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NVIDIA G80: Architectural Overview

T

TheIkariWarrior

Member
http://www.beyond3d.com/reviews/nvidia/g80-arch/

Four years and 400 million dollars in the making, NVIDIA G80 represents for the company their first brand new architecture with arguably no strong ties to anything they've ever built before. Almost entirely brand new as far as 3D functions are concerned, and designed as the flagship of their 8-series GeForce product line, their new architecture is squarely a D3D10 part but with serious D3D9 performance and image quality considerations. One doesn't beget the other in the world of programmable shading, and NVIDIA seem to want to hit the ground running. Arguably the masters of the compromise, of which all modern 3D rendering is anyway, the Cali-based graphics company has no problems loving some parts of the chip less than others, in the pursuit of the best product for the market they're addressing.
Click to expand...


G80 itself is probably the biggest and most complex piece of mass-market silicon ever created.

Chip Details
Chip Name G80
Silicon Process 90nm (TSMC)
Transistors 681M
Die Size 484mm²
[21.5mm (w) x 22.5mm (h)]
Packaging Flipchip + HS
Pipeline Configuration 32 / 24 / 192
(Textures / Pixels / Z Samples per clock)
Memory Interface 384-bit (64x6 Crossbar)
GDDR to GDDR4
DirectX Capability DX10.0 - VS4.0 + GS4.0, PS4.0
Display None (NVIO)
Host Interface PCI Express x16


Click to enlarge
G80 Chip

Built on TSMC's 90HS process, G80 is some 681M transistors big with a rough die area of 480mm², supporting Direct3D 10 (Shader Model 4.0) and implementing a heavily threaded, unified shader architecture. NVIDIA disguise the actual die with a package that includes a heatspreader module, for more effectively getting the heat output from the GPU to the cooling solution.
Click to expand...

lots more reading. the G80 / NV50 is a complete departure from the GeForce 6 and 7 series. this is the architecture the PS3 should've used but oh well that's another discussion.
 
G80 itself is probably the biggest and most complex piece of mass-market silicon ever created.

Chip Details
Chip Name G80
Silicon Process 90nm (TSMC)
Transistors 681M - gpu clock speeds might finally attain over a gig.


Die Size 484mm² very compact size in line with computer case also rate of production might increase because of this tiny size
[21.5mm (w) x 22.5mm (h)]

Packaging Flipchip + HS
Pipeline Configuration 32 / 24 / 192 G80 itself is probably the biggest and most complex piece of mass-market silicon ever created. wow impressive the fill rate of the vertex shader pipes will finally be able to be customized. Filling rates will be insane even with all filters maxmized to reach peak output.


Memory Interface 384-bit (64x6 Crossbar)
GDDR to GDDR4 Awesome this expanded memory bank will be able to encompass a whole new level of bump mapping, of course with custom shader effects on.

DirectX Capability DX10.0 - VS4.0 + GS4.0, PS4.0
Display None (NVIO)
Host Interface PCI Express x16

All i can say is wowaweewa!(poor effort but you get the ****ing point, on the other hand pictures would be welcome.)
 
It's a good read for the tech minded (Beyond3Ds the best place for this kinda stuff), but it's too bad Nvidia didn't release any D3D10 compatible drivers. I guess we'll have to wait a while to get the full overview of the beast. :)
 
Onix said:
People are whining about the price of the PS3 as is ...
Click to expand...

I'd be whining about PC gaming if I actually had to pay that price to play the games. Thankfully pc games are perfectly playable on video cards that are under 200 bucks. I ain't touching the geforce 8 series until they make a midrange card (like I've done the past 2 nvidia generations of cards)
 
PS3 could've used a mid-range G80-based chip with 3/4th of the processing logic.


PS1 and PS2 were both ahead of the fastest PC graphics cards at the time, not so with the PS3. Sony cut their R&D for graphics and put everything into CELL + Blu-ray.
 
Pimpbaa said:
I'd be whining about PC gaming if I actually had to pay that price to play the games. Thankfully pc games are perfectly playable on video cards that are under 200 bucks. I ain't touching the geforce 8 series until they make a midrange card (like I've done the past 2 nvidia generations of cards)
Click to expand...

The above is something the anti-PC crowd tends to forget when focusing on how much the ridiculously high end hardware costs. :)
 
TheIkariWarrior said:
PS3 could've used a mid-range G80-based chip with 3/4th of the processing logic.


PS1 and PS2 were both ahead of the fastest PC graphics cards at the time, not so with the PS3. Sony cut their R&D for graphics and put everything into CELL + Blu-ray.
Click to expand...


And what about heat issues? You assume the size of the PS3 wouldn't be bigger than it is also. Think about it like this.....



Nvidia paid $400 million for R&D for this chip. Sony paid $400 million for R&D for the CELL chip and to build factories to make the chip.

So why do you expect a lower model of the G80 to be in the PS3 for real?
 
Why are people talking about the goddamned PS3? Go stand in line in Burbank then decide if the RSX is good enough for you. Leave that shit outta this thread.
 
G80 is really a great GPU as far as the architecture is concerned but it should have been designed for 65nm.
As it is now nVidia has been forced to take a very little elegant approach for critical aspects like the size of the board, power consuption,dual slot solution for heat dissipation and so on.
This can work for a niche hardcore PC market with under a million boards manufactured but thinking such a solution could be implemented in a console which has to be mass produced is ridicolous.
 
