NVIDIA Fermi GPU and Architecture Analysis

Saturday 23rd October 2010, 11:30:00 PM, written by Rys

The timing could barely be better! ATI launch a new line of graphics processors and what do we do?  We finally get round to looking at Fermi.  Alex was at the controls again for this one, beating GF100 in GeForce GTX 470 form up with a new suite of software and a very deep, in-depth analysis of how the majority of the chip and architecture work.  It's the de-facto public analysis and a must read.
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Latest Thread Comments (35 total)
Posted by Alexko on Tuesday, 26-Oct-10 21:04:24 UTC
Quoting RecessionCone
I'm leaning towards the idea that this particular test suite just isn't very useful - it seems to be probing architectural parameters that aren't the real bottlenecks.
Maybe the bottlenecks in Cypress are not hardware, but software.


Anyway, that was a very good article. I can't say that I understood everything, but I certainly enjoyed it.

Posted by AlexV on Tuesday, 26-Oct-10 23:18:59 UTC
Quoting trinibwoy
Magic, of course. Unfortunately there aren't any tests for that just yet :)
A partial answer to that particular question (Crysis FPS tells me a different story, what's up?) is in the works (it'll be out this year, really!). But we need to remember that for a single rendered frame in a game a lot of things happen, concurrently, and drivers play a huge part, especially as you start dealing with things like awful API call sequences.

Posted by upnorthsox on Wednesday, 27-Oct-10 00:09:56 UTC
Quoting AlexV
A partial answer to that particular question (Crysis FPS tells me a different story, what's up?) is in the works *(it'll be out this year, really!). *But we need to remember that for a single rendered frame in a game a lot of things happen, concurrently, and drivers play a huge part, especially as you start dealing with things like awful API call sequences.
Not to call you out on this, but the thread below this one Q4 2006 GPU Market Analysis, and the 2nd below that is R580: ATI Radeon X1950 XTX Review. Excuse us if we're skeptical. :razz:

Posted by I.S.T. on Wednesday, 27-Oct-10 00:13:12 UTC
Quoting upnorthsox
Not to call you out on this, but the thread below this one Q4 2006 GPU Market Analysis, and the 2nd below that is R580: ATI Radeon X1950 XTX Review. Excuse us if we're skeptical. :razz:
The funny part is, the X1950 XTX review is still missing after all this time, and at least two promises to fix it!

Posted by Bob on Wednesday, 27-Oct-10 04:02:22 UTC
Slimer? Really?

Posted by trinibwoy on Wednesday, 27-Oct-10 09:47:47 UTC
Somebody really needs to let us in on the joke :)

Posted by Bludd on Wednesday, 27-Oct-10 10:09:04 UTC
I have just started reading but I notice that the table for GTX 470 on page 3 does not contain a number for the bandwidth.

Posted by Bludd on Wednesday, 27-Oct-10 10:13:40 UTC
Quoting trinibwoy
Somebody really needs to let us in on the joke :)
Well, the first sentence on page 5 refers to Fermi as a "fat green blob" so I think that is the joke.

Posted by AlexV on Wednesday, 27-Oct-10 13:58:43 UTC
Quoting Bludd
Well, the first sentence on page 5 refers to Fermi as a "fat green blob" so I think that is the joke.
No it's not that, the fat green blob came much much later. The Mem BW thing will be fixed, it's a CMS bug.Bob: it's said lovingly:razz:

Posted by Pantagruel's Friend on Thursday, 11-Nov-10 21:12:36 UTC
Ummm, looks like I'm a bit late to the party - to be honest, somewhere in September I lost faith that this article will ever manifest itself. :oops:Seriously, though, the end product was well worth the wait - many thanks for this enlightening romp through Fermi's intricacies, some of them were rather unexpected. I'm quite seriously baffled by the triangle setup rate - I was under the impression that it was a key contributor to the GTX480's advantage over the 5870.


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