# NVIDIA Kepler Refresh GPU Family Detailed



## btarunr (Oct 17, 2012)

A 3DCenter.org report shed light on what NVIDIA's GPU lineup for 2013 could look like. According to the report, NVIDIA's next-generation GPUs could follow a similar path to previous-generation "Fermi Refresh" (GF11x), which turned the performance-per-Watt equation around back in favor of NVIDIA, even though the company's current GeForce Kepler has an established energy-efficiency lead. The "Kepler Refresh" family of GPUs (GK11x), according to the report, could see significant increases in cost-performance, with a bit of clever re-shuffling of the GPU lineup. 

NVIDIA's GK104 GPU exceeded performance expectations, which allowed it to drive this generation's flagship single-GPU graphics card for NVIDIA, the GTX 680, giving the company time to perfect the most upscaled chip of this generation, and for its foundry partners to refine its 28 nm manufacturing process. When it's time for Kepler Refresh to go to office, TSMC will have refined its process enough for mass-production of GK110, a 7.1 billion transistor chip on which NVIDIA's low-volume Tesla K20 GPU compute accelerator is currently based.



The GK110 will take back the reins of powering NVIDIA's flagship single-GPU product, the GeForce GTX 780. This product could offer a massive 40-55% performance increase over GeForce GTX 680, with a price ranging anywhere between US $499 and $599. The same chip could even power the second fastest single-GPU SKU, the GTX 770. The GK110 physically packs 2880 CUDA cores, and a 384-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface. 

Moving on, the real successor to the GK104, the GK114, could form the foundation for high-performance SKUs such as the GTX 760 Ti and 760. The chip has the same exact specifications as the GK104, leaving NVIDIA to tinker with clock speeds to increase performance. The GK114 will be relegated to performance-segment SKUs from the high-end segment it currently powers, and so even with minimal increases in clock speed, the chip will have achieved sizable performance gains over current GTX 660 Ti and GTX 660. 

Lastly, the GK106 could see a refresh to GK116, too, retaining specifications and leaving room for clock speed increases, much in the same way as GK114, except, it gets a demotion to GTX 750 Ti, GTX 750, as well, and so with minimal R&D, the GTX 750 series gains a sizable performance gain over its previous generation.

*View at TechPowerUp Main Site*


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## [H]@RD5TUFF (Oct 17, 2012)

So excited for this even if I have to wait like everyone else.


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## Protagonist (Oct 17, 2012)

Why Nvidia why? I ordered a GTX670 and its still stuck at the customs, and now this news. For the same price next year a probable GK110 for GTX780 & GTX770. Then that will mean a GTX760TI will preform equal to or better than GTX680, that will make GTX760 perform equal to or better then GTX670, and all with better prices than what people are paying for currently.... why Nvidia? I love performance increase but i already feel bad, i should think of selling the GTX670 sometime early next year if this information turns out to be true.


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## HumanSmoke (Oct 17, 2012)

Interesting stuff if true. GK110 takes GK104's place in the product stack, and the GTX 680 refresh gets pricing in the GTX 660 Ti's territory. Given that AMD's refresh seems to be looking at the same ~15% increase, it would seem that AMD might end up being pressured pretty hard in perf/mm^2, perf/$ and margins if they have to fight a GTX 680 successor that is 40% cheaper than the current model. A pricing overhaul like that will surely lay waste to the resell market- by the same token, a GTX670 or 680 SLI setup should be cheap as chips come March.

At least all the people screaming about Nvidia pricing a supposed mainstream/performance GK 104 at enthusiast prices, will now be able to vent their rage elsewhere.


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## Nordic (Oct 17, 2012)

st.bone said:


> Why Nvidia why? I ordered a GTX670 and its still stuck at the customs, and now this news. For the same price next year a probable GK110 for GTX780 $ GTX770. Then that will mean a GTX760TI will preform equal to or better than GTX680, that will make GTX760 perform equal to or better then GTX670, and all with better prices than what people are paying for currently.... why Nvidia? I love performance increase but i already feel bad, i should think of selling the GTX670 sometime early next year if this information turns out to be true.



By the time you order your 7xx there will be news of the 8xx having 50% more performance and you will be asking the same thing once again.

Nvidea may pull me over for a 760ti. That is if the performance/price was good and I do like quiet cards and the 680 is not a hard card to cool. I wonder what amd will have to show for this. 89xx cards might be cheap little gpgpu powerhouses.


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## Tensa Zangetsu (Oct 17, 2012)

st.bone said:


> Why Nvidia why? I ordered a GTX670 and its still stuck at the customs, and now this news. For the same price next year a probable GK110 for GTX780 & GTX770. Then that will mean a GTX760TI will preform equal to or better than GTX680, that will make GTX760 perform equal to or better then GTX670, and all with better prices than what people are paying for currently.... why Nvidia? I love performance increase but i already feel bad, i should think of selling the GTX670 sometime early next year if this information turns out to be true.



james888 is right on this one. It's not about having the "fastest and latest" GPU that matters, it's about getting the performance you want and need. You will be going through this cycle next year again.


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## Protagonist (Oct 17, 2012)

james888 said:


> By the time you order your 7xx there will be news of the 8xx having 50% more performance and you will be asking the same thing once again.
> 
> Nvidea may pull me over for a 760ti. That is if the performance/price was good and I do like quiet cards and the 680 is not a hard card to cool. I wonder what amd will have to show for this. 89xx cards might be cheap little gpgpu powerhouses.



Its the GK110 that makes me sad,.. if they were refreshing only the GK104 to GK114 and so on, while retaining the GK110 for Tesla. Then I would not have much to worry about.

I like performance increase so if GK110 is the way forward then I'm happy for them. Any way we always knew GK104 was a mid range card if the information is true.


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## Delta6326 (Oct 17, 2012)

Sweet can't wait...


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## HumanSmoke (Oct 17, 2012)

st.bone said:


> Its the GK110 that makes me sad,.. if they were refreshing only the GK104 to GK114 and so on, while retaining the GK110 for Tesla. Then I would not have much to worry about


You still may have nothing to worry about. A certain logic would dictate that the best GK 110's are destined to end up as Tesla/Quadro parts, which would leave the GeForce parts as either salvage and/or high leakage parts. In either event I wouldn't expect the GTX 780 to be widely available, which is why the pricing is a head scratcher. It's pretty much certain that Tahiti's successor (like the GK 104) is likely only a minor refresh, so given the performance percentages given in the article, it would seem more likely that the pricing should be closer to:
GTX 780 (GK 110) @ $550 (or more, depending on % of full die)
GTX 770 (GK 110) @ $450
GTX 760Ti (GK 114) @ $350....likely price/performance comparable to HD 8970
GTX 760 (GK 114) @ $250-300


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## Nordic (Oct 17, 2012)

st.bone said:


> Its the GK110 that makes me sad,.. if they were refreshing only the GK104 to GK114 and so on, while retaining the GK110 for Tesla. Then I would not have much to worry about.
> 
> I like performance increase so if GK110 is the way forward then I'm happy for them. Any way we always knew GK104 was a mid range card if the information is true.


I get what you are saying.



Tensa Zangetsu said:


> james888 is right on this one. It's not about having the "fastest and latest" GPU that matters, it's about getting the performance you want and need. You will be going through this cycle next year again.


The first read through that I thought "What! I am only right on this *one*?" I understand this concept very well myself. I want to upgrade every year and do have a feeling of missing out on that performance. Then I actually think about it and I only need a 660 ti's worth of performance for 1080p. I plan on getting a 1440p monitor sooner or later and will need more performance so I will need a 680's worth of performance. So a 760ti may be the card for me or even the 850ti depending on when I finally get that 1440p monitor.



HumanSmoke said:


> GTX 760Ti (GK 114) @ $350....likely price/performance comparable to HD 8970


Really? The 7970 and 680 are really close as is. If the 8970 reaches the proposed 30% increase in performance I could see the 8970 being closer to the 770


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## Protagonist (Oct 17, 2012)

Tensa Zangetsu said:


> james888 is right on this one. It's not about having the "fastest and latest" GPU that matters, it's about getting the performance you want and need. You will be going through this cycle next year again.



I get your point, the GK110 stunt if what gets me. they should have at list given us the GK100 on the GTX680/GTX670. The way it was supposed to be or at list many thought it was to be, but oh well its like crying over spilled tea.

I know I'm not supposed to cry over spilled tea.


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## mastrdrver (Oct 17, 2012)

btarunr said:


> When it's time for Kepler Refresh to go to office, TSMC will have refined its process enough for mass-production of GK110, a 7.1 billion transistor chip on which NVIDIA's low-volume Tesla K20 GPU compute accelerator is currently based.



Of which on nVidia seems to be having problems making working chips on TSMC's 28nm process. Not a peep from AMD or Qualcomm.


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## Aksh_47 (Oct 17, 2012)

Although performance is sweet, for someone who cant buy new GPUs every year, this annual system of launching GPUs really sucks :/


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## krimetal (Oct 17, 2012)

*Wait and see*

We will just have to wait and see the reviews on this GPUs next year when it will be released. For now, it's just Nvidia showing off.
6xx series have a good power consumption draw? Yeahh, of course, when they chopped off much of the GPUGPU power.
Then, AMD will show off about the 8xxx series.
Just wait for the reviews.

@Aksh_47: 





> Although performance is sweet, for someone who cant buy new GPUs every year, this annual system of launching GPUs really sucks



Unfortunately, thats the way things work. If your video card runs your favorite games, then it's fine, upgrade at 3-4 years.


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## HumanSmoke (Oct 17, 2012)

james888 said:


> Really? The 7970 and 680 are really close as is. If the 8970 reaches the *proposed 30% increase* in performance I could see the 8970 being closer to the 770


Kind of depends whose proposing the 30% increase does it not?.


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## Recus (Oct 17, 2012)

mastrdrver said:


> Of which on nVidia seems to be having problems making working chips on TSMC's 28nm process. Not a peep from AMD or Qualcomm.



http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2012/04/19/qualcomm-28nm-capacity/1
http://wccftech.com/amd-28nm-processors-delayed-2014/ (Global Foundries problems)


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## NC37 (Oct 17, 2012)

Worst case scenario...AMD is right back where ATI was with the HD2000 series. Totally surpassed by NV with no way to really compete coming any time soon. But will they be able to pull off another 3870? Time will tell!


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## Prima.Vera (Oct 17, 2012)

I"m looking forward of it since I am getting tired on crappy AMD cards. After so long still no Physics alternative or support for it, even that a lot of games are using it, the MLAA quality and speed sucks compared to FXAA, very crappy crossfire support, etc, etc. Enough is enough!


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## iO (Oct 17, 2012)

I just don´t believe these performance increase claims. They gonna double the transistor count but won´t get even 50% more speed. GK110 will be highly optimised for DP computing.
GK110 will definately shine in some selected benchmarks but there will be a lot of die area that won´t be touched by even the latest games.
Big Kepler just makes no sense as a gaming card. Huge die size, huge power consumption and a huge pricetag. GK114 might de worth waiting for...


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## BigMack70 (Oct 17, 2012)

It's still too early to really know what's going on... we have rumors saying GK110 won't be a GTX 7xx card, rumors saying it is, rumors saying that the performance increase will be 15-25% on both sides, and now this, which is probably relying on old rumors from last January of the GK110 being ~45% faster than the 7970.

The 7xxx and 6xx round was pretty much a tie and I expect that to continue next round with no major shakeups from either green or red.


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## Selene (Oct 17, 2012)

This just proves every thing I and many others said early on, the GTX 680 was to be the GTX 660Ti but AMD flopped and left the door open for Nvidia to cash in on a mid range part at high end prices. I could not wait and went with a pair of GTX670 FTW's to feed my needs and will do me for a few years I think.


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## Ikaruga (Oct 17, 2012)

btarunr said:


> could offer a massive 40-55% performance increase over GeForce GTX 680


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## BigMack70 (Oct 17, 2012)

Selene said:


> This just proves every thing I and many others said early on, the GTX 680 was to be the GTX 660Ti but AMD flopped and left the door open for Nvidia to cash in on a mid range part at high end prices. I could not wait and went with a pair of GTX670 FTW's to feed my needs and will do me for a few years I think.



