Sunday, September 14th 2008
GeForce GTX 260 with 216 Stream Processors Pictured, Benchmarked
NVIDIA is dressing up a new version of the GeForce GTX 260 GPU as reported earlier, with a revision that carries 216 shader units (against 192 for the original GTX 260). Chinese website Bear Eyes has pictured the new GPU. Other than the increased shader count, that should provide a significant boost to the shader compute power, other GPU parameters such as clock speeds remain the same. The core features 72 texturing units and 28 ROPs. The core is technically called G200-103-A2 (the older core was G200-100-A2). The card reviewed by Bear Eyes was made by Inno3D, called GeForce GTX 260 Gold. This shows that the GTX 260 brand name is here to stay.
The card continues to have a 448-bit wide GDDR3 memory bus with 896 MB of memory. This card features 1.0 ns memory chips made by Samsung. On to the benchmarks, and NVIDIA finally manages to comprehensively outperform the Radeon HD 4870 512M in its category. Benchmark graphs for (in the order) 3DMark Vantage, Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts (without and with AA at 1680x1050 px), and Crysis, are provided below. To read the full (Google Translated) review, visit this page.
Source:
Bear Eyes
83 Comments on GeForce GTX 260 with 216 Stream Processors Pictured, Benchmarked
The prices in Greece don't really matter to me.
Here is W1z's latest Price/Performance chart:
The HD4870 and GTX260 are neck and neck according to that, but with the recent GTX260 price drops, the GTX260 is definitely the better buy.
if you want to play Call of Duty/GRID then ATI = win
if you want to use it in a HTPC then ATI = win as in supports 7.1 Lossless LPCM via hdmi out
Anyways, the more competition there is the better choices we "consumers" have.
is still better than ATi's cards
better than ATi's cards
Has never heard of a 4870X2:roll:
Prices from Newegg. Are the first ones that appear when you sort them out by lowest price:
GTX260 - www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133229 - $240, $220 after MIR.
The list: www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&Description=gtx%20260&bop=And&Order=PRICE
HD4870 - www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814129113 - $260
The list: www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&Description=hd4870&bop=And&Order=PRICE
Actually the cheaper one after MIR is the Palit one at $250 after MIR, but you can see the difference between both cards at this moment.
In the end is a matter of choice, but based purely on price/performance Nvidia right now wins hands down. Following your logic, most people in the world (based on number of buyers) shouldn't even consider the HD4870, right?
the higher price much like Nvidia did when they where on top.
I have to disagree with Ati's strategy. If we talk about actual products, I agree that Ati has delivered the better mainstream ones this round. But to answer your last sentence, RV770 just worked, because Nvidia failed in the first place. Had Nvidia used 55nm/GDDR5/256bit (lower prices) or simply had better yields (better prices again), or would have been able to clock the cards where they wanted (higher performance that would have made RV770 slow in comparison), RV770 wouldn't have been so appealing. Also IMO NONE of them has delivered a good high-end card. Yes ATi's X2 is FASTER, but I would never say BETTER for many reasons. There's a lot more to a card than pure performance, like power consumption, heat, etc.
That leads me to the point. We have talked about the chips, let's talk about architectures. Ati has talked so much about the benefits of multi-small-GPUs versus monolithic GPUs, but in the end what the final products show, for those of us that are not blind, is that the monolithic architecture has won this battle hands down. Ati chips had many advantages against Nvidia's ones in this particular battle:
1 - 55nm.
2 - GDDR5.
2b - 256 bit memory interface.
3- No CUDA support. Today that's a huge advantage. Nvidia chips have actual hardware which is specific to CUDA. Basically that's adding many transistors (a good chunk BTW -> full 64 bit computing...) that don't help increasing framerates. Because CUDA is not established yet, that's a dissadvantage, but we'll see in the future.
Even with those advantages and Nvidia's 40% yields fiasco, Ati has not really won this round, because Nvidia has been able to lower the prices in order to regain the performance/price lead and still make money. Well that's a bit of speculation on my part, but one of the main problems was those low yields and if 216 SP GTX260 is feasible now, yields have improved a lot for sure. Contrary to what many people think, PCB complexity is not such an issue anymore. First of all, things are expensive when they are new and scarce (and they are not now, that is) and secondly, dual 256bit designs, although not as complex as 512bit ones, it is also complex enough so that the difference gets smaller.
