Will the 6970 overtake the 580?

[Jacky60]

I seem to recall when the 4890 first launched against the 285gtx it was a fair bit slower but the later benchmarks nearly all showed it caught up pretty much to 285 performance levels. Does anyone anticipate the 6970 doing the same?

 

[badb0y]

Hard to say both a relatively new architectures. I would say both improve at about the same rate.

 

[happy medium]

Not a chance.

 

[RaistlinZ]

Nope. They're at totally different price points.

 

[lavaheadache]

Nope. They're at totally different price points.

what does price point have anything to do with the cards potential.

Take a corvette zr1 against almost and highend european supercar. Another example more in line with the topic would be hd 4870 vs gtx 2xx. They were in different price point initially until Nvidia got a rude awakening.

I'm not saying that a 6970 is going to miraculously become faster than a 580 but your point so far from being valid.

 

[Daedalus685]

I really really doubt it.

However, anything is possible. Techpowerup looked at driver scaling over time and the 5870 saw a lot more performance increase in that time than the Nvidia equivalents. However, there is simply too much ground to make up, in the best case the gap might close a touch by the summer.

 

[Gikaseixas]

Overtake - not very probable

Get close - possible

 

[RaistlinZ]

lava,

I'm saying if the 6970 were likely to perform at 580 levels or above AMD would have released it at a closer price relative to the 580. AMD knows the limits of what their card is capable of.

 

[Jionix]

Hard to say both a relatively new architectures. I would say both improve at about the same rate.

But the 580 is not really a "new" arch like the 6970 is. The 580 is just a corrected 480.

The 6970 will benefit far more from maturing drivers (read: AMD/ATI going from VLIW 5 arch to now VLIW 4). Hell, I don't think the current drivers were even ready for release as it is. The 6950/6970 are desperate for improved drivers.

Will it catch the 580? Maybe, maybe not. But the 580 doesn't have much more to gain. It's drivers have already been maturing for a year.

 

[notty22]

lava,

I'm saying if the 6970 were likely to perform at 580 levels or above AMD would have released it at a closer price relative to the 580. AMD knows the limits of what their card is capable of.

Agreed. And the gtx 580 can benefit from better drivers, a good example is BFBC2 where Fermi slightly underperformed , the gtx 580 is now returning more performance.

In this example, I think the 5870 used to perform better, so maybe AMD cards can also find gains here.
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2011/01/11/amd_69706950_cfx_nvidia_580570_sli_review/5

 

[formulav8]

The 5xx series isn't even close to a new arch. Its nvidia's typical ripoff method. (The 68xx is a negative as well but at least there were pretty decent changes). Is it still possible for nvidia to improve drivers? Absolutely.

But no, drivers won't allow AMD to overtake the crown. There WILL be decent improvements down the road though...

 

[ShadowOfMyself]

Depends on the settings... At 2560 they are already so close it is obvious the 6970 will eventually take the lead, but at lower resolutions not really

 

[Barfo]

The 5xx series isn't even close to a new arch. Its nvidia's typical ripoff method. (The 68xx is a negative as well but at least there were pretty decent changes). Is it still possible for nvidia to improve drivers? Absolutely.

But no, drivers won't allow AMD to overtake the crown. There WILL be decent improvements down the road though...

how is the 5xx series a ripoff?

 

[OCGuy]

Probably not

 

[calvin0416]

What is the most trusted benchmarks here in AT? For gaming.

 

[Castiel]

Not a chance.

This. Over at XS a 1030 core 6970 couldn't even match a stock 580 in 11 and vantage

 

[jiffylube1024]

I agree with the sentiment that the 6970 will probably have a higher % increase over current drivers over its life compared to the GTX 580 for a few reasons: that the 69xx are a new architecture, that ATI often improves performance over the life of the card, and also because it has so much VRAM that may not be utilized perfectly yet. However, asking it to overtake the GTX 580 is too much. The GTX 580 is a 520mm² die card, while the 69x0 cards are a 'mere' 389mm². That the two cards are as close as they are is a testiment to how well the small-die strategy is working.

But the 580 is not really a "new" arch like the 6970 is. The 580 is just a corrected 480.

The 6970 will benefit far more from maturing drivers (read: AMD/ATI going from VLIW 5 arch to now VLIW 4). Hell, I don't think the current drivers were even ready for release as it is. The 6950/6970 are desperate for improved drivers.