Also, Nvidia couldn't get yields up enough on the GK110 to make it viable. It's not like Nvidia was sitting on a GK110 based GTX 680 and then suddenly just decided to hold it back. If AMD had done anything much better, Nvidia would have been in a really nasty predicament. 

As it turned out, it was win-win for them and lose-lose for the consumer. AMD really helped them out by (severely) underclocking and overpricing their 7970 and 7950 at launch.


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## BarbaricSoul (Oct 17, 2012)

So Nvidia IS going to release what was suppose to be the GTX680 as the GTX780.


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## Hilux SSRG (Oct 17, 2012)

Looks like I'm picking up another GTX670 to do SLI in 2013. I hope prices will drop significantly after release of the 780/770.


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## Nordic (Oct 17, 2012)

BigMack70 said:


> It's still too early to really know what's going on... we have rumors saying GK110 won't be a GTX 7xx card, rumors saying it is, rumors saying that the performance increase will be 15-25% on both sides, and now this, which is probably relying on old rumors from last January of the GK110 being ~45% faster than the 7970.
> 
> The 7xxx and 6xx round was pretty much a tie and I expect that to continue next round with no major shakeups from either green or red.



That is probably how it will turn up.


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## crazyeyesreaper (Oct 17, 2012)

i love how everyone is saying AMD will have a hard time competing  did everyone forget that yawn that is the 7970 GHz edition still beat out the GTX 680 and this gen for the most part each company is equal at the typical price points.

8970 is expected to be 40% faster than the 7970

GTX 780 is expected to be 40-55% faster than the 680

add in overclocking on both and we end up with the exact same situation as this generation. So in reality it just plain doesnt matter lol performance is all i care about and who gets product onto store shelfs and from their into my hands. Doesn't matter whos fastest if it takes 6 months for stock to catch up.


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## hoodlum (Oct 17, 2012)

*Low Power?*

If you go back to the original linked article the performance gains for the GK114 and GK116 will only be 5-15%.  That seems quite low considering the improvements to memory bandwidth, shaders, ROPs, etc.  That would suggest nvidia may be focusing on even lower TDP than pure performance increases.  And prices will be increasing too.

I think people may be disappointed by the time these are released.  I suspect AMD will show similar improvements next year as well with more focus on TDP.


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## BigMack70 (Oct 17, 2012)

crazyeyesreaper said:


> i love how everyone is saying AMD will have a hard time competing  did everyone forget that yawn that is the 7970 GHz edition still beat out the GTX 680 and this gen for the most part each company is equal at the typical price points.



I think, from reading pretty much every review of these cards, that the general impression this round is (wrongly) more favorable to Nvidia than AMD, and this carries over into forums/etc. 

AMD did this to themselves because they released their 79xx cards fairly horridly underclocked (especially the 7950), and at price points that were too high. They didn't make a move on either front soon enough, and so when Kepler finally hit, reviewers were left looking at a situation where the 7970 was outperformed by a cheaper card. Then the 670 came in, trashed the 7950, and competed with AMD's previously $550 card at $150 less.

Those things defined the impressions most people have of this round. AMD then made the mistake of releasing their GHz edition as a reference card for reviewers, and most reviewers then dismissed it as too loud/etc. 

You have to do a decent amount of homework before you start realizing that both companies at this point in time are pretty much dead even, and most people don't like to think that hard.

If AMD had released their 7970 clocked around 1050/1500 MHz for $500 at launch, and their 7950 at maybe 950/1400 for $400, I can guarantee you that the impressions would be different. Pretty much every single 7970/7950 will hit those clocks without messing with voltages, so I have no idea why they got so conservative. But they didn't make those moves, and so here we are.


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## crazyeyesreaper (Oct 17, 2012)

they were conservative in order to get better yields essentially most chips yes can do 1050 but not all can at the proper voltage or TDP level, they also have to harvest chips for the 7950 lower clocks meant more chips more usable chips means greater volume to put on store shelves. 

Regardless the refresh will probably see Nvidia take the lead but not by a whole lot they have more room to play when it comes to TDP than AMD does right now.


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## BigMack70 (Oct 17, 2012)

I understand they did it for better yields, but I haven't seen a 7970 that wouldn't do 1050 on stock volts. I'm sure they're out there, but they've gotta be a tiny minority. I think AMD just flat out screwed up figuring out how they needed to clock their cards for viable yields.


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## crazyeyesreaper (Oct 17, 2012)

probably but it doesnt matter much most overclocked 7970s on the market were already 1000-1100 mhz before the GHz edition dropped lol but i digress looking at the info available if AMD limits themselves to 32 ROPs again but increases shader count they will be beaten by NVIDIA. should AMD wise up and increase ROP count to 48 they stand a good chance of being within reach in that pre - overclocked models should fair well against Stock 780 time will tell of course.


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## Nordic (Oct 17, 2012)

crazyeyesreaper said:


> probably but it doesnt matter much most overclocked 7970s on the market were already 1000-1100 mhz before the GHz edition dropped lol but i digress looking at the info available if AMD limits themselves to 32 ROPs again but increases shader count they will be beaten by NVIDIA. should AMD wise up and increase ROP count to 48 they stand a good chance of being within reach in that pre - overclocked models should fair well against Stock 780 time will tell of course.



Can you explain what a ROP is and why it is/might be bottlenecking the 7970?


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## crazyeyesreaper (Oct 17, 2012)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Render_Output_unit

Look back at the 5850 and 5870

clock both to the same clock speed the 5850 with less shaders but same ROP count was within 1-2% of the 5870 so increased shader count didnt do a whole hell of a lot

with GCN shaders scale a bit better yes but notice

7870 1280 GCN stream processors and 32 ROPs can take on the 7950 which is 32ROPs 1792 shaders etc

looking at previous GPUs 

7770 = 640 shaders 16 ROPs, 10 Compute Units, 40 TMUs  - 3Dmark 11  P3500
7870 = 1280 shaders 32 ROPs, 20 Compute Units, 80 TMUs - 3Dmark 11 P6600
7970 = 2048 shaders 32 ROPs, 32 Compute Units, 128 TMUs - 3Dmark 11 P8000

what 7970 probably looked like if following AMDs previous design philosphy
1920 shaders 48 Rops, 30 Compute Units, 120 TMUs add in higher GPU clock

for the 8970 being at the same 28nm its looking like AMD will push for 2500-2600 shaders many are saying 2560 but no one knows for sure yet

thats 25% increase in shaders however we can see from the 7870 to 7950 a 20-30% increase in shaders didnt do much for performance

AMD needs more ROPs and higher clocks for GCN to scale well with a large number of stream processors

so with just increasing shaders AMD wont get far they will need to up the # of compute units as well as TMUs and with that ROPs count needs to be bumped up to maintain a balanced GPU design Tweaks in architecture will help but a simple bump in shaders would mean that a heavily clocked 7970 could possible catch the 8970 if the basis of 40% is compared to the 925 Mhz stock cards in which case we see the 7970 at full overclocks pulling as far as 20% faster right now on avg.  that would make a stock 8970 just 20% faster so a better balance and more optmized design is necessary. 

NVIDIA already has their design finished, AMD on the other hand we can only hope didnt screw the pooch.


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## Xzibit (Oct 17, 2012)

Recus said:


> http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2012/04/19/qualcomm-28nm-capacity/1
> http://wccftech.com/amd-28nm-processors-delayed-2014/ (Global Foundries problems)



That deals with capacity something that nvidia complains very little of. The past 3 quaters they've "nvidia" has been complaining about wafer yields since they moved to a buy per wafer instead of a per working die.
Look up any Nvidia transcript this year and 28nm yields issues along with margins will be the dominate fall-back.

Nvidia is currently in talks with Samsung to use its 28nm fabs but Samsung is more expensive and Nvidia only uses Samsung for initial fab of desings and looks to Global Foundries and TSMC for production.
Samsung will have a open slot given there recent litigation with Apple and companies like Qualcomm, Nvidia and others will be looking to fill in that slot and Samsung will charge a premium i'm sure.


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## GoldenTiger (Oct 17, 2012)

Selene said:


> This just proves every thing I and many others said early on, the GTX 680 was to be the GTX 660Ti but AMD flopped and left the door open for Nvidia to cash in on a mid range part at high end prices. I could not wait and went with a pair of GTX670 FTW's to feed my needs and will do me for a few years I think.



It proves nothing. In fact, if anything,  it shows nVidia didn't have a great, available GK100. Now that GK110 came out well, they may be releasing it as the high-end. You really need to not be so hung-up on codenames.



BigMack70 said:


> It's still too early to really know what's going on... we have rumors saying GK110 won't be a GTX 7xx card, rumors saying it is, rumors saying that the performance increase will be 15-25% on both sides, and now this, which is probably relying on old rumors from last January of the GK110 being ~45% faster than the 7970.
> 
> The 7xxx and 6xx round was pretty much a tie and I expect that to continue next round with no major shakeups from either green or red.



Considering the Tesla card specs have been outed by a CAD vendor recently accidentally (K20 card) with them up for order of GK110.... and 3dcenter tends to be pretty knowledgeable.... I would put my bet on this rumor being fairly accurate, pending good clock speeds at release for the GeForce variant.

Also, a useful post from OCN and my reply:

-----



			
				Nowyn said:
			
		

> Say the rumor is true.
> We have 2496 CUDA Cores out of 2880 ie 2 SMX clusters disabled. That gives us  2496 - 1536 = 960 extra cores which is 62.5% more.
> There are 12 more ROPs so there's 50% increase from 24 in GK104
> Plus 384-bit bus which is 50% wider.
> ...



Exactly... and we may see further optimizations ala the GF104 vs. GF114. I doubt it'll come in at "just" 700mhz, but if it does, it's still not outside the realm of possibility that it could be 50% faster out of the box.


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## BigMack70 (Oct 17, 2012)

There's more than enough evidence to substantiate that the GK104 was drawn up to be the 660ti and not the 680...


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## GoldenTiger (Oct 17, 2012)

BigMack70 said:


> There's more than enough evidence to substantiate that the GK104 was drawn up to be the 660ti and not the 680...



Oh, perhaps it was originally, but GK100 was certainly not "held back" so they could "put out a midrange card as high-end for mad profits!!!!" as some people like to proclaim.


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## cadaveca (Oct 17, 2012)

GoldenTiger said:


> Oh, perhaps it was originally, but GK100 was certainly not "held back" so they could "put out a midrange card as high-end for mad profits!!!!" as some people like to proclaim.



This is always what I thought. If nVidia could truly release a card twice as fast as what AMD has, using the same foundry, then they would, since that would ensure far more sales and profit than selling something that "saves on costs" instead.

In fact, had nVidia done this, to a degree, would amount to price fixing, and of course, is illegal.

Of course, now that both cards are here, and we can see the physical size of each chip, we can easily tell that this is certainly NOT the case, at all, so whatever, it's all just marketing drivel.

In fact, it wouldn't really be any different than AMD talking about Steamroller.  "Man, we got this chip coming..."


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## BigMack70 (Oct 17, 2012)

GoldenTiger said:


> Oh, perhaps it was originally, but GK100 was certainly not "held back" so they could "put out a midrange card as high-end for mad profits!!!!" as some people like to proclaim.



You are correct... the idea that it was intentionally held back is nonsense. However, the chip did disappear among a ton of rumors about yield problems, so it seems best to reason that they were forced into holding it back due to poor yields. Fortunately for them, they were able to hit the performance target they needed (set by AMD) with GK104.

Wound up being a big win for them on the business side of things (because it IS a midrange card from a manufacturing point of view, with a high end price) and a loss for consumers (who lost out on potentially much greater performance).


