NVIDIA's 1.4 Billion Transistor GPU: GT200 Arrives as the GeForce GTX 280 & 260
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on June 16, 2008 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Folding@home Now on NVIDIA
Folding@home, for those who don't know, is a distributed computing app designed to help researchers better understand the process of protien folding. Knowing more about how protiens assemble themselves can help us better understand many diseases such as alzheimers, but protien folding is very complex and takes a long time to simulate. the problem is made much easier by breaking it up into smaller parts and allowing many people to work on the problem.
Most of this work has been done on the CPU, but PS3 and AMD R5xx GPUs have been able to fold for a while now. Recently support for AMD's R6xx lineup was added as well. NVIDIA GPUs haven't been enabled to run folding@home until now (or very soon anyway). Stanford has finally implemented a version of folding@home with CUDA support that will allow all G80 and higher hardware to run the client.
We've had the chance for the past couple days to play around with a pre-beta version of the folding client, and running folding on NVIDIA hardwarwe is definitly very fast. Work units and protiens are different on CPUs and GPUs because the hardware is suited to different tasks, but to give some perspective a quadcore CPU could simulate tens of nanoseconds of a protien fold, while GPUs can simulate hundreds.
While we don't have the ability to bring you any useful comparative benchmarks right now, Stanford is working on implemeting some standard test cases that can be run on different hardware. This will help us actually compare the performance of different hardware in a meaningful way. Right now giving you numbers to compare CPUs, PS3s, AMD and NVIDIA GPUs would be like directly comparing framerates from different games on different hardware as if they were related.
What we will say is that NVIDIA predicts that the GTX 280 will be capable of simulating something between 5 and 6 hundred nanoseconds of folding per day while CPUs are going to be two orders of magnitude slower. They also show the GTX 280 handily ahead of any current AMD solutions by high margins, but until we can test it ourselves we really don't want to put a finer point on it.
In our tests, we've actually seen the GT200 folding client perform at between 600 and 850ns per day (using the timestamps in the log file to determine performance), so we are quite impressed. Work units complete about every 20 to 25 minutes depending on the protien and whether or not the viewer is running (which does have a significant impact since the calculations and the display are both running on the GPU).
Hardware H.264 Encoding
For years now both ATI and NVIDIA have been boasting about how much better their GPUs were for video encoding than Intel's CPUs. They promised multi-fold speedups in performance but never delivered, so we've been stuck encoding and transcoding videos on CPUs.
With the GT200, NVIDIA has taken one step closer to actually delivering on these promises. We got a copy of a severely limited beta of Elemental Technologies' BadaBOOM Media Converter:
The media converter currently only works on the GeForce GTX 280 and GTX 260, but when it ships there will be support for G80/G92 based GPUs as well. The arguably more frustrating issue with it today is its lack of support for CPU-based encoding, so we can't actually make an apples-to-apples comparison to CPUs or other GPUs. The demo will also only encode up to 2 minutes of video.
With that out of the way however, BadaBOOM will perform H.264 encoding on your GPU. There is still a significant amount of work being done on the CPU during the encode, our Core 2 Extreme QX9770 was at 20 - 30% CPU utilization during the entire encode process, but it's better than the 50 - 100% it would normally be at if we were encoding on the CPU alone.
Then there's the speedup. We can't perform a true apples-to-apples comparison since we can't use BadaBOOM's H.264 encoder on anything else, but compared to using the open source x264 encoder the performance speedup is pretty good. We used AutoMKV and played with its presets to vary quality:
In the worst case scenario, the GTX 280 is around 40% faster than encoding on Intel's fastest CPU alone. In the best case scenario however, the GTX 280 can complete the encoding task in 1/10th the time.
We're not sure where a true apples-to-apples comparison would end up, but somewhere between those two extremes is probably a good guesstimate. Hopefully we'll see more examples of GPU based video encoder applications in the future as there seems to be a lot of potential here. Given how long it takes to encode a Blu-ray movie, we needn't even explain why it's necessary.
