Fermi SLI-powered Maingear PC pictured

[Wreckage]

http://www.legitreviews.com/news/6935/

Launch may be closer than many think. :whiste:

 

[tviceman]

There are also the full blown specs for both the gtx 360 and 380 (assuming clock speeds are accurate) over at BSON.com.

 

[jrphoenix]

http://www.legitreviews.com/news/6935/

Launch may be closer than many think. :whiste:

I was hoping to see this reviewed / some sneak previews. I was also disappointed to see only an Nvidia marketing guy holding the box

Let's hope we see them soon so that we can see some competition / lower prices. I'm not going to hold by breath.

 

[Voo]

So we'll see some benchmarks in near time? Would be rather interesting - despise the results..

 

[Idontcare]

There are also the full blown specs for both the gtx 360 and 380 (assuming clock speeds are accurate) over at BSON.com.

Care to share some infos for those of us too lazy to go fetch?

 

[tviceman]

Care to share some infos for those of us too lazy to go fetch?

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/Dat...Maingear-PC-pictured/NVDA_GF100_Specs_560.jpg

It looks like the GTX 360, at least according to those specs, may be trading blows with the 5870. Of course I honestly don't know for sure and no one else likely will until benchmarks are released.

 

[Idontcare]

Thanks for the link, I would have never guessed BSON = brightsideofnews as I am so used to everyone calling it BSN (here at least, is it commonly referred to as BSON on other forums?).

650MHz clock...interesting. No mention of power consumption though. Am rather curious to see where that ends up.

 

[ShadowOfMyself]

Guessing the 360 will go head to head with the 5870 and the 380 will be about 15-20% faster

 

[thilanliyan]

What if it's another mockup??!! Anyone spot any wooden screws?

 

[Creig]

http://www.legitreviews.com/news/6935/

Launch may be closer than many think. :whiste:

Simply because the Director of Technical Marketing at Nvidia can get his hands on two GF100s at one time? I'd be surprised if he couldn't.

I doubt this has any bearing whatsoever on launch dates.

 

[dguy6789]

Simply because the Director of Technical Marketing at Nvidia can get his hands on two GF100s at one time? I'd be surprised if he couldn't.

I doubt this has any bearing whatsoever on launch dates.

This. That's probably every GF100 they have ever produced right there :biggrin:

 

[Phanuel]

Is it sad that I'm more interested in Maingear's reskinned Raven chassis than the cards? http://www.maingear.com/custom/desktops/shift/

 

[scooterlibby]

Sad, and off topic

 

[nitromullet]

Simply because the Director of Technical Marketing at Nvidia can get his hands on two GF100s at one time? I'd be surprised if he couldn't.

I doubt this has any bearing whatsoever on launch dates.

I doubt that there are a whole lot of these cards yet, but any official showing off of the cards (provided they aren't mock-ups) is a good sign.

 

[v8envy]

Guessing the 360 will go head to head with the 5870 and the 380 will be about 15-20% faster

Pretty much my read as well. The 360 has a hair more bandwidth and much less SP floating point power. DP doesn't matter for gaming, so 360 performance should be -50% to +2% better, depending on the task. The 380 does have a very significant hardware spec lead on the 5870.

That said, the cost of these bad boys could be a problem. 20 to 50% more memory, more traces on the board for a wider bus, and 50% more transistors for the GPU. The final cards will have to weigh in at nearly double the price to enjoy the same kind of margins as ATI. Maybe people will line up to buy the 380 for $600 in March, who knows. I know for a fact I won't be one of them even if there is a 20% across the board performance lead for it.

The last remaining hope is for the midrange not being a rebadge of previous generations. However, since the '310' is already out and is an exact relabeled 210 that hope may be in vain.

Gah. Another two years of no desktop Linux in my near future. I can feel it.

 

[thilanliyan]

On a sidenote:
http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/16738/38/

Yes another rebrand but if it fits into the proper performance and price bracket why not? It probably is confusing at times though for some people which sucks.

 

[jvroig]

Another two years of no desktop Linux in my near future. I can feel it.

Why? I thought starting with the 4xxx series, ATi cards and drivers for linux were ok? Is this not the case? Are they still not providing decent 3D performance?

 

[tviceman]

Pretty much my read as well. The 360 has a hair more bandwidth and much less SP floating point power. DP doesn't matter for gaming, so 360 performance should be -50% to +2% better, depending on the task. The 380 does have a very significant hardware spec lead on the 5870.

On paper the 4870 should have destroyed the gtx 260 216, but in actuality they were fairly equal performers. I suspect this will be the same with the gtx 360 vs. 5870.

My guess is that the gtx 360 will have an msrp of $399 and the gtx 380 will msrp at $499.

