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
GT200 vs. G80: A Clock for Clock Comparison
The GT200 architecture isn't tremendously different from G80 or G92, it just has a lot more processing power. The comparison below highlights the clock for clock difference between GT200 and its true predecessor, NVIDIA's G80. We clocked both GPUs at 575MHz core, 900MHz memory and 1350MHz shader, so this is a look at the hardware's architectural enhancements combined with the pipeline and bus width increases. The graph below shows the performance advantage of GT200 over G80 at the same clock speeds:
Clock for clock, just due to width increases, we should be at the very worst 25% faster with GT200. This would be the case where we are texture bound. It is unlikely an entire game will be blend rate bound to the point where we see greater than 2x speedups, and while test cases could show this real world apps just aren't blend bound. More realistically, the 87.5% increase in SPs will be the upper limit on performance improvements at the same clock rate. We see our tests behave within these predicted ranges.
Based on this, it appears that Bioshock is quite compute bound and doesn't run into many other bottlenecks when the burden is eased. Crysis on the other hand seems to be limited by more than just compute as it didn't benefit quite as much.
The way compute has been rebalanced does affect the conditions under which performance will benefit from the additional units. More performance will be available in the case where a game didn't just need more compute, but it needed more computer per texture. The converse is true when a game could benefit from more compute, but only if there was more texture hardware to feed them.
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junkmonk - Monday, June 16, 2008 - link
I can has vertex data? LMFAO, hahha that was a good laugh.PrinceGaz - Monday, June 16, 2008 - link
When I looked at that, I assumed it must be a non-native English speaker who put that in the block. I'm still not entirely sure what it was trying to convey other than that the core will need to be fed with lots of vertices to keep it busy.Spoelie - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - link
http://icanhascheezburger.com/">http://icanhascheezburger.com/http://icanhascheezburger.com/tag/cheezburger/">http://icanhascheezburger.com/tag/cheezburger/
chizow - Monday, June 16, 2008 - link
Its going to take some time to digest it all, but you two have done it again with a massive but highly readable write-up of a new complex microchip. You guys are still the best at what you do, but a few points I wanted to make:1) THANK YOU for the clock-for-clock comparo with G80. I haven't fully digested the results, but I disagree with your high-low increase thresholds being dependent on solely TMU and SP. You don't mention GT200 has 33% more ROP as well which I think was the most important addition to GT200.
2) The SP pipeline discussion was very interesting, I read through 3/4 of it and glanced over the last few paragraphs and it didn't seem like you really concluded the discussion by drawing on the relevance of NV's pipeline design. Is that why NV's SPs are so much better than ATI's, and why they perform so well compared to deep piped traditional CPUs? What I gathered was that NV's pipeline isn't nearly as rigid or static as traditional pipelines, meaning they're more efficient and less dependent on other data in the pipe.
3) I could've lived without the DX10.1 discussion and more hints at some DX10.1 AC/TWIMTBP conspiracy. You hinted at the main reason NV wouldn't include DX10.1 on this generation (ROI) then discount it in the same breath and make the leap to conspiracy theory. There's no doubt NV is throwing around market share/marketing muscle to make 10.1 irrelevant but does that come as any surprise if their best interest is maximizing ROI and their current gen parts already outperform the competition without DX10.1?
4) CPU bottlenecking seems to be a major issue in this high-end of GPUs with the X2/SLI solutions and now GT200 single-GPUs. I noticed this in a few of the other reviews where FPS results were flattening out at even 16x12 and 19x12 resolutions with 4GHz C2D/Qs. You'll even see it in a few of your benches at those higher (16/19x12) resolutions in QW:ET and even COD4 and those were with 4x AA. I'm sure the results would be very close to flat without AA.
That's all I can think of for now, but again another great job. I'll be reading/referencing it for the next few days I'm sure. Thanks again!
OccamsAftershave - Monday, June 16, 2008 - link
"If NVIDIA put the time in (or enlisted help) to make CUDA an ANSI or ISO standard extention to a programming language, we would could really start to get excited."Open standards are coming. For example, see Apple's OpenCL, coming in their next OS release.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nf/20080612/bs_nf/60250">http://news.yahoo.com/s/nf/20080612/bs_nf/60250
ltcommanderdata - Monday, June 16, 2008 - link
At least AMD seems to be moving toward standardizing their GPGPU support.http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/VirtualPressRoo...">http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/VirtualPressRoo...
AMD has officially joined Apple's OpenCL initiative under the Khronos Compute Working Group.
Truthfully, with nVidia's statements about working with Apple on CUDA in the days leading up to WWDC, nVidia is probably on board with OpenCL too. It's just that their marketing people probably want to stick with their own CUDA branding for now, especially for the GT200 launch.
Oh, and with AMD's launch of the FireStream 9250, I don't suppose we could see benchmarks of it against the new Tesla?
paydirt - Monday, June 16, 2008 - link
tons of people reading this article and thinking "well, performance per cost, it's underwhelming (as a gaming graphics card)." What people are missing is that GPUs are quickly becoming the new supercomputers.ScythedBlade - Monday, June 16, 2008 - link
Lol ... anyone else catch that?Griswold - Monday, June 16, 2008 - link
Too expensive, too power hungry and according to other reviews, too loud for too little gain.The GT200 could become Nvidias R600.
Bring it on AMD, this is your big chance!
mczak - Monday, June 16, 2008 - link
G92 does not have 6 rop partitions - only 4 (this is also wrong in the diagram). Only G80 had 6.And please correct that history rewriting - that the FX failed against radeon 9700 had NOTHING to do with the "powerful compute core" vs. the high bandwidth (ok the high bandwidth did help), in fact quite the opposite - it was slow because the "powerful compute core" was wimpy compared to the r300 core. It definitely had a lot more flexibility but the compute throughput simply was more or less nonexistent, unless you used it with pre-ps20 shaders (where it could use its fx12 texture combiners).