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Today we are going to talk about the differences between enhanced architecture of Cayman graphics processors and their predecessors. We will also check out the first graphics cards based on them, test their performance, acoustics and power consumption.
Nvidia keep holding the initiative in their hands. Following an almost ideal flagship GeForce GTX 580, the company announced the continuation to this family – GeForce GTX 570, which promises to be just as successful.
There are only a handful of metrics by which 2009 didn’t end as a successful year for AMD. With the launch of the Radeon HD 5800 series in September of that year AMD got a significant and unusually long-standing jump on the competition. By being the first company to transition a high-end GPU to TSMC’s 40nm process they were able to bring about the next generation of faster and cheaper video cards, quickly delivering better performance at better prices than their 55nm predecessors and competitors alike. At the same time they were the first company to produce a GPU for the new DirectX 11 standard, giving them access to a number of new features, a degree of future proofness, and good will with developers eager to get their hands on DX11 hardware.
Ultimately AMD held the high-end market for over 6 months until NVIDIA was able to counter back with the Fermi based GTX 400 series. Though it’s not unprecedented for a company to rule the high-end market for many months at a time, it’s normally in the face of slower but similar cards from the competition – to stand alone is far more rare. This is not to say that it was easy for AMD, as TSMC’s 40nm production woes kept AMD from fully capitalizing on their advantages until 2010. But even with 40nm GPUs in short supply, it was clearly a good year for AMD.
Now in the twilight of the year 2010, the landscape has once again shifted. NVIDIA did deliver the GTX 400 series, and then they delivered the GTX 500 series, once more displacing AMD from the high-end market as NVIDIA’s build’em big strategy is apt to do. In October we saw AMD reassert themselves in the mid-range market with the Radeon HD 6800 series, delivering performance close to the 5800 series for lower prices and at a greater power efficiency, and provoking a price war that quickly lead to NVIDIA dropping GTX 460 prices. With the delivery of the 6800 series, the stage has been set for AMD’s return to the high-end market with the launch of the Radeon HD 6900 series.
Launching today are the Radeon HD 6970 and Radeon HD 6950, utilizing AMD’s new Cayman GPU. Born from the ashes of TSMC’s canceled 32nm node, Cayman is the biggest change to AMD’s GPU microarchitecture since the original Radeon HD 2900. Just because AMD doesn’t have a new node to work with this year doesn’t mean they haven’t been hard at work, and as we’ll see Cayman and the 6900 series will brings that hard work to the table. So without further ado, let’s dive in to the Radeon HD 6900 series.
Nvidia closed the ranks of Fermi based solutions by launching their GF108 graphics processor. Today we are going to discuss the junior representative of the family – GeForce GT 430.
NVIDIA can be a very predictable company at times. It’s almost unheard of for them to release only a single product based on a high-end GPU, so when they released the excellent GeForce GTX 580 last month we knew it was only a matter of time until additional GTX 500 series cards would join their product lineup. Now less than a month after the launch of the GTX 580 that time has come. Today NVIDIA is launching the GeForce GTX 570, the second card to utilize their new GF110 GPU. As the spiritual successor to the GTX 470 and very much the literal successor to the GTX 480, the GTX 570 brings the GTX 580’s improvements to a lower priced, lower performing card. Furthermore at $350 it serves to fill in the sizable gap between NVIDIA’s existing GTX 580 and GTX 470 cards. So how does NVIDIA’s latest and second greatest stack up, and is it a worthy sibling to the GTX 580? Let’s find out.
<p><span style="font-size: small">The DirectX 11 GeForce GTX 480 that was seriously late for the battle failed to become a winner. But today Nvidia has a much stronger candidate for the crown. Please meet GeForce GTX 580!</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small"><a target="_blank" href="http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/geforce-gtx-580.html">Read more...</a></span></p>
Now that the new AMD Radeon HD 6870 and HD 6850 graphics cards are out, it is fairly easy to determine the performance boost we can get in CrossFireX configurations.