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## crazyeyesreaper (Oct 17, 2012)

more likely it was held back because Nvidia needed to release something rather than face ongoing delays like they did with Fermi aka GTX 480 Gk104 offered plenty of performance and allowed them to keep GK110 in the wings for a refresh it essentially gave them a performance boost for the next series without need much more input and instead gave them time to further tweak the chip.

Its better to release a product when its truly ready than to release early with massive issues my guess is with Kepler Nvidia learned from their mistakes with Fermi and to great effect.


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## Xzibit (Oct 17, 2012)

BigMack70 said:


> There's more than enough evidence to substantiate that the GK104 was drawn up to be the 660ti and not the 680...



If the GK104 was a true mid-size Nvidia would be making out like thiefs with a very profitable mid-range chip.  Thats not what Nvidia has been saying in there quarterly reports and conference call to investors.  They have been voicing concerns about production, yields and margins since there first report this year.
That theory doesnt really reflect Nvidias own stance and it makes less sense given 2 quater straight AMD has gain market share in discrete graphic sector.

Think thats more of a forum myth driven by fanboyism.

Think about it. As a company your loosing market share and sales down 1million units sold form quater to quarter.  You'd think it be the opposite if your selling a mid-range chip at great profit for the high-end market.

If for some weird reason that would be true then its a horrible design and execution.


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## renz496 (Oct 17, 2012)

GoldenTiger said:


> Oh, perhaps it was originally, but GK100 was certainly not "held back" so they could "put out a midrange card as high-end for mad profits!!!!" as some people like to proclaim.



the way i heard it GK100 was not held back but it was scrapped and redesign into GK110. IMO if AMD able to put out  much better performance out of 7970 from the launch day maybe nvidia will be forced to use that scrapped GK100 as their flagship. but luckily for nvidia amd choose to be conservative with 7970 clock and somewhat nvidia was able to make GK104 to match 7970 performance. lol i think originally nvidia wants GK104 to be clocked around 700mhz and intend to market the card with 'overclockers dream' slogan just like they did with 460 and 560.


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## atikkur (Oct 17, 2012)

st.bone said:


> Why Nvidia why? I ordered a GTX670 and its still stuck at the customs, and now this news. For the same price next year a probable GK110 for GTX780 & GTX770. Then that will mean a GTX760TI will preform equal to or better than GTX680, that will make GTX760 perform equal to or better then GTX670, and all with better prices than what people are paying for currently.... why Nvidia? I love performance increase but i already feel bad, i should think of selling the GTX670 sometime early next year if this information turns out to be true.



only buy nvidia at their revision stage,, that is their second refreshs after their major architecture change. GK110 looks sweet.


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## BigMack70 (Oct 17, 2012)

If you assume that GK104 was drawn up originally to be the 680, as it eventually was, you have to come up with an explanation for:

-All the rumors and leaked info until late Jan/Feb of this year which had the GTX 680 being based on the GK110. That wasn't one or two isolated rumors... there was tons of info floating around indicating that to be the case. Almost NOTHING indicated GK104 to be the high end chip, not until GK110 completely disappeared and rumors of yield problems started cropping up all over.
-The limited memory bus (256 bit) on the GK104, which is typically reserved for mid level cards and not high-end
-The PCB design itself, most notably as it appears on the 670 (which is close to being a half-length PCB in the reference designs). 

If you assume that GK110 was originally supposed to be the 680 and GK104 was to be the 660ti, as I do, it makes sense of the above information quite well. As for Nvidia not "making out like [a thief]", the explanation for that is readily apparent in their yield problems, which affected GK104 as well (remember - the GTX 680 was basically a paper launch for 2+ months). Also, aren't desktop GPUs a relatively low-profit/revenue area anyways from a business perspective?

We'll never know with 100% certainty, but I think that it makes better sense of the available data that the original GTX 6xx lineup was to include both Gk110 (680/670?) and GK104 (660ti/660).


----------



## cadaveca (Oct 17, 2012)

BigMack70 said:


> you have to come up with an explanation for:



You do not have to explain anything.

Period.


Die sizes say GK100 or whatever was never possible.

HD 7970:







GTX 680:







Note how the AMD chip has nearly 33% more transistors, but is barely physically larger than GTX 680.

If nVidia could have fit more functionality into the same space, they would have.


They could have planned to release something different all they wanted, but if they had, that chip would have to have been quite a bit larger than HD 7970 is.

Since nvidia is selling a chip that is much the same size as 7970. per wafer ,they aren't getting that many more chips.


If Nvidia is selling a mid-range chip as high-end, they either have HUGE HUGE HUGE design issues,


OR AMD is doing the exact same thing.





Fact isd, GTX 680 ain't no mid-range chip, unless you beleive that most of that there chip is deactivated.


----------



## BigMack70 (Oct 17, 2012)

cadaveca said:


> You do nto have to explain anything.
> 
> Die sizes say GK100 or whatever was never possible.



This doesn't make much sense...  why do we now have rumors of that same GK110 being released? Die size constraints will still be there... if the die size were the inherent problem here, GK110 would have been scrapped and we wouldn't be reading this article right now.


----------



## cadaveca (Oct 17, 2012)

BigMack70 said:


> GK110 would have been scrapped and we wouldn't be reading this article right now.



it WAS scrapped.


----------



## BigMack70 (Oct 17, 2012)

cadaveca said:


> it WAS scrapped.



Did you read the article?



> When it's time for Kepler Refresh to go to office, TSMC will have refined its process enough for mass-production of GK110, a 7.1 billion transistor chip on which NVIDIA's low-volume Tesla K20 GPU compute accelerator is currently based.
> The GK110 will take back the reins of powering NVIDIA's flagship single-GPU product, the GeForce GTX 780. This product could offer a massive 40-55% performance increase over GeForce GTX 680, with a price ranging anywhere between US $499 and $599. The same chip could even power the second fastest single-GPU SKU, the GTX 770. The GK110 physically packs 2880 CUDA cores, and a 384-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface.



Doesn't sound like "scrapped" to me... unless you want to argue that this is just bogus, which it could be.


----------



## cadaveca (Oct 17, 2012)

BigMack70 said:


> Did you read the article?
> 
> 
> 
> Doesn't sound like "scrapped" to me... unless you want to argue that this is just bogus.



I'm not arguing that it is bogus.

Not at all.

But the fact of the matter is that what nVidia can do with TSMC's 28nm, AMD can as well.

And AMD's already 33% more efficient in used die space.

If you beleive the 7.1 billion transistor thing, than it must be twice as big as current GTX680 silicon(3078 Million transitors, BTW), or current GTX 680 really is a horrible horrible design, and it's a feat of wonder that nvidia managed to get it stable.

And how does a doubling of transistors only equal a 55% increase in performance?

Oh, I read it just fine. 


Argue that it's bogus...


----------



## MxPhenom 216 (Oct 17, 2012)

crazyeyesreaper said:


> i love how everyone is saying AMD will have a hard time competing  did everyone forget that yawn that is the 7970 GHz edition still beat out the GTX 680 and this gen for the most part each company is equal at the typical price points.
> 
> 8970 is expected to be 40% faster than the 7970
> 
> ...



It doesn't matter. If you look at most recent performance numbers they trade blows. Thats how it has been for the last 2-3 generations. Only reason the 680 truely looks like the better card is because it consumes a lot less power then the 7970 for the same performance range.


----------



## BigMack70 (Oct 17, 2012)

@cadaveca

Unless I'm seriously misunderstanding you, you're arguing that GK110 is/was scrapped due to inherent problems with die size even though we're sitting here reading and commenting on an article that is proposing that GK110 is going to be released just fine for the 7xx series cards.

That makes no sense.

Much more likely is that their yields sucked last year on this chip and so they bumped GK104 up a tier from 660ti to 680, while putting GK110 on the back burner until they got yield issues fixed.


----------



## cadaveca (Oct 17, 2012)

BigMack70 said:


> That makes no sense.



Neither does the doubling of transistor count, but only a 55% performance increase...unless...it's so big they had to drop clocks by 40%...






:shadedshu

What's in the news doesn't make sense. period. I'm not gonna argue it's bogus...if you don't realize that yourself..well...I won't argue with you.





It's twice the size of GTX680, this news says, but only 55% faster.

We know it'll use the smae silicon process as current GTX680...how can die size NTO be a problem?


If it wasn't, then a doubling of the same transitors should equal a doubling of performance, no?


----------



## BigMack70 (Oct 17, 2012)

The transistor count to performance increase issue is also well explained as it's been oft-rumored that a big chunk of those 7.1B transistors are to increase DP float performance etc and not really to increase gaming performance:
http://semiaccurate.com/2012/10/15/will-nvidia-make-a-consumer-gk110-card/


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## cadaveca (Oct 17, 2012)

It would still leave it twice as large as GTX680...


----------



## NHKS (Oct 17, 2012)

BigMack70 said:


> *We'll never know with 100% certainty*, but I think that it makes better sense of the available data that the original GTX 6xx lineup was to include both Gk110 (680/670?) and GK104 (660ti/660).



that's right.. 'no one can say for sure', but I am inclined to believe your case.. also that atleast on paper, ie, in the 'plans', nvidia could possibly have included the GK1x0(100 or 110) in the GTX 6xx line-up, but since its a big chip(500+ mm²) and TSMC's 28nm process was in its nascent stages, nvidia might have changed plans anticipating poor yields(they might have made a pre-production study too)



cadaveca said:


> HD 7970:
> 
> http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/HD_7970_Matrix/images/gpu.jpg
> 
> ...



you seem to make a valid point, sir.. but I am not convinced just looking at the pics(they are zoomed at slightly diff levels, based on the match-stick size).. moreover, based on calc :
Tahiti ≈ 365 mm²
Gk104 ≈ 295 mm²

Difference in size ≈ 24%
Difference in # of. transistors ≈ 33%

looking at the above numbers, Tahiti does pack more transistors but the die sizes are not too close either


----------



## BigMack70 (Oct 17, 2012)

cadaveca said:


> It would still leave it twice as large as GTX680...



Hey, if this is the smoking gun that for you means that all this isn't possible/makes no sense, then that's fine.  

However, there's nothing that inherently makes that the case. S|A's article (linked above) offers a fairly good explanation here, I think.

And of course, we're only dealing in rumorville, so we'll see what happens.


----------



## cadaveca (Oct 17, 2012)

NHKS said:


> you seem to make a valid point, sir.. but I am not convinced just looking at the pics(they are zoomed at slightly diff levels, based on the match-stick size).. moreover, based on calc :
> Tahiti ≈ 365 mm²
> Gk104 ≈ 295 mm²
> 
> ...



Yeah, and Tahiti has 384-bit bus, so really needs to be physically bigger, for more connections to PCB for the added ram chips.

see, to me, a mid-range chip is under 250mm², like GTX 660 and HD 7870. All these claims of GTX680 being mid-range do not make sense.



BigMack70 said:


> Hey, if this is the smoking gun that for you means that all this isn't possible/makes no sense, then that's fine.
> 
> However, there's nothing that inherently makes that the case. S|A's article (linked above) offers a fairly good explanation here, I think.
> 
> And of course, we're only dealing in rumorville, so we'll see what happens.



No, really, the smoking gun is that design schedules ALWAYS work this way.


See, nVidia and AMD are both contrained by what TSMC offers. They both buy wafers from TSMC, TSMC makes all chips for both, and as such, they are even using the same process.


AMD packs 33% more transistors into HD 7970. It's not 33% bigger.

Nvidia may be able to further increase transistor density, for sure, but it's not going to be enough that even qualifies GTX 680 as "mid-range"


----------



## BigMack70 (Oct 17, 2012)

cadaveca said:


> Yeah, and Tahiti has 384-bit bus, so really needs to be physically bigger, for more connections to PCB for the added ram chips.
> 
> see, to me, a mid-range chip is under 250mm², like GTX 660 and HD 7870. All these claims of GTX680 being mid-range do not make sense.



That's because you _a priori_ exclude the possibilty of GK110's existence/plausibility based on size. If GK110 exists as stated, then it defines what the high end chip is, and GK104 is comfortably midrange in comparison.


