Nvidia GeForce GTX680 and going down…

So, it’s been a week now since Nvidia released the GeForce GTX680 and and response has been overwhelmingly positive. AMD have had a good run by themselves at the top end in the 3 months since they introduced their 28nm part in the form of the Radeon HD7900 series. These boards were impressive and many (myself included) wondered how Nvidia were going to compete after their last 2 top end cards were pretty hot and power hungry. The answer is to get rid of the shader clock and pack in a LOT more processor!

Previously, Nvidia ran its shader clock at twice the speed of the rest of the GPU but Kepler has done away with this approach. In doing so they have decreased the power draw and temperature the GPU operates at. Obviously with this halving of speed there will be a massive decrease in performance. In order to counter this, Nvidia has tripled (yes, tripled) the number of stream processors to 1536, as well as increasing the clock speed by nearly 30%. Unfortunately, the RAM side of things has seen no such overhaul. Whereas AMD’s 7970 has a memory bandwidth of 264 GB/s, the GTX680 has just 192.3 GB/s. This is actually down on the GTX580, albeit by only 0.01GB/s. With such a powerful GPU this could be a problem, if only minor. The situations when you need the most graphics grunt are at higher resolutions (surround for example), in 3D, and when applying heavy AA. Guess what? Every one of those scenarios also  requires a decent amount of graphics card RAM with plenty of bandwidth.

Most websites have found the GTX680 to be noticably faster than the 7970 in the majority of games (obviously it depends on the game engine, developer etc.). The real issue (for AMD) is that Nvidia have launched this card cheaper than theirs. We can expect price drops on at least the top tier of AMD’s range, and possibly further into the upper-midrange. This lower price will have been brought about in no small part by the fact that Nvidia have produced a chip that is physically smaller than AMD’s. for the last couple of generations Nvidia have produced GPUs that have been, frankly, huge. The GTX 580 was a whopping 520 mm² this compared at the time to AMD’s 6970 at 389 mm². Big difference. This time around however, whilst AMD is producing a 7970 chip at 365 mm², Nvidia have managed to squeeze all thGTX680’s power into just 294 mm², allowing the use of less silicon, less cost to manufacture, and less price to the end user.

The next big question is the mid-range. How will the new GF104 scale, and how is Nvidia planning to do so. We should be finding out in the next few weeks, but if the GTX680 is anything to go by, we could have some cheap powerful chips hitting the midrange.