Of course it is. I lowered the bandwidth by half to simulate a 256bit bus and it really affects performance quite significantly.So lower memory bandwidth isn't a bad thing after all?
Hence why I'm holding off until I see what they're like. I have a 750Ti and it's a pretty surprisingly good card for what it offers, I recorded a shadowplay clip playing Planetside 2 last night using it and was getting 60-110fps with closely the same settings as I use with the R9 280X or GTX770- but the R7 265 performs a little better than the 750Ti at the cost of more power consumption.This node has taken too long to come. We have already had a refresh of cards over a year ago and we should right now be looking at lovely shiny 20nm GPUs with 2x the transistors and near 2x the performance (at least in compute). Having to wait nearly a year or see an architecture designed for 20nm on 28nm is a huge disappointment and not one which looks like it will bring much performance. Are people really going to ditch their cards for an extra 20% and a price premium as well? Not in volume they aren't.
Oh, and while we're at it, if this chip scales similarly in performance over GM107 like GK104 did over GK107, then it should be significantly faster than a gtx 780 TI. I don't think it will be significantly faster, not with 32 ROP's and ~240gb/s bandwidth, but I do think with the given specs it will be somewhat faster.
20nm has been "Just around the corner" for two years, and is just now becoming available for SoC's. You seriously think that an HP 16nm process will be available in 2016?
I did some tests to see how crippling 230GB/s of memory bandwidth would be. The test results don't look promising, I have a hard time believing that such bandwidth would suffice to overtake 780ti by 20%.
Uniengine Tropics
1440 MSAA 8X 876(1GHz)/1500MHz 288.4GB/s 74FPS
1440 MSAA 8X 1001MHz(1.125GHz)/1500MHz 288.4GB/s 81.6FPS
1440 MSAA 8X 1001MHz(1.125GHz)/1650MHz 317.8GB/s 84.7FPS
1440 MSAA 8X 1001MHz(1.125GHz)/1200MHz 230.8GB/s 71.6FPS
BW +37%
FPS +16.5%
It seems that even a Titan with just 2688 shaders is already hurting for bandwidth maybe not by much but it certainly doesn't have bandwidth to spare unlike past NV flagships. (GTX280/285, GTX580)
ps. To be honest with 3200SP that are more efficient to boot I would think that even keeping the bandwidth intact from 780ti would still be limiting this card. GTX580 was insensitive to memory overclocking that's why 680 with the same bandwidth could beat it soundly. Titan/780ti are sensitive to memory overclocking, they could certainly use more.
20nm has been "Just around the corner" for two years, and is just now becoming available for SoC's. You seriously think that an HP 16nm process will be available in 2016?
Samsung/GloFo are starting volume production of 14 nm this year.
We will see AMD GPUs on 14 nm in 2016.
P.S I find it funny how everyone thinks AMD/NVIDIA will skip 20 nm. They can't. 14/16 nm - ex Intel - won't be here until 2016. And 20 nm is coming this year for SoCs, the rest are next year.
28nmHP to 20nmSOC is not much of a jump for high performance GPUs (around 15% performance increase IIRC?) but TSMC's 16nmFF+SOC (http://www.cadence.com/Community/bl...-ahead-for-16nm-finfet-plus-10nm-and-7nm.aspx) is a considerable jump over 28nmHP. I wonder if Nvidia can create a Pascal on TSMC's 16nmFF+SOC in the early segment of 2H 2016.I think when people saw 20SOC they somehow instantly rejected it. The 16FF and 14FF is also SOC targetted nodes. But you can still make highend GPUs on it.
The test result you have presented are quite interesting but this is assuming that the same memory controller from GK110 (Kelper uArch) is used in the GM204. I highly suspect this is not the case.
Nv has been making memory controllers for a long time, if they are going to improve bandwidth utilization it's going to be a rather small improvement.
