NVidia launching Fermi DX11 Cards in March

Tom Ellis · Feb 2010

http://news.softpedia.com/news/NVIDIA-Reveals-Official-Fermi-Launch-Date-135727.shtml

I know a lot of people (incuding myself) are waiting for these before buying/upgrading their PC.

I don't really follow PC tech enough to know this, but anyone have any ideas on what price range these are likely to fall into? Looking at the current price of the GTX295, it may be over my budget anyway and I might just upgrade now.

Also, I read that DX11 will run on some of NVidias current cards, is this correct?

Justin Meisse · Feb 2010

wait until DX11 is commonplace, early adopters always lose. I learned my lesson with DVD drives.

metalliandy · Feb 2010

Im guessing about £350ish for the highend cards...they are always around that sort of price on release

ZacD · Feb 2010

Yay for price drops on the 200 series!

Rurouni Strife · Feb 2010

From what is rumored, 600USD for the 480, and 400 for the 470. That's inline with that Nvidia usually charged for their highest end products out of the gate. And DX11 will run as DX10 on current cards, or how DX11 will run as DX10.1 on Radeons that aren't 5 series cards. So it works, just not with all the fancy DX11 effects working.

Keg · Feb 2010

some features of dx11 (mainly the computation stuff I believe) are available to dx10 cards. Tesselation and some other features are dx11 only.

Tom Ellis · Feb 2010

Thanks for the replies all.

I think to be honest I'm just gonna go with like a GTX260 for now and upgrade after the DX11 cards have been out for a while. I've been holding off upgrading my whole rig for so long and the constant warnings I've been getting recently of 'Your Windows 7 will expire in x days' (yes I'm still running the RC) mean I gotta do something soon. May as well save a bit with an OEM copy of 7 if I buy a new setup.

Also, $600 is more than likely gonna translate to about £599.99 GBP which is way outta my price range for a GPU when I'm buying a whole setup.

Thanks again.

Wells · Feb 2010

Keg wrote: »

some features of dx11 (mainly the computation stuff I believe) are available to dx10 cards. Tesselation and some other features are dx11 only.

my friend, a graphics programmer, told me tesselation could be done on dx10 cards as well. it's not really a new feature

Mark Dygert · Feb 2010

Justin_Meisse wrote: »

wait until DX11 is commonplace, early adopters always lose. I learned my lesson with DVD drives.

+1
- the DVD thing...

EarthQuake · Feb 2010

creationtwentytwo wrote: »

Thanks for the replies all.

I think to be honest I'm just gonna go with like a GTX260 for now and upgrade after the DX11 cards have been out for a while. I've been holding off upgrading my whole rig for so long and the constant warnings I've been getting recently of 'Your Windows 7 will expire in x days' (yes I'm still running the RC) mean I gotta do something soon. May as well save a bit with an OEM copy of 7 if I buy a new setup.

Also, $600 is more than likely gonna translate to about £599.99 GBP which is way outta my price range for a GPU when I'm buying a whole setup.

Thanks again.

Check out a ATI 5770, i think it is cheaper, faster and uses less power than a 260. I'm a big nvidia guy myself, but these 5770's look really tempting.

Krynn72 · Feb 2010

Nvidia is supposedly having some trouble with this card.

Number one on Nvidia's hit list is yields. If you recall, we said that the yield on the first hot lot of Fermis that came back from TSMC was 7 good chips out of a total of 416 candidates, or a yield of less than 2 percent.

The chip is big and hot. Insiders have told SemiAccurate that the chips shown at CES consumed 280W.[...] The power wall is simple, a PCIe card has a hard limit of 300W, anything more and you will not get PCIe certified. No certification means legal liability problems, and OEMs won't put it in their PCs. This is death for any mass market card. The power can only be turned up so far, and at 280W, Nvidia already has the dial on 9.5.

Fermi GF100 is about 60 percent larger than Cypress, meaning at a minimum that it costs Nvidia at least 60 percent more to make, realistically closer to three times. Nvidia needs to have a commanding performance lead over ATI in order to set prices at the point where it can make money on the chip even if yields are not taken into account. ATI has set the upper pricing bound with its dual Cypress board called Hemlock HD5970.

http://www.semiaccurate.com/2010/02/17/nvidias-fermigtx480-broken-and-unfixable/

So even beyond the "wait for DX11 to mature" argument, it might be better to hold off anyways, since it sounds like they're going to be expensive, bulky and hot. Since they're trying to get a lot of workstation stuff in the card, I will still be watching for it, but I think when it comes time to upgrade in the next few months, I'll just go with a 295.

_Calix_ · Feb 2010

Take that article from semi accurate with a mound of salt.

Charlie, the author, is known for pulling "facts" out of his arse, its been shown and proved in many earlier articles from him.

90% of the people from the anandtech video forums never takes his articles seriously. I suggest you do too. Wait for its release, which im guessing will be a hard launch, then read reviews from unbiased websites.

Calabi · Feb 2010

These were supposed to come out ages ago. Then they announced again and again, and now the NDA as lifted and there still isnt particularly much news about these new cards we dont even know the spec or the rough average performance. How can there be no information about a card which is imminently supposed to be released?

There's no smoke without fire, Nvidia havent come out with anything to refute or make you disbelieve that guy charlie, and his information is very detailed and tech oriented, he's went to a lot of effort to make up alot of rubbish if thats what it is.

I'm betting hardly anyone will be able to get one and they will be very expensive.

Richard Kain · Feb 2010

I never early adopt 3D cards. Why bother? The price on them is going to go through the floor as soon as the next big thing gets announced or gets released. When these new DX11 cards come out, I'm not going to be shopping for them. I'm going to be shopping for the DX10 cards that they are replacing, and just got tossed in the bargain bin.

