Mainstream Nvidia DX11 Cards to Have 256 Shader Cores

Mainstream Nvidia DX11 Cards to Have 256 Shader Cores
by dostov

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Derivative from the Fermi architecture aimed at the mainstream market, dubbed GF104, is expected to feature up to 256 shader cores, half of what is found in the GF100 chip. Graphics cards based on the new silicon from Nvidia are expected to hit retail during the summer 2010.

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Heh, who is expecting them come summer?

Actually to be fair, these will have a much smaller die and therefor much larger yield. I'm going to laugh if their mid range cards draw as much juice per performance as the big ones though. I hope they can get that fixed quickly.
Otherwise, say hello to a card competing with a 5770 and drawing like a 5850.

256 cores is still more than the 240 that the GTX280/285 has, so these should be very capable cards. The 256-bit bus coupled w/ GDDR5 should give similar bandwidth to the 512-bit bus and GDDR3 that the GTX280/285 has as well.

All in all I'm thinking the GTS450 will outperform the GTX280/285, and if they come in at the $250 price range as indicated in the article then they'll be priced similarly as well.

I'm not sure how much the power consumption will go down, but I'm sure it will be significant. I'm just guessing here, but let's say the GF100 core consumes 200W out of the 250W that the total card consumes. If cutting GF100 in half reduces that to 100W on the core that would be great, and if further core power efficiencies are possible due to the smaller die size then that can only make things better. If the main enemy of the GF100 is it's size then these chips should be significantly more efficient.

These could be great upgrades for people still on 8800GT/GTS, 9800GT/GTX, or GTS250 or below that want to stay with nVidia and don't want to fork out $300+.

The actual testing i read showed the 480 to be closer to 300 then 250, and way over 300 with a furmark load, i'm not sure i'd go with the TDP in this case.

Well if the GTX480 is pulling 300W in the test done by Hardware Canucks then that only leaves 92W for the rest of the system. That doesn't seem right. And if that's true then the 5970 and GTX295 have to be pulling about 325W, and I'm not sure I believe that either.

I wouldn't believe any Furmark result comparisons either since ATI has deliberately put code in their drivers to not let their cards run at full gallop when the Furmark executable is launched. Obviously there are ways around that, but I'm not sure that's accounted for in reviews. And I don't blame ATI for doing it either; Furmark puts out an unrealistic load, and has been known to kill cards. I don't recommend running it for extended periods of time, and I only use it in windowed mode. It's not very good at showing artifacts anyway. It's more of just a burn test IMO.

jason4207 said:

Well if the GTX480 is pulling 300W in the test done by Hardware Canucks then that only leaves 92W for the rest of the system. That doesn't seem right. And if that's true then the 5970 and GTX295 have to be pulling about 325W, and I'm not sure I believe that either.

I wouldn't believe any Furmark result comparisons either since ATI has deliberately put code in their drivers to not let their cards run at full gallop when the Furmark executable is launched. Obviously there are ways around that, but I'm not sure that's accounted for in reviews. And I don't blame ATI for doing it either; Furmark puts out an unrealistic load, and has been known to kill cards. I don't recommend running it for extended periods of time, and I only use it in windowed mode. It's not very good at showing artifacts anyway. It's more of just a burn test IMO.

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Look at HardOCP's figures though:




5870 = 188w

Total system draw difference between the system with the GTX480 in and the 5870 = 113w

= 301w

Anadtech's numbers also confirm this:




So err?

Yeah, it's hard to know what is accurate. If the GTX480 is drawing 300W in the Anandtech test then the 4870X2 has to be drawing 338W, and that doesn't seem right either.

Canucks has the 5970 and GTX295 drawing more wattage than the GTX480, while Anandtech shows the opposite.

Another thing I like to look at is the difference between a single GTX480 and 2 in SLI. Because the difference between those 2 configs is exactly 1 GTX480. Anandtech is showing a delta of 247W, and HardOCP shows 115W (seems like we should throw their results out).

jason4207 said:

Yeah, it's hard to know what is accurate. If the GTX480 is drawing 300W in the Anadtech test then the 4870X2 has to be drawing 338W, and that doesn't seem right either.

Canucks has the 5970 and GTX295 drawing more wattage than the GTX480, while Anadtech shows the opposite.

Another thing I like to look at is the difference between a single GTX480 and 2 in SLI. Because the difference between those 2 configs is exactly 1 GTX480. Anadtech is showing a delta of 247W, and HardOCP shows 115W (seems like we should throw their results out).

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I agree the numbers seem off but from the reviews I've read (Canucks is the first I've seen with significantly different figures) the GTX 480 is consistently pulling more wattage than the 5970.

I just have trouble believing that a lot of the respected review sites out there could have got the figures completely wrong.

Neural Net said:

I agree the numbers seem off but from the reviews I've read (Canucks is the first I've seen with significantly different figures) the GTX 480 is consistently pulling more wattage than the 5970.

I just have trouble believing that a lot of the respected review sites out there could have got the figures completely wrong.

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Well they're all using different 'loads' so to speak. Different benchmarks and games push different areas of the card in different ways. And Canucks said:

hardwarecanucks said:

Please note that after extensive testing, we have found that simply plugging in a power meter to a wall outlet or UPS will NOT give you accurate power consumption numbers due to slight changes in the input voltage. Thus we use a Tripp-Lite 1800W line conditioner between the 120V outlet and the power meter.

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jason4207 said:

Well there all using different 'loads' so to speak. Different benchmarks and games push different areas of the card in different ways. And Canucks said:

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Interesting stuff, I had a look at Legion Hardware's figures as well and these actually seem pretty spot on from the info that is available.



This would mean the GTX 480 is a 298 watt part. As they are running furmark as well, the 4870X2 could be using more than 300 watts as it unrealistically loads the 4000 series cards, so ATI would have never seen that type of load under testing.

Of course one way to test this would be to find a card that we know uses about 250 watts, (like a GTX 285?) and then run it on the lowest rated PSU possible then see if the GTX480 can run on it as well.