----------



## cadaveca (Oct 17, 2012)

What I am denying is the ability to cool a chip that large in size, yes.

I'm not denying it might have been planned...but reality says, since chips take liek 2 years to design, that they knew since day one it wasn't going to happen. They knew LONG before those "claims" came out that GTX 680 was the chip we got.




GK110 or GK100 or whatever...was NEVER meant to be GTX 680. Nor was it meant to compete with the current HD7970.


I'm not denying that a new GPU is coming, either.


----------



## BigMack70 (Oct 17, 2012)

cadaveca said:


> I'm not denying it might have been planned...



All I've been arguing is that they planned GK110 as the GTX 680 and had to scrap it and bump the GK104 up a level.

Basically, I'm arguing that GK104 was not drawn up as a high end GPU. It wound up filling that role just fine, but that doesn't mean it was planned that way.


----------



## eidairaman1 (Oct 17, 2012)

i can only guess reason this is happening is because they losing a lil share unless they are getting geared to launch a new series after the HD 8s come out


----------



## Casecutter (Oct 17, 2012)

HumanSmoke said:


> logic would dictate that the best GK 110's are destined to end up as Tesla/Quadro parts, which would leave the GeForce parts as either salvage and/or high leakage parts. In either event I wouldn't expect the GTX 780 to be widely available, which is why the pricing is a head scratcher. GTX 780 (GK 110) @ $550 (or more, depending on % of full die)


That’s going to be the question… has TSMC got their process to the point that makes parts that are viable to gaming enthusiasts and not out of bounds on power.  I think with geldings from Tesla and a more tailored second gen boost mapping this is saying they can, but I would say it not $550.  Something tells me these will all be as GTX690’s, Nvidia only outing a singular design and construction as a factory release. 



iO said:


> I just don't believe these performance increase claims. They gonna double the transistor count but won´t get even 50% more speed. GK110 will be highly optimised for DP computing.
> GK110 will definately shine in some selected benchmarks but there will be a lot of die area that won´t be touched by even the latest games.
> Big Kepler just makes no sense as a gaming card. Huge die size, huge power consumption and a huge pricetag. GK114 might de worth waiting for...


 Nvidia can minimize the shortcoming, and exhort the virtues to attain a card that enthusiasts will exculpate, just to exclaim its presence in the market exclaiming how great thou art! (for $600 and a 280W TDP)



crazyeyesreaper said:


> they were conservative in order to get better yields essentially most chips yes can do 1050 but not all can at the proper voltage or TDP level, they also have to harvest chips for the 7950 lower clocks meant more chips more usable chips means greater volume to put on store shelves.
> 
> Regardless the refresh will probably see Nvidia take the lead but not by a whole lot they have more room to play when it comes to TDP than AMD does right now.


I think it was always a TSMC issue that caused both their woe's, but yes GK104 once Nvidia got good stuff surprise themselves as to what could be wrung out, but they had to use Boost to insure they wouldn't have chip committing Hari Kari.  This time around boost theyll get more aggressive and tolerate to heat and power, so that's where the gains will really come from, but will effectively quell any OC’n.


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## cadaveca (Oct 17, 2012)

BigMack70 said:


> All I've been arguing is that they planned GK110 as the GTX 680 and had to scrap it and bump the GK104 up a level.
> 
> Basically, I'm arguing that GK104 was not drawn up as a high end GPU. It wound up filling that role just fine, but that doesn't mean it was planned that way.



It HAD to be. You can only fit so many transistors into so much space.  THere is no way it coudl have ever worked, just like AMD's 2560x shader Cypress couldn't work either.


----------



## BigMack70 (Oct 17, 2012)

So Nvidia couldn't possibly have just made a design mistake?? 

Because companies never do that...


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## NHKS (Oct 17, 2012)

cadaveca said:


> see, to me, a mid-range chip is under 250mm², like GTX 660 and HD 7870. All these claims of GTX680 being mid-range do not make sense.



if you expect mid-range chips to have sub-250mm² die sizes, then GF104 (GTX 460) & even GF114 were well-over 300mm².. as for me, I am going by 'naming' convention of Fermi gen.. it had GF100 & GF110 as the high-end chips, so same could be said for Kepler(knowing that GK110 exists)...

anyways with due respect I wish to end it here, to each his own (its all speculation)..


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## Benetanegia (Oct 17, 2012)

cadaveca said:


> All these claims of GTX680 being mid-range do not make sense.



It may not make sense to you, but it makes all the sense in the world. You are arguing against history. Are you going to suggest that GF104 was not a midrange chip? It was 332 mm^2. Significantly bigger than GK104 and definitely bigger than your 250 mm^2 figure.

All Nvidia high-end chips (GPU + HPC) of past generations have been close to or bigger than 500 mm^2. G80 484mm^2, GT200 576mm^2. GF100 520 mm^2.

Time to have a reality check man. GK100/110 IS the high-end chip. A chip that Nvidia decided it was not economically feasible this past months when TSMC supply was so constrained and yields (for everybody) were not good. End of story. It really is. There's no problem with it other than that and the fact that by being bigger it's going to have lower yields and lower number of dies, nothing that Nvidia didn't do previously or that are afraid of. GK106 took long to release too. Was it because it was not posible? No, because it was economically less "interesting" than GK104 and so was GK110. If they could win with a 294mm^2 chip there was absolutely no reason to release the big one and have lower margins as they had to with first Fermi "generation". HPC moves slower and relies on designs like the Oak Ridge supercomputer that would not been ready back at the time, so more reason to delay.


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## cadaveca (Oct 17, 2012)

Oh, I never mean to say that my expectations are the same as what the industry sets, but yes, if a 28nm, and let me repeat...*a 28nm chip *is over 250mm, then yes, I would not consider it a mid-range chip. If you need more than that space(and neither AMD or nvidia did), then you've got some serious engineering issues, for sure.


Of course bigger processes took up more space. 


Silly.


I never said GK100 or GK110 is NOT the high-end chip...sure is...but it was NEVER meant to be GTX680.

TSMC had yield issues.  That is comical. Yeah, blame the infant technology.  

Of course it was horrible. nVidia KNEW it would be, as did AMD...and they dealt with it, as they have with every process.



BigMack70 said:


> So Nvidia couldn't possibly have just made a design mistake??
> 
> Because companies never do that...




Actually, no, i think nVidia did NOT make a big mistake, at all, and that GK100 was planned for next year ALWAYS, rather than this January or whatever.


It's not like Kepler is some new thing..it's a tweaked Fermi. nVidia admitted big mistakes with Fermi, so I do expect that there were extra-cautious with kepler.


As will be the next chip.


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## BigMack70 (Oct 17, 2012)

I like that you repeatedly just _a priori_ dismiss dozens and dozens of reputable stories/rumors from the past year for no real reason other than your own theories.


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## cadaveca (Oct 17, 2012)

BigMack70 said:


> I like that you repeatedly just _a priori_ dismiss dozens and dozens of reputable stories/rumors from the past year for no real reason other than your own theories.



Stories and rumours. Yep.


Except, of course, as a reviewer, I do have a bit more info than the average joe, although, not as much as many other reviewers do, I'm sure.


See, the difference between me and other reviewers..I do this for fun, as a hobby..and not for cash.


I'm not posting news for hits, because that garners money for the site with ads...


TPU isn't built upon that, at all.

This is specualtion, after all, not fact, so yeah, I offer a different perspective...So?

At the end of the day, it's me playing with the hardware NOW you guys want to buy IN THE FUTURE. I don't really care who has the faster chips, who is cheaper, or what you buy...this stuff just shows up on my doorstep, with ZERO cost.



I'm just not afraid to be wrong.  In the future, we can say "look, this was right, and this wasn't"...and I won't care if I'm wrong.  You might...but I won't.


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## BigMack70 (Oct 17, 2012)

Pulling rank as a reviewer doesn't mean rumors/stories are untrustworthy just because you don't believe them and/or they don't fit your ideas of what is or is not going on. Maybe if we were talking about some isolated or crazy things, but not when we're talking about widespread info.


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## cadaveca (Oct 17, 2012)

BigMack70 said:


> Pulling rank as a reviewer doesn't mean rumors/stories are untrustworthy just because you don't believe them and/or they don't fit your ideas of what is or is not going on. Maybe if we were talking about some isolated or crazy things, but not when we're talking about widespread info.



If I had actual info about an unreleased product, I wouldn't be able to talk about it.

That's where me being a reviewer is important.


Who cares that I review stuff. It's not important, really. Like, really...big deal..I get to play with broken stuff 9/10 times, when it's pre-release. I've said it before, I'd much rather have stuff later, but I guess some OEMs value my feedback prior to launch. That's like the whole "ES is better for OC" BS.

That fact I do that for them, for free...well...it's not a big of a deal that most seem to think it is. I actually think it's kind of the opposite...

At the same time though, those that DO have info about unreleased products, like myself, also cannot say much, except what they are allowed, or their info cannot be real.


THAT is a fact I learned as as reviewer, that many seem to not know. That is just how it works. Either this info is force-fed, or it's fake.


----------



## eidairaman1 (Oct 17, 2012)

cadaveca said:


> If I had actual info about an unreleased product, I wouldn't be able to talk about it.
> 
> That's where me being a reviewer is important.
> 
> ...



well thats how they improve it later but its for PR honestly when NDA is lifted too bro


----------



## Benetanegia (Oct 17, 2012)

cadaveca said:


> I never said GK100 or GK110 is NOT the high-end chip...sure is...but it was NEVER meant to be GTX680.



Explain why GK110 wastes so much space in 240 texture mapping units and ROPs, and tesselators and whatnot, if it was never meant for high-end gaming card? 



> TSMC had yeild issues.  That is comical. Yeah, blame the infant technology. Of course it was horrible. nVidia KNEW it would be, as did AMD...and they dealt with it, as they have with every process.



Of course they dealt with it. They released the mid-range chip as the high-end card knowing that it would be able to compete with AMD's fastest chip. 

No one's blaming the "infant tech". Both AMD and Nvidia design their chips according to TSMC's guidances on the process. They have to, since they have to design the chips long before TSMC is ready for production. They design around them and weight in the feasibility and profitability based on them. Guidances are one thing and reality is often a very different one. Of course AMD by being a fabbed chip maker in the past, knows better than Nvidia how to deal with them. We are not discussing that so to the point. Trying to deny that volume and yield issues are TSMC's problem is stupid. Ther guidances for the process and reality didn't match and everyone has suffered from it, be it Nvdia, Qualcomm or AMD, even if AMD has not been as vocal. Each company has very different things to address in their conference calls and trying to extract any conclusions from whether they talk about TSMC issues or not is again stupid. AMD is in far more trouble and has much more things to excuse than having to explain why profit margins on the GPU bussiness are slightly lower than expected.

So imagine we are Nvidia. 28nm is not as good as it was "promised" to be. We get close to Kepler release dates. Volume is not good, yields are not good either, neither worse then 40nm, as Jen Hsun Huang said. But Nvidia had 2 options, repeat GF100 or release GK104 as the high-end. The answer is simple. In a waffer you can have 201 GK104 die candidates. And ~100 GK110 candidates.  Again, knowing that GK104 would be close to Tahiti performance or beat it, it's an easy choice*. GK104 at $500. There was no price point at which GK110 would have been more profitable, no matter how much faster than HD7970 it could have been. With the severely low 28nm volume, they would never be able to sell enough GK110 cards so as to be more profitable than they have been with GK104, even if they had acheved 100% market share.

* More so when you know that the next node willl not be ready until 2-3 years later. You'll have to do a refresh and you'll have to make it appealing, faster, so by doing what they did, they can kill 2 birds with a single stone.


----------



## BigMack70 (Oct 17, 2012)

What I'm saying is that your status as a reviewer gives no inherent credibility to your dismissal of tech rumors/stories (sorry to break it to you...). That might be true if the stories were from people clueless about tech, or if everyone who is well informed about GPUs agreed with you, but that's not the case. When you get corroborating evidence from many reliable and semi-reliable tech sources, there's something to it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority#Disagreement
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_accomplishment


----------



## WhoDecidedThat (Oct 17, 2012)

Hmmm. Nvidia. One request. Try to release these GPU's * without GPU Boost. *It really hampers overclocking. If the GTX 680 didn't have GPU Boost, it would have easily reached 1.4 GHz with good binning.