Picking up immediately from where we left off yesterday with our review of NVIDIA’s new GeForce GTX 580, we have a second GTX 580 in house courtesy of Asus, who sent over their ENGTX580. With our second GTX 580 in hand we’re taking a look at GTX 580 SLI performance and more; we’ll also be taking a look at voltage/power consumption relationship on the GTX 580, and clock-normalized benchmarking to see just how much of GTX 580’s improved performance is due to architecture and additional SMs, and how much is due to the clockspeed advantage.
The GeForce GTX 480 and the associated GF100 GPU have presented us with an interesting situation over the last year. On the one hand NVIDIA reclaimed their crown for the fastest single GPU card on the market, and in time used the same GPU to give rise to a new breed of HPC cards that have significantly expanded the capabilities of GPU computing. On the other hand, like a worn and weary athlete finally crossing the finish line, this didn’t come easy for NVIDIA. GF100 was late, and the GTX 480 while fast was still hot & loud for what it was.
Furthermore GTX 480 and GF100 were clearly not the products that NVIDIA first envisioned. We never saw a product using GF100 ship with all of its SMs enabled – the consumer space topped out at 15 of 16 SMs, and in the HPC space Tesla was only available with 14 of 16 SMs. Meanwhile GF100’s younger, punchier siblings put up quite a fight in the consumer space, and while they never were a threat to GF100, it ended up being quite the surprise for how close they came.
Ultimately the Fermi architecture at the heart of this generation is solid – NVIDIA had to make some tradeoffs to get a good gaming GPU and a good compute GPU in a single product, but it worked out. The same can’t be said for GF100, as its large size coupled with TSMC’s still-maturing 40nm process lead to an unwieldy combination that produced flakey yields and leaky transistors. Regardless of who’s ultimately to blame, GF100 was not the chip it was meant to be.
But time heals all wounds. With GF100 out the door NVIDIA has had a chance to examine their design, and TSMC the chance to work the last kinks out of their 40nm process. GF100 was the first Fermi chip, and it would not be the last. With a lesson in hand and a plan in mind, NVIDIA went back to the drawing board to fix and enhance GF100. The end result: GF110, the next iteration of Fermi. Hot out of the oven, it is launching first in the consumer space and is forming the backbone of the first card in NVIDIA’s next GeForce series: GeForce 500. Launching today is the first such card, the GF110-powered GeForce GTX 580.
<p><span style="font-size: small">From a variety perspective, the Radeon HD 6800 series is certainly the most interesting Radeon *800 series launches in recent history. AMD typically launches with (and only with) reference cards, and then in time partner-customized cards show up as AMD approves the designs and partners have the time to do the engineering legwork to make custom cards. In the case of the 5800 series this was a particularly long period of time, as TSMC’s production shortage meant that AMD was intentionally shipping out reference cards as fast as humanly possible; and as a result we didn’t see our first custom 5800 series card until 6 months later in February of 2010. It was a much more controlled launch than normal for AMD.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small">The 6800 series on the other hand turns that on its head, giving us a much more liberal launch when it comes to card designs. While the 6870 series launched and is still all-reference, the 6850 is the opposite, having launched with a number of custom designs. In fact you won’t find a reference 6850 in North America unless you’re a hardware reviewer. With an all-custom launch the door is opened to a wide variety of cards with a wide variety of performance characteristics, so we have wasted no time in collecting a few cards to see what they’re capable of – after all we’ve seen what the non-existent reference card can do, but how about the cards you can actually buy? And how about overclocking, do the latest 6850 cards continue the tradition of the *850 being strong overclockers? Today we’re going to answer all of that and more.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small"><a target="_blank" href="http://www.anandtech.com/show/4002/amd-radeon-hd-6850-overclocking-roundup-asus-xfx-msi">Read more...</a></span></p>