Nvidia already had the performance/watt one, something that doesn't help protraying Ati's multi-GPU strategy very well to say the least. In the next round, both Ati and Nvidia will play with the same weapons (40nm, GDDR5, low memory buses) and common sense says that Nvidia has many chances to win every front by a huge margin with the simple evolution of their architecture. Unless Ati does something a lot more revolutionary than evolve/refine the strategy they have today, they won't have anything to do against Nvidia's next gen IMHO. Ati is been lagging behind despite their fab process advantage and that's a big one of advantage. RV770 was the secret weapon and has won, but not to the point it should have in order to demostrate their strategy is the best one long term.
not much gain
-too hot
barely any performance increase
-still too hot
thing costs as much as some small computers
-WAY too hot
face it nvidia has lost this generation :nutkick:
-DAM thing will probably fail and fry like the others because its, too hot
this is also coming from a guy with 2 9800GX2s
-OMG its the sun
Guess what DAMMIT never wanted to take on Nvidia
-the dam stickers are pealing off from the heat
R700 series was made for efficiency, performance per watt, and performance per dollar
-omg water cooling is boiling
kicked nvidia's so bad they paniced and drooped prices like a rock pissing off OEM dealers
-i think im getting a tan
now on the flip side to this i also got ati cards here is what i think
-WTF Drivers suck
Nvidia still has grate preformance
-Stock heat sinks blow
Nvidia has kicked ati's @$$ for a long time
-it has almost 4 times the horse power but the drivers blow
that's all i can think of at 4 in the morning
Also I really, really, REALLY hope Ati didn't design R700 with efficiency and performance per watt in mind. Otherwise they failed so badly... No, they designed it with performance per price in mind and everything else was secondary. They succeeded and that's good.
TBH I like to think this way because it portraits a better and stronger Ati and we all want a strong Ati.
Also,there is faar to much fanboy slanging crap goin on,play nice guys.Does it really matter which is faster or cheaper or hotter or cooler.We are all pc fans in here and it dont really matter if your card is ati or nvidia,just enjoy what you bought and respect the fact that not everyone shares your opinion.
Those people are called sheep. Call me a hypocrite but it is the damned truth!
:mad:
I recall this website primarily being here to help others who are having a problem with their "personal confuser" (Thank You Leo Laporte- Call for Help/ The Screen Savers)
You have to take into account more than your country and you in a foreign forum don't you think? Price/performance of the cards were being discused, amongst other things, if you were not implying the HD4870 was cheper/better, if you were not trying to make a point, what was the point of posting?
I bought my 8800GT for 203 euros (retail VAT included, I think it was a typo in their listings, but since they have to follow them... :laugh:) when every other 8800GT was 250-300 AND cheapest HD3870 I could find back then was 240. But you will not see me, posting something like 8800GT was cheaper, why should I take the HD3870? Eh, come on Ati fans tell me.
People arguing like this will be the downfall of the site, because it gives reason for new users to not hang around and ask questions because they are affraid that they will be bashed because they have one companies product and not the other.
I have an idea how about i call in the mods to have this topic cleaned up and possibly locked because, fanboys always go into the opposing companies product topic and spew negativities.
*Maybe you thought I did, because of my last sentence or something? I only pretended to reproduce your post using my own experience.
I think Nvidia is releasing this Chip so they can sell the rest of the GTX 200 Stock off (I think the new GTX260b is basically a weakened form of the GTX280 (some defective SPs but not as many as the current GTX260).
About the "GTX260b" being a weakened GTX280. Of course, that's exactly what it is. That's exactly what GTX260 is.
But about being it a way to sell the GTX200 stock, I don't think it's only because of that. I have said thi before, that IMO Nvidia when they design their chips their goal is to make the chip so that the second card can be the same one with one cluster dissabled. But in order for this you need good yields, if you don't have enough of them you have to dissable one more. Yields is the one thing you can improve a lot over the time, so possibly right now dissabling one cluster is enough to assure a high yield rate.