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## BigMack70 (Oct 17, 2012)

blanarahul said:


> Hmmm. Nvidia. One request. Try to release these GPU's * without GPU Boost. *It really hampers overclocking. If the GTX 680 didn't have GPU Boost, it would have easily reached 1.4 GHz with good binning.



+1 I would LOVE an option to disable GPU-Boost. Maybe put a dual BIOS or throw an option into the control panel or something. 

If they do that and start allowing voltage control again, they'll have a far superior product for people wanting to overclock. GPU Boost nonsense + no voltage control kept me away from the GTX 680.


----------



## eidairaman1 (Oct 17, 2012)

BigMack70 said:


> +1 I would LOVE an option to disable GPU-Boost. Maybe put a dual BIOS or throw an option into the control panel or something.
> 
> If they do that and start allowing voltage control again, they'll have a far superior product for people wanting to overclock. GPU Boost nonsense + no voltage control kept me away from the GTX 680.



with the trend NV is following especially after forcing EVGA to disable voltage tuning, i honestly dont think they will listen to customer feedback in this sense


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## BigMack70 (Oct 17, 2012)

I know, and I'm very sad about that. I often prefer Nvidia's GPUs, but if AMD offers me something that I can turn into a superior product via overclocking while Nvidia cripples that capability, as happened with the 7970 and 680, I'll take AMD's offering every time.


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## cadaveca (Oct 17, 2012)

BigMack70 said:


> What I'm saying is that your status as a reviewer gives no inherent credibility to your dismissal of tech rumors/stories (sorry to break it to you...). That might be true if the stories were from people clueless about tech, or if everyone who is well informed about GPUs agreed with you, but that's not the case. When you get corroborating evidence from many reliable and semi-reliable tech sources, there's something to it.
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority#Disagreement
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_accomplishment



I never said it did. I said that you must assume that what I post IS speculation only, since I do what I do, and any real info about un-released products I cannot post.


And like-wise, the same applies to any tech site. 


That is all. GK110 is un-released, nobody except nVidia employees and those that work at nvidia board pertners know anything about it, and none of them can comment due to NDA.


So anything, anything at all about it...is questionable.


Heck, it might not even actually exist, and is only an idea.


Post a pic of a GK100 chip, full specs and everything else officail form nvidia, and I'll stop my speculation.

Otherwise, if you don't like my post..that's just too bad. the report button is to the left, if you like.

you cna say asll you like that it was planned, you have no proof, and neither do I. And neither of us, if we did, could post it. So I can think and post what I like, and so can you. It's no big deal...only you are making it a big deal that I do not agree with this news.


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## Benetanegia (Oct 17, 2012)

> Post a pic of a GK100 chip, full specs and everything else officail form nvidia, and I'll stop my speculation.





cadaveca said:


> you cna say asll you like that it was planned, you have no proof, and neither do I. And neither of us, if we did, could post it. So I can think and post what I like, and so can you. It's no big deal...only you are making it a big deal that I do not agree with this news.



Argument from ignorance. You ARE claiming both that GK100 never existed and that it didn't exist because it can not be made, based on the fact that we can not provide proof to disprove your theory. You are the only one claiming anything using this argument from ignorance falacy to back it up.

The rest of us is just saying that it is entirely posible and probable that GK100 existed and was simply delayed or slightly redesigned into GK110, in a move similar to GF100 -> GF110. The proofs although rumors, are out there and have been there for a long time. Rumors about chips don't always end up being entirely true, but there's always *some* true to it. GK100 was mentioned many times. GK110 DOES exist. 2+2=4

All in all Nvidia has already shipped cards based on the 7.1 b transistor GK110 chip, so the notion that such a chip cannot be made is obviously false.


----------



## BigMack70 (Oct 17, 2012)

I've just never seen someone so ready to cavalierly dismiss a multitude of tech rumors based on their own idea of what is or is not possible from a manufacturing perspective...

To each his own I guess.


----------



## cadaveca (Oct 17, 2012)

Benetanegia said:


> Argument from ignorance. You ARE claiming both that GK100 never existed and that it didn't exist because it can not be made, based on the fact that we can not provide proof to disprove your theory. You are the only one claiming anything using this argument from ignorance falacy to back it up.
> 
> The rest of us is just saying that it is entirely posible and probable that GK100 existed and was simply delayed or slightly redesigned into GK110, in a move similar to GF100 -> GF110. The proofs although rumors, are out there and have been there for a long time. Rumors about chips don't always end up being entirely true, but there's always *some* true to it. GK100 was mentioned many times. GK110 DOES exist. 2+2=4
> 
> All in all Nvidia has already shipped cards based on the 7.1 b transistor GK110 chip, so the notion that such a chip cannot be made is obviously false.





BigMack70 said:


> I've just never seen someone so ready to cavalierly dismiss a multitude of tech rumors based on their own idea of what is or is not possible from a manufacturing perspective...
> 
> To each his own I guess.



Nah, actually, I'm claiming this since i know all the specs of GK110 already. I even have a die shot. And yeah, liek you said, it is now for sale.

You can find info just as easy, too.

And becuase of this, I do think nvidia knew long before AMD's 7970 release that GK110 was not possible(which is when that news of GTX680 being a mid-range chip), and as such it wasn't meant to be GTX680, ever. Is GK110 the ultimate Kepler design...sure. but it was NEVER intended to be released as GTX680. It was always meant as a Tesla GPGPU card.

Liekwise, AMD knew that Steamroller...and excavator were coming...and that they arre the "big daddy" of the Bulldozer design...but that doesn't mean that Bulldozer or Piledriver are mid-range chips.


----------



## Benetanegia (Oct 17, 2012)

cadaveca said:


> Nah, actually, I'm claiming this since i know all the specs of GK110 already. I even have a die shot.
> 
> You can find it just as easy, too.
> 
> ...



Everybody knows the specs and has seen die shots, for a long time already. That means nothing to the discussion at hand. Specs and dies shots say nothing about whether it is feasible to do or not (it IS, it's been already been created AND shipped to customers) and certainly says nothing regarding the intentions of Nvidia.

If GK100/110 was so unfeasible as a gaming card that it was never meant to be one, they would design a new chip to fill in that massive ~250mm^2 difference that exists between GK104 and GK110, instead of using GK110 as the refreshed high-end card. GK110 being an HPC chip wouldn't have so many gaming features wasting space either.

EDIT: SteamRoller, etc. Worst analogy ever.


----------



## cadaveca (Oct 17, 2012)

Benetanegia said:


> If GK100/110 was so unfeasible as a gaming card that it was never meant to be one, they would design a new chip to fill in that massive $ 250mm^2 difference that exists between GK104 and GK110, instead of using GK110 as the refreshed high-end card. GK110 being an HPC chip wouldn't have so many gaming features wasting space either.



I dunno. You know, the one thing that nVidia is really good as is getting the most dollar for R&D, and designing another chip kinda goes against that mantra.

I mean, it's like dropping the hot clock. They knew they had to.

Keeping within the 300W power envelope with the full-blown Kepler design was obviously not possible, proved by Fermi, IMHO.

Jen Hsun said "The interconnecting mesh was the problem" for Fermi. That mesh...is cache.

And gaming doesn't need that cache. But... HPC does. Gaming needs power-savings, and dropping the hotclock and lowering cache and DP lowered power consumption enough that GTX680 is pretty damn good.

GK104..was that chip you just mentioned.


HPC is more money. WAY MORE MONEY. So for THAT market, yes, a customized chip makes sense.


See, Fermi was the original here. GF100 is the original, NOT GK100. or GK110.


If nvidia started with Kepler as the new core design, then I would have sided with you guys, for sure, but really, to me, Kepler is a bunch of customized Fermi designs, customized in such a way to deliver the best product possible for the lowest cost, for each market.

You may think the Steamroller analogy is wrong here, but to me, that is EXACTLY what Kepler is. And you know what..nVidia says the same thing, too. 


The hotclock to me, and the lack of DP functionality, says it all. hotclock lets you use less die space, but requires more power. DP functionality also requires more power, because it requires more cache. Dropping 128-bits of memory control..again, to save on power...


If the current GTX680 was meant to be a mid-range chip, after doing all that to save on power, damn, Nvidia really does suck hard.


----------



## Casecutter (Oct 17, 2012)

blanarahul said:


> Try to release these GPU's without GPU Boost.


Sure and if you click the check box to enable OC or break the seal on the switch and then it bricks? I would love to have heard how GK104 could do with the dynamic nanny turned off...  While you may believe it might find 1.4Ghz... would it live on for any duration?  

I speculate it wouldn’t or Nvidia would've not put in place such restrictions if there wasn't good reasons.  Will they still have it that way for next generation? Yes, almost assuredly but at that point better TDP and improve clock and thermal profiles will mean there's will be no gain over operating at an exaggerated-fixed clock. I think for mainstream both sides will continue to refine boost type control.  It provides them the best of both worlds, lower claimed power usage, while the highest FpS return.


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## [H]@RD5TUFF (Oct 17, 2012)

crazyeyesreaper said:


> i love how everyone is saying AMD will have a hard time competing  did everyone forget that yawn that is the 7970 GHz edition still beat out the GTX 680 and this gen for the most part each company is equal at the typical price points.
> 
> 8970 is expected to be 40% faster than the 7970
> 
> ...





It's allways entertaining when fanboys get butt hurt over peoples opinions, the fact is a stock reference 7970 is slower than a stock reference 680, I know this hurts you to accept this fact but it is true. As for the Ghz edition, compare it to a 680 that is factory overclocked and the result is thew same. My 680 classified walks all over any 7970, so  less and check facts more.


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## BigMack70 (Oct 17, 2012)

Guys, we should only look to cadaveca now for tech rumors, this guy obviously knows what's up and we can't trust dozens of other knowledgeable people/sites. They all just make stuff up and obviously only release info to get page views.


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## BigMack70 (Oct 17, 2012)

[H]@RD5TUFF said:


> My 680 classified walks all over any 7970, so  less and check facts more.



My 1200/1800 Lightnings very seriously doubt that... OC'd 680s and 7970s are about even overall, trading blows depending on the game/benchmark.

The 7970 gets beat by the 680, sure, but the pricing has updated itself to reflect that now - the 7970 is priced about the same as the 670, and the GHz edition priced around the 680.


----------



## Benetanegia (Oct 17, 2012)

cadaveca said:


> I dunno. You know, the one thing that nVidia is really good as is getting the most dollar for R&D, and designing another chip kinda goes against that mantra.
> 
> I mean, it's like dropping the hot clock. They knew they had to.
> 
> ...



 at Kepler being Fermi. Sure and Fermi is Tesla arch (GT200). 

If we go by similarities, as in they look the same to me with a few tweaks we can go back to G80 days. Same on AMD side. But you know what? They have very little in common. Abandoning hot-clocks is not a trivial thing. Tripling the number of SPs on a similar transistor budget is not trivial either and it denotes exactly te opposite of what you're saying. Fermi and Kepler schematics may look the same, but they aren't the same at all.

As to the rest. It makes little sense to think that GK104 is the only thing they had planned. In previous geerations they created 500 mm^2 chips that were 60%-80% faster than their previous gen and AMD was close, 15%-20% behind. But on this gen they said: "you know what? What the heck. Let's create a 300mm^2 chip that is only 25% faster than our previous gen. Let's make the smallest (by far) jump on performance that we've ever had, let's just leave all that potential there. Later we'll make GK110 a 550 mm^2, so we know we can do it, and it's going to be a refresh part so it IS going to be a gaming card, but for now, let's not make a 450mm^2 chip, or a 350mm^2, no, no sir, a 294mm^2 and with a 256 bit interface that will clearly be the bottleneck even at 6000 MHz, let's just let AMD rip us a new one..."

