 
brain_stew said:
And, no, anisotropic filtering will not bog down your 8800GTX's performance, you should be able to enable 8xaf for practically free in most games and 2xmsaa won't have a noticeable hit in many games at all. Your GPU has dedicated hardware for this stuff, yet its going compeltely unused in your case.
Seriously, zero AF? I'm surprised you don't go blind from the blurry mess that your games must be.
I sincerely can barely notice anything when i turn those settings up on most games, other than the FPS dropping considerably.

However, I'm not running on some small bullshit 1440x600 resolution, 24incher going 1920x1200 here. On all games, all settings maxed all the time.

One of the only games that i really see the AA difference (and that's the only game i usually have it on) is on Team Fortress 2, mostly because of the flat colors and how much more noticeable the jaggedness of it all is.

Another game that comes to mind where i actively noticed the AA stuff is on Left4Dead. It turns on AA by default and i can notice the FPS dropping HARD. I turn it off and FPS is back up on the 60's (on crowded areas). I can barely notice the AA difference. I mean, i know it's there (i'm not blind after all), but it really doesn't bother me.
 
drizzle said:
I sincerely can barely notice anything when i turn those settings up on most games, other than the FPS dropping considerably.

However, I'm not running on some small bullshit 1440x600 resolution, 24incher going 1920x1200 here. On all games, all settings maxed all the time.

One of the only games that i really see the AA difference (and that's the only game i usually have it on) is on Team Fortress 2, mostly because of the flat colors and how much more noticeable the jaggedness of it all is.

Another game that comes to mind where i actively noticed the AA stuff is on Left4Dead. It turns on AA by default and i can notice the FPS dropping HARD. I turn it off and FPS is back up on the 60's (on crowded areas). I can barely notice the AA difference. I mean, i know it's there (i'm not blind after all), but it really doesn't bother me.

I was talking about af not aa. Anisotropic filtering doesn't do anything for jaggies, it just stops textures more than a metre away from the camera looking like smudged vomit. Go ahead and set af to 8x, I guarantee the performance hit will be tiny at best.
 
brain_stew said:
I was talking about af not aa. Anisotropic filtering doesn't do anything for jaggies, it just stops textures more than a metre away from the camera looking like smudged vomit. Go ahead and set af to 8x, I guarantee the performance hit will be tiny at best.

That's the thing: AA is the only option i CAN see a difference. All the other crap you mentioned, I can sincerely tell you that i don't even know what they mean. I see them in games, Ii turn them on, I see no difference, I turn them off - that's why i don't even research them.

On an earlier message, somebody posted a site that allowed you to change between screenshots of the settings on the exact same scene on Half Life 2. The difference is obviously there, but it sincerely doesn't bother me. At least not ingame. If i'm going to be taking screenshots of my games to show others (photomode anyone?), I guess i can see it being applied.

I can't really pay that much attention to details on games either. The FPS drop is a much more noticeable (and annoying) loss for me.
 
Zefah said:
He obviously hates Nvidia with a passion, but he has been quite accurate in the past.

I'm sure parts of the article do have some sort of foundation. For example, it's been confirmed that Nvidia has slowed shipments of their current chips, which for all I know is the only fact that this guy had.

He then wrote up this elaborate article, using the fact he knew, connected the dots in a way that made Nvidia seem like they are fucked, and then posted it.

About the slowing shipments, that's normal for any company before they release a new product. Would MS keep making the Xbox's and shipping them out like crazy right before the 360? No, of course not. Nvidia is doing the same thing by draining the supply chain slowly from their end to get ready for the next gen of cards.

HardOCP got a flat out denial from Nvidia when they asked about the article, and Nvidia even made the jibe that the site is an AMD fanboy site, and not non-biased. So please, take the article's conclusion with a grain of salt...
 
drizzle said:
That's the thing: AA is the only option i CAN see a difference. All the other crap you mentioned, I can sincerely tell you that i don't even know what they mean. I see them in games, Ii turn them on, I see no difference, I turn them off - that's why i don't even research them.

On an earlier message, somebody posted a site that allowed you to change between screenshots of the settings on the exact same scene on Half Life 2. The difference is obviously there, but it sincerely doesn't bother me. At least not ingame. If i'm going to be taking screenshots of my games to show others (photomode anyone?), I guess i can see it being applied.

I can't really pay that much attention to details on games either. The FPS drop is a much more noticeable (and annoying) loss for me.

If you can't tell the difference between zero af and 16x then I can only conclude that you are blind, it really is that striking. And for the zillionth time, the performance hit is negligeable.

http://www.nhancer.com/help/AFSamples.htm

If anything that example understates the difference, as its much more noticeable when in fullscreen and you can see a clear line being that divides the blurred vomit from the clear textures moving forward with every step you take. Its simply hideous.
 
irfan said:
Yes, I do. What you are illustrating here is the level of hatred as if ATI raped your puppy and then some. :lol

I bought a 8800GT two years ago and got burned by Nvidia for Vista drivers. Now if a really good deal comes along on GTX275 or GTX285, would I hold a puppy dog grudge to pass it up? No.

Here is how I see it, I think its more fair than what your opinion is on this specific topic. I'll get the card that offers the best performance for a specific price. At this point in time both Nvidia and ATI are pretty competitive and the days of piss poor support are long gone.

AMD/Intel/Nvdia/ATI, I'm actually agnostic when buying and want them all to go back and forth so nobody gets nutty with pricing. When I upgrade I'll buy the card that's got the best bang for the buck. But all things being close to equal, I'm gonna have preferences. Wading through hundreds and hundreds of posts trying to figure why my HDTV Wonder was a broken POS is gonna do that.
 
It'd be nice for NVidia to take a hit and even out the market share. Maybe it can also make they stop this re-branding nonsense that is slowly gearing towards the GF4 nonsense, where we had widely different GPU generations in the same product line and have them design a proper architecture that is usable from IGPs to nuclear-powered 4-way SLI monsters.

Anyone praising NVidia drivers never tried to do anything serious using more than one monitor with them. My last straw was having the removal of theater mode (using Vista's WDM as an excuse - while ATI's theater mode actually works even in Vista) and the fact that 3D performance is halved in rotated/extended displays.

brain_stew said:
If you can't tell the difference between zero af and 16x then I can only conclude that you are blind, it really is that striking. And for the zillionth time, the performance hit is negligeable.

http://www.nhancer.com/help/AFSamples.htm

If anything that example understates the difference, as its much more noticeable when in fullscreen and you can see a clear line being that divides the blurred vomit from the clear textures moving forward with every step you take. Its simply hideous.
You need a 3rd party tool to force AF in games? Isn't there an option for this in the NV panel?
 
My problem with Nvidia is the smack talking they do >.<

Theyre kinda jerks.

So yeah, landing flat on their asses would be nice for abit.
 
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