Krynn72 · Feb 2010

_Calix_ wrote: »

Take that article from semi accurate with a mound of salt.

Charlie, the author, is known for pulling "facts" out of his arse, its been shown and proved in many earlier articles from him.

90% of the people from the anandtech video forums never takes his articles seriously. I suggest you do too. Wait for its release, which im guessing will be a hard launch, then read reviews from unbiased websites.

Yeah, ive heard that about the site. Ive never really read anything from there before, but Techreview said some things about his article, and they didnt seem to think he was too far off. And anandtech seems to hint at it a lot, with statements scattered through other articles, like this one from an article on the RV870.

"The idea of taking such a huge risk made Carrell uncomfortable. Running two GPU designs in parallel, for the same family of chips, is risky. If everything works out perfectly, you get two chips out at the same time. If it doesnt, youve just tied up two design teams on one product generation. A slip here would give ATI its own Fermi.

Of course, like I said, I'll wait and see. I would like nothing better to be surprised.

Calabi · Feb 2010

Here's some more info from perhaps a bit more trusted source.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/nvidia-geforce-470-480/

rawkstar · Feb 2010

New stuff thats only fractionally better than the old stuff always makes the old stuff drop in value by alot, so i recommend getting whatever the current/last gen of the nvidia cards are out there for cheap now.

Also think about which games are using DX11, do you really need it? its great if the hardware is supporting it, but what software is actually taking advantage of it? And by the time DX11 is all around these cards will be worth maybe 150 bux tops and you'll want to upgrade again. I don't know i'm still using 8800gtx, which was like THE BOMB when it came out, but now its horribly outdated yet i still find it runs everything just fine i can run pretty much every recent game at high-max setting.

acc · Feb 2010

Nvidia cards are good every second generation. 4xxx, 6xxx, 8xxx, 10xxx (200's). This next line will have tons of problems and/or be totally underwhelming and then the line after that will be great again.

I agree with the "buy a 200 series card once the prices drop" mentality. It'll be a small fraction of the price and last you a long time.

Also, tesselation has been promised since DX8 cards came out... and probably even before that. I won't complain if it's finally used this time, but don't hold your breath for it to actually be a big deal. Polygon counts are not nearly as important as they used to be, anyways. It's all in the shaders and lighting systems, now.

Entity · Feb 2010

EarthQuake wrote: »

Check out a ATI 5770, i think it is cheaper, faster and uses less power than a 260. I'm a big nvidia guy myself, but these 5770's look really tempting.

I've got one of those and they rock. Cheap and plenty of power packed into them

Unless you're running at crazy >2k resolutions I don't really see any need for anything more.

Gannon · Feb 2010

I'm really glad you posted this. My mobo just blew out on me and I'm going to upgrade the whole kit, but i wanted to wait for the new Nvidia cards to come out because of the price drop. EVGA's always been what i stuck w/. I plan on going with two of the 285 ftw 2gigs. Not the best but they're strong.

Lifetime warranties ftw.

jipe · Feb 2010

It will be interesting to see if the Fermi launch has much of an effect on current card prices... the rumored price points are so high that I don't see why ATI would lower prices on any of their mid-range cards (5770, upcoming 5830, etc.), which also doesn't give much of a reason for NVidia to drop prices drastically on stuff like the GTX 260. I think real price shakeups will only come if NVidia can release DX11 cards in the mid-range tier with competitive performance and pricing... and it doesn't look like that will happen until summer, at earliest.

arrangemonk · Feb 2010

Sectaurs wrote: »

my friend, a graphics programmer, told me tesselation could be done on dx10 cards as well. it's not really a new feature

it is done with a geometry shader , (instanced tesselation)

Kraftwerk · Feb 2010

EarthQuake wrote: »

Check out a ATI 5770, i think it is cheaper, faster and uses less power than a 260. I'm a big nvidia guy myself, but these 5770's look really tempting.

I got a 5850 my self and its been ages i have been that content with an new graphicscards, its very fast and ATI really pulled it self together with there recent drivers, works very well. (Saying this as longtime nVidia follower)

Also the new "DX11" tesselation is not the same as the stuff older ATI cards already had, way faster and more effcient.

Im also very very hooked about OIT (Order Independant Transparency) never again transparency sorting errors, at full alpha even and you can overlap tons of transparent stuff without makeing the card choke.

Keg · Feb 2010

arrangemonk wrote: »

it is done with a geometry shader , (instanced tesselation)

I question this. All the tessellation demos in the directx sdk all switch to reference mode on my laptop. My laptop is running a geforce 240m, which is a dx10.1 card.

I would love to see proof of directx 10 cards running the dx11 tessellation demos in hardware. So far I have seen nothing.

Edit: found this in the directx sdk talking about the AdaptiveTessellationCS40 sample

This sample demonstrates some adaptive tessellation techniques implemented using Compute Shader 4.0. It has been updated in the August 2009 SDK. You can use the radio buttons in the user interface to switch which tessellation scheme to use and observe how the tessellation pattern changes. The tessellation schemes implemented here are now identical to the triangle patchbased tessellation of Direct3D11 Tessellator Stage. So potentially the technique here could be a fallback solution for future games or other applications that utilize DirectX 11 hardware tessellation when they are running on 10.x-only devices, as Compute Shader 4.0 runs on most DirectX 10.x hardware today.

Compute Shader allows more general algorithms to be implemented on the GPU. While the full feature Compute Shader 5.0 requires real Direct3D 11 hardware, a subset of thatCompute Shader 4.xruns on existing Direct3D 10 hardware, if the driver supports it.

NVidia launching Fermi DX11 Cards in March

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