AT fermi review is up!

[akugami]

Firing Squad has an interesting tidbit in how the HIS Radeon 5870 TurboX performs. Kinda gives a hint at what a "5890" should achieve if one is forthcoming. It minimizes the gap between it and a GTX 480 in some benchmarks. Still, there are many games where the overclocked card barely registers. Probably cases where ATI needs to tweak their drivers more.

The GTX 470 and 480 seems to scale badly at higher resolutions but it's only really noticeable at 2560x1600 and almost no one games at those resolutions so it's not a huge deal.

Also, overclocking a GTX 470 or 480 gives a pretty decent performance boost, assuming you have decent cooling in your case of course. The 470 and 480 are already very hot cards and the extra heat and power from overclocking them can be a killer.

 

[Compddd]

Plenty of people game at 2560x1600

 

[ZimZum]

Plenty of people game at 2560x1600

Yup, I do.

 

[MrK6]

Plenty of people game at 2560x1600

A lot of us do, but comparatively we're still an extreme minority. However, we're also the most likely to buy the fastest GPUs available, so high-end GPUs should perform their best at extreme resolutions, not their worst. :hmm:

 

[McCartney]

A lot of us do, but comparatively we're still an extreme minority. However, we're also the most likely to buy the fastest GPUs available, so high-end GPUs should perform their best at extreme resolutions, not their worst. :hmm:

Don't worry. They'll scale much better in a few driver releases. nVidia is still working on the software. The hardware has yet to be fully tapped because I'm pretty sure they haven't fully optimized the code paths.

 

[n7]

Someone say 2560x1600?

I'm in that club too, & w/ a secondary display (1200x1600) as well.

 

[MrK6]

Don't worry. They'll scale much better in a few driver releases. nVidia is still working on the software. The hardware has yet to be fully tapped because I'm pretty sure they haven't fully optimized the code paths.

I'd be more likely to believe that if this wasn't the case for the last generation anyway. NVIDIA had trouble at 2560x1600 with the GT200 chips too - maybe they just needed a new architecture, I don't know.

 

[McCartney]

The 280s are still scaling well in a lot of games. I really do believe that Fermi isn't being tapped because there is a push to scale ~256 cores, but then the next leap is 512 and that's where they need to be for fermi.

To me it seems like they're just releasing hardware we'll need in the future, but they're still working on making it scale better than last generation's hardware.

 

[Lonyo]

Don't worry. They'll scale much better in a few driver releases. nVidia is still working on the software. The hardware has yet to be fully tapped because I'm pretty sure they haven't fully optimized the code paths.

So what have they been doing for the last 6 months? Sitting on their hands waiting for the cards to come out before they optimise the code paths?

 

[Cookie Monster]

So what have they been doing for the last 6 months? Sitting on their hands waiting for the cards to come out before they optimise the code paths?

It doesn't quite work like that.

And yes, you need working samples that has passed all the functionality/stability/compability tests before starting to optimize for performance. If the tapeout dates are rumoured to be true for A2/A3, then they didnt have much time to optimize anything.

It applies to all IHVs. The R520 (delayed for 3 months or was it 6?) was only 5% faster than the 7800GTX til drivers improved its performance which truly showed what the card was capable of. Same as the GTX280 since its consistently faster than the 9800GX2 which wasn't the case when it was initially released.

Like all cards, drivers tend to improve performance by 20~30% overall across its lifetime. Cypress has a massive head start, already enjoying performance improvements from drivers because its been in the market for 6 months. But consider comparing GTX480 vs initial benchmark results of an HD5870. The gap would be alot larger than what it is, so in this sense the GTX480 is good for being a 6month delayed part.