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woofermazing - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - link
Isn't the R700 high-end model going to have a direct link between the two cores. Could be a false rumor, but i would think that would solve a lot of problems with having two GPU's on a single board, since games would see it as 1 chip instead of a Crossfire/SLI setup. And besides, why the heck does it matter what the card looks like under the cooler. If it delivers better performance than Nvidia's offering without driver headaches, I don't think most gamers are going to care.VooDooAddict - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - link
Why am I the only one happy about this product?Since the release of the 8800GTX top end single GPU performance has been a little stagnant... then came the refresh (8800GT/8800GTS-512) better prices came into effect.
Now we've got the new generation, and like in years prior, the new gen single GPU card has near performance of the previous gen in SLI. Price is also similar with when NVIDIA launched the first 8800GTX.
Sure, I wish they came in at a lower price point and at less power draw. (Same complaints that we had with the original 8800GTX). Lower power and lower price will come with a refresh.
Will I be getting one? ... nahh these cheap 9600GTs, overclocked 8800GT's and 8800GTSs will be the cards I recomend till i see the refresh. But I'm still happy there's progress.
I'm hoping the refresh hits around the same time as Intel's updated quad core.
DerekWilson - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - link
i think its neat and has very interesting technology under the hood.but i'm not gonna spend that much money for something that doesn't deliver enough value (or even performance) compared to other solutions that are available. you pretty much reflect my own sentiment there: it's another step forward but not one that you're gonna buy.
i think people "don't like it" because of that though. it just isn't worth it right now and that's certainly valid.
greenx - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - link
There are two ways I can look at this article.1)First an foremost at the heart of a real gamer ticks the need for good story lines fed by characters you will never forget, held by a gameplay you will fall in love with and finally covered by graphics that will transport you to another world (kinda like when I first played FF VII on my PC).
Within the context of the world we live in today I wonder what is really going through the minds of these people selling $600+ video cards. Kinda like those $10 000+ PCs. Madness. Sure they have their market up there but I shudder to think of how much money has been poured into appeasing a select few. Furthermore for what reason? Glory? I don't know but seeing as how the average gamer is what has made the PC/Gaming scene what it is, where does a $600+ video card fit into the grand scheme of things?
2) The possibilities that these new cards open up certainly seem exciting. The comparison with intel has been justified, but considering the other alternatives out there are much further ahead in development, who is going to bypass intel/amd/etc for a GPU technology based supercomputer?
DerekWilson - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - link
two address point 2):developers will bypass Intel, AMD, SUN, whoever owns Cray these days, and all other HPC developers when a technology comes along that can speed up their applications by two orders of magnitude immediately on hardware that costs thousands (and in large cases millions) less to build, run and develop for.
evolucion8 - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - link
LOL that was quite funny but incorrect as well, there's more than 4 Billion of people in China, in the future probably nVidia will launch a 4 Billion Transistors GPU hehe. It will require a Nuclear Reactor to turn it on, a and two of them to play games :D7Enigma - Wednesday, June 18, 2008 - link
4 Billion? Did you just make that out of thin air. Latest tabs show approximately 1.4 billion (give or take a couple hundred million). The world population is only estimated at 6.6 billion, so unless 60% of the people in the world are living in China, you're clueless.http://geography.about.com/od/populationgeography/...">http://geography.about.com/od/populationgeography/...
Bahadir - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - link
Firstly I must say I enjoyed reading the whole article written by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson. However, what does not make sense to me is the fact that "At most, 105 NVIDIA GT200 die can be produced on a single 300mm 65nm wafer from TSMC", but by looking at the wafer, only 95 full dies can be seen. Is this the wrong die?Also, it is not fair to compare the die of the Penryn against the GTX 280die because Penryn's die was made in 45nm process and GTX280 was made in 65nm die. Maybe it would be fair to compare it with the Conroe (65nm) die. But well done folks for putting an excellent article together!
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - link
Thanks for your kind words btw :) Both of us really appreciate it - same to everyone else in this thread, thanks for making a ridiculously long couple of weeks (and a VERY long night) worth it :)-A
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - link
You're right, there's actually a maximum of 94 usable die per wafer :)Take care,
Anand