EDIT: If GK110 had not been fabbed and shipped to customers already, you'd have the start of a point. But since it's already been shipped, it means that it's physically posible to create a 7.1 b chip and make it economically viable (the process hasn't changed much in 6 months). So like I said something in the middle, lika a 5b transistor and/or 400mm^2 would be entirely posible and Nvidia would have gone with that, because AMD's trend has been upwards in regards to die size and there's no way in hell Nvidia would have tried to compete with a 294mm^2 chip, when they knew 100% that AMD had a bigger chip AND they have been historically more competent at making more in less area. Nvidia can be a lot of things, but they are not stupid and would not commit suicide.


----------



## cadaveca (Oct 17, 2012)

BigMack70 said:


> Guys, we should only look to cadaveca now for tech rumors, this guy obviously knows what's up and we can't trust dozens of other knowledgeable people/sites. They all just make stuff up and obviously only release info to get page views.



Yep. 


The fact you can't ignore that bit, says something.


What, I cannot speculate myself?

And when you can't attack my points, you go after my character? lulz. 

As if I want to be the source of rumours.  Yes, I want to be a gossip queen.


Like, do you get that? I'm not the one that posted the news...BTA didn't either...he just brought it here for us to discuss...

These same sites you trust, get it wrong just as often as right. Oh yeah, Bulldozer is awesome, smokes INtel outright..yeah..that worked...


HD7990 form AMD in auguest....but it was Powercolor...


Rumours are usually only part-truths, so to count them all as fact...is not my porogative. 



Benetanegia said:


> at Kepler being Fermi. Sure and Fermi is Tesla arch (GT200).
> 
> If we go by similarities, as in they look the same to me with a few tweaks we can go back to G80 days. Same on AMD side. But you know what? They have very little in common. Abandoning hot-clocks is not a trivial thing. Tripling the number of SPs on a similar transistor budget is not trivial either and it denotes exactly te opposite of what you're saying. Fermi and Kepler schematics may look the same, but they aren't the same at all.
> 
> As to the rest. It makes little sense to think that GK104 is the only thing they had planned. In previous geerations they created 500 mm^2 chips that were 60%-80% faster than their previous gen and AMD was close, 15%-20% behind. But on this gen they said: "you know what? What the heck. Let's create a 300mm^2 chip that is only 25% faster than our previous gen. Let's make the smallest (by far) jump on performance that we've ever had, let's just leave all that potential there. Later we'll make GK110 a 550 mm^2, so we know we can do it, and it's going to be a refresh part so it IS going to be a gaming card, but for now, let's not make a 450mm^2 chip, or a 350mm^2, no, no sir, a 294mm^2 and with a 256 bit interface that will clearly be the bottleneck even at 6000 MHz, let's just let AMD rip us a new one..."



Well, that's just it. This is complicated stuff.

I am not saying at all that GK104 was the only thing...it isn't. But GK110 was never meant to be a GTX part. Kepler is where the Geforce and Tesla become truly seperate products.

View attachment 48746

And yeah, it probably did work exactly like that...300mm2...best they could get IN THAT SPACE, since this dictates that they can get so many chips per wafer. You know, designs do work like that, so they can optimize wafer usage...right?


----------



## BigMack70 (Oct 17, 2012)

Didn't mean it as an attack on your character, I'm just saying that your last couple posts had an _"I know what I'm talking about because I'm a reviewer and you peons don't"_ flavor to them, that's all.

Could just be reading them wrong, I suppose, but I think not.

Anyways, rumors are rumors, but they exist for a reason, and this particular family of rumors has been around for almost a year now... plenty long enough to indicate there's something to it.

Enough debating about rumors for me, though.


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## cadaveca (Oct 17, 2012)

BigMack70 said:


> Could just be reading them wrong, I suppose, but I think not.



Yeah, you're reading that wrong. I was saying explicitly that I don't know WTF I'm talking about here, since I'm a reviewer. If I did know what I was tlaknig about, I'd not be able to discuss it.


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## Benetanegia (Oct 17, 2012)

cadaveca said:


> But GK110 was never meant to be a GTX part.



Oh gosh. Before you say that one more time, can you please explain at least once, why it has so many units that are completely useless in a Tesla card?

Looking at the whitepaper, anyone who knows a damn about GPUs can see that GK110 has been designed to be a fast GPU as much as it's been designed to be a fast HPC chip. Even GF100/110 was castrated in that regards compared to GF104, and G80 and G9x had the same kind of castration, but in Kepler the family where "Geforce and Tesla become truly seperate products." they choose to mantain all those innecessary TMU, tesselators and geometry engines.

- If GK104 was at least close to 400mm^2, your argument would hold some water. At 294mm^2 it does not.
- If GK104 was 384 bits, your argument would hold water. At 256 bit, it doe not.
- If GK110 didn't exist and had not released 6 months after GK104 did...
- If GK110 had no gaming features and wasn't used as the high-end refresh card...
- *If GK104 had been named GK100*... you get it.


----------



## cadaveca (Oct 17, 2012)

Benetanegia said:


> Oh gosh. Before you say that one more time, can you please explain at least once, why it has so many units that are completely useless in a Tesla card?



Because all those things are needed for medical imaging. HPC products still need 3D video capability too. Medical imaging is a very vast market, worth billions. 3D is not gaming. That's where you miss some things. 

And no, I do not agree with the summation that GK110 was intended to be a "fast GPU". The needed die size says that is not really possible.


But, since it's for HPC, where precision is needed over speed as a priority, that's OK, and lowered clocks, but greater functionality, makes sense.


However, for the desktop market, where speed wins overall, the functionality side isn't so much needed, so it was stripped out. This makes for two distinct product lines, with staggered releases, and hence not competing for each other.

I mean likewise, what do all those HPC features have to do with a gaming product?


----------



## [H]@RD5TUFF (Oct 17, 2012)

BigMack70 said:


> My 1200/1800 Lightnings very seriously doubt that... OC'd 680s and 7970s are about even overall, trading blows depending on the game/benchmark.
> 
> The 7970 gets beat by the 680, sure, but the pricing has updated itself to reflect that now - the 7970 is priced about the same as the 670, and the GHz edition priced around the 680.



You confusing value in a debate about performance, not the same thing at all, nor valid in any way.:shadedshu


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## Protagonist (Oct 17, 2012)

BigMack70 said:


> Anyways, rumors are rumors, but they exist for a reason, and this particular family of rumors has been around for almost a year now... plenty long enough to indicate there's something to it.



Yes there is something and what we know for sure is GK110 TESLA/QUADRO,... for now.

And as *cadaveca* said, the info we have right now is just rumors and speculation, lets just wait and sooner or later we will all know for sure.


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## Benetanegia (Oct 17, 2012)

cadaveca said:


> Because all those things are needed for medical imaging. HPC products still need 3D video capability too. Medical imaging is a very vast market, worth billions. 3D is not gaming. That's where you miss some things.



Medical imaging is not HPC. Maybe you should have been more clear. That being said, Nvidia has announced GK110 based Tesla, but no Quadro:

http://www.techpowerup.com/170096/N...tion-Revolution-With-Kepler-Architecture.html

Their Maximus platform is composed off GK104 based Quadro and GK110 based Tesla cards. So I think that you're missing much more than I.

And oh, I don't doubt there will be a GK110 based Quadro, but it's not been announced yet afaik. I've only heard about them in the same rumors as the GeForce part so... 



> And no, I do not agree with the summation that GK110 was intended to be a "fast GPU". The needed die size says that is not really possible.



And yet it all points to Nvidia using it. And in the past they have used chips of the same size and quite successfully.

And an HPC chip has never been profitable on it's own and I don't think it is right now either.


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## cadaveca (Oct 17, 2012)

Benetanegia said:


> And an HPC chip has never been profitable on it's own and I don't think it is right now either.



I bet nVidia would disagree.


For me, Medical imaging is part of the HPC market. Precise imaging isn't needed just for medical uses either, anything that needs a picture that is accurate, from oil and gas exploration to military uses, all fall under the same usage. Both Tesla and Quadro cards are meant to be used together, building an infrastucture that can scale to consumer demands, called Maximus. If you need more rendering power, say for movie production, you got it, or if you need more compute, for stock market simulation, that's there too, so I fail to agree you've posted much that agrees with your stance there. Nvidia doesn't build single GPUs...they build compute infrastructure.


Welcome to 2012.




> With this second generation of Maximus, compute work is assigned to run on the new NVIDIA Tesla K20 GPU computing accelerator, freeing up the new NVIDIA Quadro K5000 GPU to handle graphics functions. *Maximus unified technology transparently and automatically assigns visualization and simulation or rendering work to the right processor*.



Did you read that press release?




I mean, that whole press release is nVidia claiming it IS profitible, or they wouldn't be marketing towards it. 



In fact, that press release kinda proves my whole original point, now doesn't it?  GK104 for imaging(3D, Quadro and Geforce), GK110 for compute(Tesla).


Like, maybe I'm crazy...but...well...whatever. I'm gonna play some BF3.


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## crazyeyesreaper (Oct 17, 2012)

i could care less if you want to call me a fanboy [H]@RD5TUFF but honestly it just makes you look like a child.

i could care less about your classified 680s blah blah i still had my card months before 680 was available and enjoying roughly the same performance. 

Simple fact is if i want to be a dick and pull useless numbers the 7970 holds the World Record for 3DMark 11 Extreme, Heaven Extreme, among others

when both cards are clocked they perform the same, they excell in certain games over their rival and vice versa

AvP favors AMD
BF3 favors NVIDIA
etc


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## BigMack70 (Oct 17, 2012)

[H]@RD5TUFF said:


> You confusing value in a debate about performance, not the same thing at all, nor valid in any way.:shadedshu



Except that your 680 isn't going to outperform an overclocked 7970. They'll be about the same.

And I'm not confusing anything... the 7970 and 670 are about the same, and the 7970GE and 680 are about the same. If you overclock the 7970 or 7970GE, they'll match an overclocked 680 - trading blows depending on the game/test and overall being about the same.

I know you have to defend your silly purchase of an overclocking-oriented voltage locked card, though


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## Benetanegia (Oct 17, 2012)

Visualization and HPC are not the same thing even if both require high computation abilities. Games require high computation and are not labelled HPC. 



cadaveca said:


> Did you read that press release?
> 
> 
> 
> I mean, that whole press release is nVidia claiming it IS profitible, or they wouldn't be marketing towards it.



Yeah I read it and that says nothing regarding to its profitability on its own. That's why a GK110 based GeForce cards are going to be released. 



> In fact, that press release kinda proves my whole original point, now doesn't it? GK104 for imaging(3D, Quadro and Geforce), GK110 for compute(Tesla).



No it doesn't. It would prove it if GK110 had no gaming features. Visualization != Gaming. DirectX and all of it's gaming features are not needed, why does it have it, and why does it improve on them over GK104, in fact.


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## cadaveca (Oct 17, 2012)

Benetanegia said:


> DirectX and all of it's gaming features are not needed, why does it have it, and why does it improve on them over GK104, in fact.



Because Windows is the standard GUI for most users, and Windows uses DirectX?





This isn't the first generation Maximus tech, either...


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## Benetanegia (Oct 17, 2012)

cadaveca said:


> Because Windows is the standard GUI for most users, and Windows uses DirectX?



Erm OpenGL is used in MOST if not all of those systems??



> This isn't the first generation Maximus tech, either...



lol and what does that tell? It definitely does not tell that GK104 -> visualization and GK110 -> HPC. It tell us that Nvidia is willing to mix and match Quadro and Tesla cards to get more $$ and that's all. 

The thing is for the time being there's no Quadro GK110 as much as there's no GeForce GK110. And the reason is not that one is feasible and the other isn't. Such big chips were posible in GeForce in the past and surely are right now (more so since 28nm is so much better in regards to power consumption). And you'll see them, you can be sure of this, when Nvidis sees fit.