TheIkariWarrior said:
PS3 could've used a mid-range G80-based chip with 3/4th of the processing logic.


PS1 and PS2 were both ahead of the fastest PC graphics cards at the time, not so with the PS3. Sony cut their R&D for graphics and put everything into CELL + Blu-ray.
Click to expand...

PS2 was ahead of its time in terms of speed and BW, but behind the times in terms of texturing and effects.

RSX is a more balanced design.


You are making the mistake of looking at pieces of the system, instead of the overall design. I think that is one area where Sony has shined since they joined the gaming community. While each of their systems have had their quirks, when taken overall - they have been consistently well thought out.
 
Onix said:
PS2 was ahead of its time in terms of speed and BW, but behind the times in terms of texturing and effects.

RSX is a more balanced design.
Click to expand...

Bingo. Or to flesh that out a bit more, where the EE had the majority of it's muscle tasked for graphics (ie transform and lighting), Cell+RSX (and the big fat bus connecting them) is a much more balanced configuration.

Anyways, back on topic about this monster. 681M transistors?! :0
 
Yeah, the transistor count is crazy. That was one of the rumors I thought was just BS, man was I surprised when I saw that one. The G80 must be a bitch to manufacture :lol
Though it's amazing how little power it draws for that many transistors, only ~11 watts more than a 1900XT :D
 
Onix said:
PS2 was ahead of its time in terms of speed and BW, but behind the times in terms of texturing and effects.

RSX is a more balanced design.


You are making the mistake of looking at pieces of the system, instead of the overall design. I think that is one area where Sony has shined since they joined the gaming community. While each of their systems have had their quirks, when taken overall - they have been consistently well thought out.
Click to expand...

Uh, no. PS2 was an extremely unbalanced design as far as hardware is concerned.
 
TheIkariWarrior said:
PS3 could've used a mid-range G80-based chip with 3/4th of the processing logic.
Click to expand...
And ship with a porta-nuclear power plant for the power supply.
This thing might very well use as much power as the whole PS3 and 360 combined, and you'd stick it in a console case?

aaaaa0 said:
No way in hell this chip could ever have made it into the PS3.
Click to expand...
See my post above ;)
Although fair is fair - we weren't that far from getting a half a bilion transistor chip in consoles this gen, including this whole "new" approach of using scalar instead of vector ALU pools.

WARCOCK said:
gpu clock speeds might finally attain over a gig.
Click to expand...
You might be surprised there...

Slurpy said:
Uh, no. PS2 was an extremely unbalanced design as far as hardware is concerned.
Click to expand...
It was balanced for different kinds of workloads then PC "standard" of its era. Whether that was good or bad thing is kinda immaterial now, it obviously worked.
 
Balancing the PS2 for fillrate at the expense of even some basic features when its target display is standard definition TVs and it only has 4-MB of display RAM would be a tough choice to defend.
 
Standard definition TV is the very reason why you have no need for more then 4MB of display RAM. Though I guess you could argue 360 choice is tough to defend as well.

Anyway, if you're arguing that balanced means = "highest count of usable features", I would have to concede that XBox was more balanced then all other consoles put together.
But that metric also puts DC as dead last (because it scales linearly with technology).
 
Architecturally, i really like it. I really dig the whole "lots of simple cores on a single chip" philosophy in general, actually. As for the cost, i really hope no one who bitched about the PS3's price is planning to get one of these. That'd be pretty hypocritical.
 
X360 and past systems showed that normally priced consoles can release with cutting edge GPUs. High-end PC cards aren't sold at cost or for a loss like consoles and also carry very high price mark-ups since they're sold in such low volumes.
 
Lazy8s said:
X360 and past systems showed that normally priced consoles can release with cutting edge GPUs.
Click to expand...

GPUs don't matter, it's the fact that consoles are closed systems and developers have years to fully utilize the hardware that gives them the edge. As amazing as the G80 is, it's sad to know that it'll get replaced long before it's fully tapped.
 
An abundance of fillrate becomes less useful when the system isn't well equipped to exploit it for anti-aliasing nor well positioned to exploit it for high resolution output. That oversight wasn't made in X360.

eDRAM has its own problems as a design choice, though. For memory configurations, it's the opposite extreme to external RAM on an "immediate mode" renderer.

Having the highest count of useable features is meaningless without considering its cost to silicon. Dead last is as far from the rank that DC gets there.
 
Lazy8s said:
X360 and past systems showed that normally priced consoles can release with cutting edge GPUs. High-end PC cards aren't sold at cost or for a loss like consoles and also carry very high price mark-ups since they're sold in such low volumes.
Click to expand...

X360 is a normal priced console now?
 
Compared to its direct competition and in the context of the high-end PC cards against which it was being measured, absolutely.
 
WARCOCK said:
Transistors 681M - gpu clock speeds might finally attain over a gig.
Click to expand...

The shader ALUs are clocked at 1.35GHz. The core clock is 575MHz.

I've finally got a chance to read the B3D article and some of the performance reviews fully, and it's pretty spectacular. I'm going to try and get this into a rig I'm building for work, probably the GTS.

For people in Europe, the GTS and GTX are showing up for preorder on Komplett (available 16/11). €479/£315 and €669/£435 respectively.
 
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