Nvidia details GF100 graphics beastie

Nvidia has released additional details on its upcoming GF100 graphics processor, and if the GPU performs as well in reality as it does on paper, AMD/ATI's Radeon HD 5000 series may have a worthy competitor. The GF100 will be Nvidia's first to be based on the company's muscular Fermi architecture, which features such niceties …

[Anonymous Coward]

Supercomputer on a chip?

Gaming is of no great interest to me, but the sheer power of this generation of graphics cards is. With an expected compute power of over 2 teraflops and the standardised DirectCompute interface, how much longer will "serious" graphics and audio software be able to get away with just using the tiny number of FPUs in the CPU? I can perhaps understand why the developers of such software haven't in the past moved over to using the GPU because of the differing SDKs required by vendors, but surely, the advent of DirectCompute leaves them with no excuse.

[CastorAcer]

Re: Supercomputer on a chip?

Worth noting that Fermi will also be supporting OpenCL which is the platform neutral equivalent of DirectCompute - I'm already using it from Java on OS X and Windows platforms with great success.

[John 62]

finally

fanbois will be able to buy a GF from Newegg

[MinionZero]

Cool but names are getting very confusing...

I can't wait to get a GF100 but I am really starting to struggle with NVidia product names. They are getting extremely confusing and I'm really trying to keep up, so I can't see how consumers who don't try to follow the NVidia news will have a hope of comparing cards. Its made even worse by the constant NVidia rebranding.

It took me a moment to realize that the GF100 is the true Fermi series card, not the rebranded card from a few weeks ago.

Also that means a GF100 is better than a GT200. Thats a smart marketing move. *shakes head*

(Yes, I will be buying one. My old card is obsolete and I missed the Geforce GTX 280 etc.. range as I wasn't that impressed with them (and I want to play with Cuda, hence not into ATI/AMD's design at this time. :))

[Citizen Kaned]

does it?

still sound like an aircraft taking off?

last card i bought was an 8800GTX/S and its noisy as hell.

[Anonymous Coward]

Very nice...

But will it run VISTA?

[James O'Brien]

I lold

Alot.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm

Seriously, who buys stuff like this for gaming anymore? No really, if you're out there, pipe up! There just isn't a decent whack of games for the PC anymore for me to even consider upgrading, espcecially given that most of the high end graphics cards are the same price as a console..

Now, get the Newtek developers to work some rendering engine magic in with Lightwave, and I may be interested...

[Paul Westerman]

Nonsense

You can spend well under 100 pounds on a card and be able to play most games. My PC has a Radeon 3870 and it runs Fallout 3 beautifully, Bioshock and Left 4 Dead look great and I play Crysis on it with medium-high settings. So there :oP

[Dave Cheetham]

I do!

If you want to run Micorosoft Flight sim X with all of the expansions, hardware and add-ons and settings to max, you need high end graphics cards. So just because you play kids games on a console rather than serious simulations...

You Reg readers make me laugh with your bigotted statements.

[EmperorFromage]

I'll take two (after NSA has taken delivery of theirs)

@AC 13:01

It will be interesting to see how they compare to the 58xx. I have two of those cards in my rig, and use them for rendering stuff like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6w6vo9t62c0 or compute rainbow tables etc. (or just plain video and image processing)

Has anyone notice that the DX11 instruction set contains the "canonical NSA instruction" (bit population count) - I expect various 3 letter government agencies to stock up on these cards as well now.

[Anonymous Coward]

@AC "Seriously, who buys stuff like this..."

"Seriously, who buys stuff like this for gaming anymore? No really, if you're out there, pipe up! "

Peep, peep!. Plenty buy stuff like this and will buy two or three cards for a single machine as well. Multi monitor gaming at high resolutions demands fast cards.

[sccary]

floating point

Look likes more general purpose GPU and this floating point math may add more transistor (die size) and more power .is it good for gaming???

[Eddie Edwards]

SemiAccurate

There is a fascinating piece on the GF100 on semiaccurate.com

http://www.semiaccurate.com/2010/01/17/nvidia-gf100-takes-280w-and-unmanufacturable/