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## HumanSmoke (Oct 17, 2012)

GK 110 like most of the big-die Nvidia GPU's is aimed more at the professional market than gaming. Gaming allows for some high-visibility PR and a useful ongoing marketing tool going forward...they represent an iconic face of each generation- but as a segment, $500+ gaming cards are a miniscule part of sales....it's also the reason Nvidia developed CUDA, and also why Nvidia have a stranglehold on the professional graphics market. At $3k per single GPU card it's relatively easy to see where Nvidia's priorities lie.






A couple of point- can't be fucked looking for the quotes on this drag race of a thread.

Medical imaging. My GF works in radiology (CAT, MRI etc) and the setup is Quadro for image output and 3D representation and Tesla for computation (math co-processor). There is no real difference between medical imaging and any HPC task ( weather forecast, economics/physics/ warfare simulation or any other complex number crunching).
Die size (Dave?) Posting pictures means the square root of fuck-all. Show a picture of an Nvidia chip that isn't covered by a heatspreader if you're making a comparison. BTW: A few mm here or there doesn't sound like a lot, but it impacts the number of usable die candidates substantially ( Die per wafer calculator )

GK110 is pretty much on schedule judging by it's estimated tape out. It looks to have had no more than two silicon revisions (and possibly only one) from initial risk wafer lot to commercial shipping. ORNL started receiving GK110 last month.

EDIT: Graph link


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## cadaveca (Oct 17, 2012)

HumanSmoke said:


> Show a picture of an Nvidia chip that isn't covered by a heatspreader if you're making a comparison.



I did. 



Benetanegia said:


> Erm OpenGL is used in MOST if not all of those systems??



Sure, but nearly everyone runs windows. Linux, yes if it's a server, but most stuff that have actual users making use of it is Windows-based. Not sure why..honestly...but it is what it is. From Banks to hospitals, most run Windows.



Benetanegia said:


> It tell us that Nvidia is willing to mix and match Quadro and Tesla cards to get more $$ and that's all.



Actually..no.



> As a result of the time needed to context switch, Quadro products are not well suited to doing rendering and compute at the same time. They certainly can, but depending on what applications are being used and what they’re trying to do the result can be that compute eats up a great deal of GPU time, leaving the GUI to only update at a few frames per second with significant lag. On the consumer side NVIDIA’s ray-tracing Design Garage tech demo is a great example of this problem, and we took a quick video on a GTX 580 showcasing how running the CUDA based ray-tracer severely impacts GUI performance.
> 
> Alternatively, a highly responsive GUI means that the compute tasks aren’t getting a lot of time, and are only executing at a fraction of the performance that the hardware is capable of. As part of their product literature NVIDIA put together a few performance charts, and while they should be taken with a grain of salt, they do quantify the performance advantage of moving compute over to a dedicated GPU.
> 
> For these reasons if an application needs to do both compute and rendering at the same time then it’s best served by sending the compute task to a dedicated GPU. This is the allocation work developers previously had to take into account and that NVIDIA wants to eliminate. At the end of the day the purpose of Maximus is to efficiently allow applications to do both rendering and compute by throwing their compute workload on another GPU, because no one wants to spend $3500 on a Quadro 6000 only for it to get bogged down.



http://www.anandtech.com/show/5094/nvidias-maximus-technology-quadro-tesla-launching-today/2



That's from before Kepler's launch. Long before. Nvidia has long planned dual-GPU infrastucture, because really, that's what makes sense. So making GK104 as GTX without all the cache, and GK110, with the cache for compute, and then doing the same for the next generation too, makes a whole lot of sense.


----------



## Benetanegia (Oct 17, 2012)

cadaveca said:


> Sure, but nearly everyone runs windows. Linux, yes if it's a server, but most stuff that have actual users making use of it is Windows-based. Not sure why..honestly...but it is what it is. From Banks to hospitals, most run Windows.



Yes, Windows, but not DirectX with all it's features that for the pro market do mostly nothing but make the shader processors much fatter. If there was a really serious push from Nvidia to split the markets they would have done it. Putting GPU features in GK110 when they are so clearly pushing for Maximus integration is stupid if they really wanted to split the market. And they are not stupid. Look I remember the exact same things being said back when Fermi (GF100) was unveiled, because just like with GK110 they unveiled it in an HPC event and the focus was 100% on HPC features. But they were excellent gaming GPUs too. Power consumption was "bad" HCP features strippled GF104/114 too. Same perf/watt as GTX 580, nothing to do with the added HPC features. And GK110 is much of the same, I'm pretty sure of that.

http://tpucdn.com/reviews/ASUS/HD_7970_Matrix/images/perfwatt_1920.gif



cadaveca said:


> lThat's from before Kepler's launch. Long before. Nvidia has long planned dual-GPU infrastucture, because really, that's what makes sense. So making GK104 as GTX without all the cache, and GK110, with the cache for compute, and then doing the same for the next generation too, makes a whole lot of sense.



Don't you see that your logic fails. That's why you are not being coherent. Why does GK110 have gaming/visualization features AT ALL if it was never meant for it sicne the beginning and they have Maximum as the final goal. It's as simple as that. You're now trying to legitimize the idea that Maximus is the way to go* and that it's Nvidia's plan since last generation. Again why those features on GK110 again?? Makes no sense, don't you see that. It's either one thing or the other, both cannot cohexist. Either GK110 was thought as a visualization/gaming (DirectX) powerhouse or not. If Maximus is Nvidia's idea for HPC and was their only intention with GK110. A GK104 + GK110 completely stripped off any other functionality than HPC would have ended up in an actually smaller die area, both conbined. But they didn't go that route and you really really have to think why. Why did they follow that route. Why there's rumors about GK110 based GeFerces and so on.

*I agree but it's beyond the point, and my comment regarding $$ is also true and you know that  the context switching is simply also convenient and Kepler has context switching vastly improve so at some point 2 cards would not be required.


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## HumanSmoke (Oct 17, 2012)

cadaveca said:


> I did.


I was think more along the lines of:


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## cadaveca (Oct 17, 2012)

Like really....that pic to me says it all. 

Is it really 512mm?

What clockspeeds are the Tesla cards? 600 Mhz, I'm guessing?



Benetanegia said:


> Why did they follow that route.



Because their customers asked for it.

CUDA can use all those features you call "useless". It's not quite like how you put it...there's not really much if any dedicated hardware for the purposes you mention. At least not any that takes up any die space worth mentioning.


See that picture above? Point to me where these "DirectX features" are located...


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## HumanSmoke (Oct 17, 2012)

cadaveca said:


> Like really....that pic to me says it all.
> Is it really 512mm?
> What clockspeeds are the Tesla cards? 600 Mhz, I'm guessing?



The overlay shows a G*F*100 of 521mm^2

The K20 spec released says 705M. Standard practice to keep the board power under the 225W limit (this is what happens when you try to keep clocks high to inflate FLOP performance in a compute enviroment) . I'd expect the GeForce card to be bound closer to (if not fudging over) the ATX 300W limit ( maybe 900 MHz or so)
With the shader count, the larger cache structure, provision for 72-bit (64 + 8 ECC) memory controllers I think the rumoured 550mm^2 die size is probably very close- another thing that argues against the GK110 being a gaming card (at least primarily). AFAIK, Nvidia's own whitepaper describes their ongoing strategy as gaming and compute becoming distinct product/architectural lines for the most part ( see Maxwell and the imminent threat of Intel's Xeon Phi)


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## Benetanegia (Oct 17, 2012)

cadaveca said:


> Like really....that pic to me says it all.
> 
> Is it really 512mm?
> 
> What clockspeeds are the Tesla cards? 600 Mhz, I'm guessing?



So you didn't know the size of GF100/110? How are you even attempting to make a half-arsed argument regarding all of this (especially what is feasible) if you lack such an essential bit of info? (I demand you are denied reviewing rights right now  j/k)

And yes that pic says it all. If you really think that after 521 mm^2 GF110 they would put up a 294mm^2 chip against AMD's 365 mm^2 one, you are deluded sir.




> CUDA can use all those features you call "useless".



No it doesn't. 



> It's not quite like how you put it...there's not really much if any dedicated hardware for the purposes you mention. At least not any that takes up any die space worth mentioning.



Yes it does. Shader Processors have to be fatter, include more instructions or differently to how it would be best for HPC. The ISA has to be much wider, resulting in more complex fetch and decode, which not only widens the front end, but it makes it significantly slower. And there's tesselation of course. There's absolutely no sense in adding more functionality than it would be required. If functionality is there is because it's meant to be used.



> See that picture above? Point to me where these "DirectX features" are located...



Are you serious? Too many beers today or what? You seem to be trolling now...


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## cadaveca (Oct 17, 2012)

HumanSmoke said:


> The overlay shows a G*F*100 of 521mm^2
> 
> The K20 spec released says 705M. Standard practice to keep the board power under the 225W limit (this is what happens when you try to keep clocks high to inflate FLOP performance in a compute enviroment) . I'd expect the GeForce card to be bound closer to (if not fudging over) the ATX 300W limit ( maybe 900 MHz or so)
> With the shader count, the larger cache structure, provision for 72-bit (64 + 8 ECC) memory controllers I think the rumoured 550mm^2 die size is probably very close- another thing that argues against the GK110 being a gaming card (at least primarily). AFAIK, Nvidia's own whitepaper describes their ongoing strategy as gaming and compute becoming distinct product/architectural lines for the most part ( see Maxwell and the imminent threat of Intel's Xeon Phi)



Huh. We don't seem to disagree, then. That's what I had thought. Just Bene here disagrees, but maybe only becuase I said GK104 was always supposed to be GTX680, not GK110.


And yes, Bene..I has no idea...as i said like 5 times earlier....because I review motherboards and memory, not GPUs. GPUs are W1zz's territory.


wait.


K20 is GF110, not G*K*110.




Still...damn that's a huge chip.



Benetanegia said:


> Are you serious? Too many beers today or what? You seem to be trolling now...



Yes, serious. Show me EXACTLY where DirectX makes the die bigger. Because from what I've been lead to beelive by nVidia, it's actually the opposite of what you indicate...as does the rest fo the info i got from them.


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## Benetanegia (Oct 17, 2012)

cadaveca said:


> Yes, serious. Show me EXACTLY where DirectX makes the die bigger. Because from what I've been lead to beelive by nVidia, it's actually the opposite of what you indicate...as does the rest fo the info i got from them.



It's not something you can see there lol, that's why I asked if you were being serious?

Ever wondered why DX11 Shader Processors require more transistors/die area and are clock for clock slower than DX10 SPs? (i.e HD4870 vs HD5770)

Whatever, an easier example to show how stupid the question is. Can you point me out where the tesselators are? Tesselators actually are a separate entity, unlike functionality included in Shader Processors.

BTW K20 is G*K*110, lol.

EDIT: A more fittig analogy:






Please point me to where exactly they planted potatoes, where wheat and where corn.


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## [H]@RD5TUFF (Oct 17, 2012)

BigMack70 said:


> Except that your 680 isn't going to outperform an overclocked 7970. They'll be about the same.
> 
> And I'm not confusing anything... the 7970 and 670 are about the same, and the 7970GE and 680 are about the same. If you overclock the 7970 or 7970GE, they'll match an overclocked 680 - trading blows depending on the game/test and overall being about the same.
> 
> I know you have to defend your silly purchase of an overclocking-oriented voltage locked card, though



Yes it's totally silly to score a nice video card . . . I am not defending anything, but I would seriously doubt many if any 7970's outside of ones with water cooling or LN would be able to keep up with my 680 @ 1320 core, while being cooled on air . . 

That said you seem to only care about suckling on AMD's teat, and disparaging things you don't like, rather than having a discussion of substance.:shadedshu


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## HumanSmoke (Oct 17, 2012)

cadaveca said:


> Huh. We don't seem to disagree, then. That's what I had thought


We probably are in agreement on the point. But then, Nvidia have been integrating GPGPU since G80 (8800GTX/Ultra). Back then the strategy seemed a one-size-fits-all mentality (plus Jen Hsun's ego of win at all costs I would suggest) that is fine so long as the GPU's gestation isn't protracted and yields are good. G200 (GTX 280 etc) seemed to signal that Nvidia was walking a knife edge of what can be achieved against the pitfalls of process design, and Fermi seems to have been a big wake up call and an example of what can go wrong will go wrong. Loss of prestige could well have translated into loss of market share had it not been that the pro market is very slow to change/update and Nvidia's software enviroment being top notch.