 

[v8envy]

Short story long, even though the 4 series is the best supported by the closed driver and tremendous strides have been taken with the two open source drivers, ATI support for desktop Linux (video acceleration and 3d) ranges from unsupported or unusable to barely functional with caveats. The most optimistic estimates are at least six more months until most ATI hardware reaches feature parity with early NV hardware for a typical desktop Linux user.

ATI's support for video playback acceleration is a very recent (as in, weeks) development in the closed binary blob driver only, and limited to cards with UVD2. It also doesn't work very well for all content, and very few playback apps support the Intel video acceleration API in the first place (ATI and Intel use one API, nv uses their own. The Intel/AMD API looks to be possible as a wrapper around the NV api).

There are multiple other problems with video playback on ATI hardware ranging from TV out support to tearing and flickering in Flash. I won't enumerate them here, but they are a legion strong. The problems encountered by current Linux desktop users are dismissed as not being the target market -- the API is meant for embedded devices.

As far as performance, native Linux 3D games are playable on ATI hardware with most of the 4 series, yes. 5 series is currently having some growing pains. However, most Linux gaming is done with Windows titles and Wine. Wine simply doesn't run for crap on ATI hardware and never has. Yes, the performance is comparatively dismal, but that's the least of it. Visual artifacts (black skin in Oblivion depending on your driver version, e.g.), crashing, lockups. This is dismissed as a Wine problem -- according to ATI the Wine developers appear to be running Nvidia hardware exclusively (no big shocker given the state of ATI drivers on Linux) and as such don't put in ATI-specific hacks.

Most of the Linux compositing desktop effects have started to work recently without problem, but once again with the closed blob driver which doesn't support "legacy" hardware like the 1950XT and older. It's hit and miss, with regressions popping up as often as bugs are fixed. The binary blob may fail to install correctly depending on your distribution. In contrast you can get the nv blob to install on the most customized, homegrown Linux distribution and display these effects flawlessly on the most bleeding edge kernels and Xorg versions using pretty much any product nv made this decade.

So in summary, to a typical desktop user like myself interested in watching video, playing games and using desktop effects eye candy, ATI is not a viable choice today. In six months to a year the picture could be completely different, but I don't have a time machine.

 

[sawtx]

On paper the 4870 should have destroyed the gtx 260 216, but in actuality they were fairly equal performers. I suspect this will be the same with the gtx 360 vs. 5870.

My guess is that the gtx 360 will have an msrp of $399 and the gtx 380 will msrp at $499.

What about the 4870 would lead you to believe it should have destroyed the GTX260?

 

[SlowSpyder]

http://www.legitreviews.com/news/6935/

Launch may be closer than many think. :whiste:

I don't see what would suggest the launch is sooner than later. Remember when AMD demoed the 3.0GHz Phenom1 to show everyone it worked?

*edit - That's a pretty small monitor for all that GPU power!

 

[tviceman]

What about the 4870 would lead you to believe it should have destroyed the GTX260?

Higher clock speeds and a bazillion more stream processors.

 

[PingviN]

Soooooo, how do we know these are not just some other GPU with a new cooler? Nvidia credability when it comes to Fermi = pretty much none-existing.

 

[uclaLabrat]

Higher clock speeds and a bazillion more stream processors.

Yeah, except the stream processor architectures aren't comparable. They are organized differently.

 

[Fox5]

Pretty much my read as well. The 360 has a hair more bandwidth and much less SP floating point power. DP doesn't matter for gaming, so 360 performance should be -50% to +2% better, depending on the task. The 380 does have a very significant hardware spec lead on the 5870.

That said, the cost of these bad boys could be a problem. 20 to 50% more memory, more traces on the board for a wider bus, and 50% more transistors for the GPU. The final cards will have to weigh in at nearly double the price to enjoy the same kind of margins as ATI. Maybe people will line up to buy the 380 for $600 in March, who knows. I know for a fact I won't be one of them even if there is a 20% across the board performance lead for it.

The last remaining hope is for the midrange not being a rebadge of previous generations. However, since the '310' is already out and is an exact relabeled 210 that hope may be in vain.

Gah. Another two years of no desktop Linux in my near future. I can feel it.

Why no desktop linux? Both ATI and nvidia have pretty good drivers, and even the open source options aren't bad for basic desktop use, at least for older cards.
In fact, ati's drivers have been better in linux lately (for me) than nvidia's.

On paper the 4870 should have destroyed the gtx 260 216, but in actuality they were fairly equal performers. I suspect this will be the same with the gtx 360 vs. 5870.

On paper:
4870 has 120 5-way 750Mhz shaders
40 textures units
16 rops
115.2GB/s of memory bandwidth

Core 216 has 216 1242Mhz shaders
72 texture units
28 rops
111.9GB/s of memory bandwidth

The 4870 only wins in memory bandwidth (slightly) and max shader power.