Will it catch the 580? Maybe, maybe not. But the 580 doesn't have much more to gain. It's drivers have already been maturing for a year.

Having read most of the AT review, it seems like the vast majority of the inherent improvement from going from VLIW 5 to VLIW 4 is already being realized. If you recall, they said that the average game is using 3.4 stream units per 5 unit SIMD unit cluster, so games are already taking advantage of the larger number of less wide core SIMD units on Cayman/69xx.

This also makes sense if you consider the fact that the 6970 is able to beat down the 5870, despite having fewer shaders (1536 vs 1600) at almost the same clockspeed (880 MHz vs 850 MHz). So, the improvement of VLIW4 is probably being mostly realized already.

However, there definitely may be some minor improvements to be had due to the massive 2GB of RAM on the card. Many times in the past, larger RAM sizes have taken time to be optimized for.

 

[Castiel]

Nvidia really needs to release a 2GB 580 as well as a 2GB 570

 

[OCGuy]

The GTX 580 is a 520mm² die card, while the 69x0 cards are a 'mere' 389mm². That the two cards are as close as they are is a testiment to how well the small-die strategy is working.

Actually the 6970 being such a small gain from 5870 is showing the exact opposite.

 

[notty22]

The exact memory amount is also dictated by the memory bit-interface on the gpu. It comes down to the physical connections with what is standard video memory.
Its why the 384 bit 580 has 1.5 and the 320 bit card has 1.25 .
256 bit interface can have multiples of 512-1024-2048
Nvidia can drop a memory controller possibly, but that would be working backwards from design.
As far as I understand things.

 

[Castiel]

The exact memory amount is also dictated by the memory bit-interface on the gpu. It comes down to the physical connections with what is standard video memory.
Its why the 384 bit 580 has 1.5 and the 320 bit card has 1.25 .
256 bit interface can have multiples of 512-1024-2048
Nvidia can drop a memory controller possibly, but that would be working backwards from design.
As far as I understand things.

So they're stuck with 1.5gb or could they increase to 3GB?

 

[notty22]

So they're stuck with 1.5gb or could they increase to 3GB?

As I understand things, yes.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/gigabyte-gf-gtx400_4.html

There are 12 GDDR5 memory chips from Samsung on the PCB. These are the same K4G10325FE-HC04 chips with a capacity of 1 Gb (32 Mb x 32) as used in the Radeon HD 5800 series but organized into a 1536MB bank the GPU has access to via a 384-bit memory bus. It was not easy for the manufacturer to wire such a complex bus. And this must be the reason why the memory chips cannot be clocked even at 1000 (4000) MHz, let alone at their rated frequency of 1250 (2500) MHz. The card’s memory frequency is only 924 (3696) MHz, exactly as specified by Nvidia. The wide bus coupled with the low (for GDDR5 memory) frequency produce a peak bandwidth of 177.4 GBps as compared with 153.6 GBps of the Radeon HD 5870 that uses a 256-bit bus and has a memory frequency of 1200 (4800) MHz. The Radeon HD 5970 has a much higher memory bandwidth – up to a theoretical peak of 256 GBps. The GeForce GTX 480 drops its memory frequency to 67 (270) MHz in power-saving mode.

 

[Wreckage]

Nope. The 4890 ended up settling in between the GTX260 and the 275, but remained behind the 280 and 285.

Right now the 6970 is around the level of the 570 and a pretty good distance behind the 580.

Makes we wonder though if we will see a 585.

 

[badb0y]

But the 580 is not really a "new" arch like the 6970 is. The 580 is just a corrected 480.

The 6970 will benefit far more from maturing drivers (read: AMD/ATI going from VLIW 5 arch to now VLIW 4). Hell, I don't think the current drivers were even ready for release as it is. The 6950/6970 are desperate for improved drivers.

Will it catch the 580? Maybe, maybe not. But the 580 doesn't have much more to gain. It's drivers have already been maturing for a year.

The 5870 was the same architecture as the 4870 yet they squeezed performance out of it. I think both are going to see gains over time.

 

[Daedalus685]

Actually the 6970 being such a small gain from 5870 is showing the exact opposite.

I'm not sure that shows us much more than that both strategies (large fermi vs small evergreen/cayman) rely intimately on a die shrink to move forward at any meaningful pace while staying on strategy.