Kepler compute cards have orders in the region of 100-150,000 units. At $3K + apiece (even taking into account low end GK104, since a 4xGPU "S" 1U system is bound to materialize taking the place of the S2090) it isn't hard too see how Nvidia would look at a modular mix-and-match approach to a gaming/workstation GPU and compute/workstation GPU. In a way, it matches AMD's past strategy, which is ironic considering that AMD have adopted compute at the expense of a larger die. The difference is that AMD wouldn't contemplate a monolithic GPU like GK110 - the risk is too great (process worries), and the return too small (not enough presence in the markets that it would be aimed at).


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## cadaveca (Oct 17, 2012)

HumanSmoke said:


> We probably are in agreement on the point. But then, Nvidia have been integrating GPGPU since G80 (8800GTX/Ultra). Back then the strategy seemed a one-size-fits-all mentality (plus Jen Hsun's ego of win at all costs I would suggest) that is fine so long as the GPU's gestation isn't protracted and yields are good. G200 (GTX 280 etc) seemed to signal that Nvidia was walking a knife edge of what can be achieved against the pitfalls of process design, and Fermi seems to have been a big wake up call and an example of what can go wrong will go wrong. Loss of prestige could well have translated into loss of market share had it not been that the pro market is very slow to change/update and Nvidia's software enviroment being top notch.
> 
> Kepler compute cards have orders in the region of 100-150,000 units. At $3K + apiece (even taking into account low end GK104, since a 4xGPU "S" 1U system is bound to materialize taking the place of the S2090) it isn't hard too see how Nvidia would look at a modular mix-and-match approach to a gaming/workstation GPU and compute/workstation GPU. In a way, it matches AMD's past strategy, which is ironic considering that AMD have adopted compute at the expense of a larger die. The difference is that AMD wouldn't contemplate a monolithic GPU like GK110 - the risk is too great (process worries), and the return too small (not enough presence in the markets that it would be aimed at).



Yeah, I actually kinda like how they are similar, but since thgey both make GPUs for kinda teh same audience, that only makes sense.

As to the whole monolithix thing, since the Fermi thing, it made sense to me that they would diverge, since they identified the problem there, and then realized that it could be an issue again in the future..one they could avoid on their higher-numbers-sold-but-less-profit products. 

And considering the market, and nvidia's plans with ARM, it makes sense they'd want to sell you both a Tesla card, and a Quadro card, and a motherboard for it all with an arm chip. It's the same as buying CPU/GPU/board...


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## BigMack70 (Oct 17, 2012)

[H]@RD5TUFF said:


> Yes it's totally silly to score a nice video card . . . I am not defending anything, but I would seriously doubt many if any 7970's outside of ones with water cooling or LN would be able to keep up with my 680 @ 1320 core, while being cooled on air . .
> 
> That said you seem to only care about suckling on AMD's teat, and disparaging things you don't like, rather than having a discussion of substance.:shadedshu



A 680 with a GPU boost frequency of ~1300 is roughly equivalent to a 7970 with a core clock of ~1200...

If you managed to get a GPU core clock of 1300 and a boost of 1400+, you got very lucky, akin to someone who got a 7970 and managed to hit 1300 MHz.


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## HumanSmoke (Oct 17, 2012)

BigMack70 said:


> A 680 with a GPU boost frequency of ~1300 is roughly equivalent to a 7970 with a core clock of ~1200...
> If you managed to get a GPU core clock of 1300 and a boost of 1400+, you got very lucky, akin to someone who got a 7970 and managed to hit 1300 MHz.


If the GK114 and Sea Islands are both basically refreshes as seems likely, then it sould also seem likely that Nvidia have more wiggle room on clocks since the power draw of GK 104 is lower than that of Tahiti. I'd assume that with 28nm being more mature that the next round of silicon would be more refined (lower leakage) for both vendors, so unless there is a fundamental redesign in silicon, I'd assume that AMD would look to lower power usage (less heat, higher boost/OC over stock), and Nvidia, higher clocks including memory to counter bandwidth limitation.

The other alternative is that AMD and Nvidia hack and slash the GPU, which doesn't seem all that likely. Adding compute, beefiing up the ROP/TMU count adds substantially to power draw and die size.


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## BigMack70 (Oct 17, 2012)

HumanSmoke said:


> If the GK114 and Sea Islands are both basically refreshes as seems likely, then it sould also seem likely that Nvidia have more wiggle room on clocks since the power draw of GK 104 is lower than that of Tahiti. I'd assume that with 28nm being more mature that the next round of silicon would be more refined (lower leakage) for both vendors, so unless there is a fundamental redesign in silicon, I'd assume that AMD would look to lower power usage (less heat, higher boost/OC over stock), and Nvidia, higher clocks including memory to counter bandwidth limitation.
> 
> The other alternative is that AMD and Nvidia hack and slash the GPU, which doesn't seem all that likely. Adding compute, beefiing up the ROP/TMU count adds substantially to power draw and die size.



I think it's too early to draw conclusions about this, as the 680 can have its power draw go absolutely through the roof with OC+OV:





Right now, we see that the 7970 and 680 perform about the same when overclocked and so there's no real performance crown. Rather or not one of the companies manages to get that crown in the next round remains to be seen.


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## mastrdrver (Oct 18, 2012)

Recus said:


> http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2012/04/19/qualcomm-28nm-capacity/1
> http://wccftech.com/amd-28nm-processors-delayed-2014/ (Global Foundries problems)



AMD has staff problems so new 28nm parts get delayed. Qualcomm can't get enough capacity. Only nVidia says that the process itself was a problem and now has been fixed enough to run GK110.

Sounds more like a nVidia problem.


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## HumanSmoke (Oct 18, 2012)

BigMack70 said:


> I think it's too early to draw conclusions about this, as the 680 can have its power draw go absolutely through the roof with OC+OV


Well, firstly, overvolting comparison is really only valid if comparing max overclock (BTW: It's common courtesy to link to the site that did the review (EVGA GTX 680 Classy 4GB)
In point of fact, you've just made my point.
EVGA 680 @ 1287 Core, 1377 boost, 6500 effective memory = 425W under OCCT
HD 7970GE @ 1150 Core, 1200 boost, 6400 effective memory= 484W under OCCT
If 425 watts is "absolutely through the roof", what's 484 watts ?




[source]


BigMack70 said:


> Right now, we see that the 7970 and 680 perform about the same when overclocked and so there's no real performance crown


True enough, but since overclocked performance isn't guaranteed, stock-vs-stock is probably a better indicator of current performance. Overclocking ability might be more an indicator of how a refresh might perform.


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## BigMack70 (Oct 18, 2012)

I didn't mean to indicate that the 7970's didn't, only that we don't know enough from this current gen to predict how next gen will play out with power and clocks. This goes double since we keep hearing rumors of a really big chip e.g. GK110 showing up.


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## crazyeyesreaper (Oct 18, 2012)

really we are enthusiasts boohoo gpu x uses more power than gpu y  honestly who give a fuck really? I don't buy based on TDP or power usage I buy based on availability and performance, As do most of you a lower power requirement is just icing on the damn cake.  I dont care if the GPU uses 200w or 500w long as it does its job.


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## HumanSmoke (Oct 18, 2012)

crazyeyesreaper said:


> really we are enthusiasts boohoo gpu x uses more power than gpu y  honestly who give a fuck really? I don't buy based on TDP or power usage I buy based on availability and performance


Missed the point by a country mile.
Lower power usage envelope now generally means more leeway on clocks on the refresh (all other things being equal)



crazyeyesreaper said:


> As do most of you a lower power requirement is just icing on the damn cake.  I dont care if the GPU uses 200w or 500w long as it does its job.


Who gives a fuck about an individual user in an industry context? When individual users buy more cards than OEM's then AMD and Nvidia will give Dell, HP and every other prebuilder the dismissive wanking gesture and thumb their nose at the ATX specification. Until then, both AMD and Nvidia are pretty much going to adhere to the 300W limit. OEM's don't buy out-of-spec parts.

/Majority of posters talk about the inductry situation, crazyeyes talks about crazyeyes situation


BigMack70 said:


> I didn't mean to indicate that the 7970's didn't, only that we don't know enough from this current gen to predict how next gen will play out with power and clocks. This goes double since we keep hearing rumors of a really big chip e.g. GK110 showing up.


Everyone here is _speculating _on details from an article that is itself _speculating _on  the _possible_ makeup of a IHV's card refresh. I put forward an hypothesis based on previous design history (HD 4870 -> HD 4890, GTX 480 -> GTX 580 for isolated examples) where refinement and design headroom produced performance increases. It is by no means the only argument-as shown by the thread, but I don't see it as being proved false by the graph you added- or the one I added to compliment it. And if we are commenting upon a speculative article with known fact only, I think the post count on the thread could be reduced by ~120 posts.


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## atticus14 (Oct 18, 2012)

HumanSmoke said:


> Interesting stuff if true. GK110 takes GK104's place in the product stack, and the GTX 680 refresh gets pricing in the GTX 660 Ti's territory. Given that AMD's refresh seems to be looking at the same ~15% increase, it would seem that AMD might end up being pressured pretty hard in perf/mm^2, perf/$ and margins if they have to fight a GTX 680 successor that is 40% cheaper than the current model. A pricing overhaul like that will surely lay waste to the resell market- by the same token, a GTX670 or 680 SLI setup should be cheap as chips come March.
> 
> At least all the people screaming about Nvidia pricing a supposed mainstream/performance GK 104 at enthusiast prices, will now be able to vent their rage elsewhere.



hmm? This only confirms their right to rage. If this comes to pass and they are justified the real rage has only begun!


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## F0XFOUND (Oct 18, 2012)

GoldenTiger said:


> Oh, perhaps it was originally, but GK100 was certainly not "held back" so they could "put out a midrange card as high-end for mad profits!!!!" as some people like to proclaim.





cadaveca said:


> This is always what I thought. If nVidia could truly release a card twice as fast as what AMD has, using the same foundry, then they would, since that would ensure far more sales and profit than selling something that "saves on costs" instead.
> 
> In fact, had nVidia done this, to a degree, would amount to price fixing, and of course, is illegal.
> 
> ...


 If GK104 was truly the high end chip for the GTX 680 then why Nvidia claimed it was 3 times as powerful as the GTX 580 and could run the Samaritan demo on just one 680. Can the *retail GTX 680* be 3x as fast as the GTX 580 and/or run the Samaritan demo all by itself? I remember the unreleased GTX 680 was touted as it could.


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## HumanSmoke (Oct 18, 2012)

F0XFOUND said:


> If GK104 was truly the high end chip for the GTX 680 then why Nvidia claimed it was 3 times as powerful as the GTX 580 and could run the Samaritan demo on just one 680. Can the *retail GTX 680* be 3x as fast as the GTX 580 and/or run the Samaritan demo all by itself? I remember the unreleased GTX 680 was touted as it could.


IIRC the original Samaritan demo ran at 4xMSAA w/ triple GTX 580's -although I'm pretty sure it was SLI with the third card handling PhysX- in either event, it was the full screen AA that took the toll. The GTX 680 demo ran with FXAA ...FXAA wasn't implemented at the time of the original demo (May 2011), and wasn't included in the Nvidia driver until April of this year.

Nvidia never claimed that the GTX 680 was three times as powerful as the GTX 580- that's just an assumption that some people jumped to....such as this article. The suggestion is the authors based on the fact that a single 680 achieved (superficially) what previously ran with three 580's. You'll note that the author still notes the difference in AA setting.


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## EarlZ (Oct 30, 2012)

Would be nice if it hits at least 25% performance gap from the 680.


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