Fermi Goes Mobile: AVADirect's Clevo W880CU with GTX 480M
by Dustin Sklavos on July 7, 2010 11:45 PM ESTGTX 480M: Fast but Mixed Feelings
Back when we took the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285M and pit them against each other, the 5870's victory was met with some disappointment because it just wasn't the Hail Mary we had hoped for. Notebook graphics performance had been stagnating for so long with no competition at the top of the heap, allowing NVIDIA to refresh the G92 an absurd number of times, and yet when ATI finally decided to come out and play, the best they could do was beat the GTX 285M by about 10% on average. ATI didn't deliver a knockout blow; they just flicked NVIDIA behind the ear over and over again. Now with a cut down Fermi chip powering the GeForce GTX 480M, NVIDIA's response is to say "quit it!" and slap at ATI's hands.
The most impressive thing about the 480M isn't its performance; it's the fact that NVIDIA was able to get the sucker into a notebook to begin with. Sure, it's a nine pound notebook cooling a TDP of 100 watts, but credit where credit is due: Fermi isn't exactly well known for being economical with power on the desktop. Really, the GTX 480M raises more questions than it answers.
I suspect most of us agreed when the GeForce GTX 260 and GTX 280 came out that there was no way NVIDIA would ever fit those chips in a notebook, and in some sense we were proven right with refresh after refresh of G92 at the top of the mobile graphics food chain. With mobile Fermi, it looks like NVIDIA more likely chose to remain with a tweaked G92 in order to focus resources elsewhere—i.e. dropping to 55nm to save power and boost clocks over the 65nm original. Obviously, we wouldn't have wanted a trimmed down GT200 chip this late in the game, but cutting down the GF100 to fit into a notebook had to have been far more onerous a task than trying to get a 55nm GT200b die into the same power envelope (or trying to respin GT200b at 40nm). Unfortunately, GT200b doesn't have DX11, so really NVIDIA had no choice. The result is a GF100 die that sips power at idle (relatively speaking) but still guzzles the juice under load. (Not that you'd run a gaming laptop on battery power.)
As for ATI/AMD, they seemed unable to deliver Mobility Radeon HD 4800s in any kind of reasonable quantities, and in general there was a lack of interest. Contrast that against being able to buy an HD 5800 series laptop from a variety of vendors today. They're not the fastest mobile parts any longer, but they are far more affordable. $1500 for the ASUS G73Jh makes the Clevo W880CU look like highway robbery! Go one step further and start asking ATI the same questions. Cypress is a monster to be sure, but it's no more a beast in terms of power and heat than its predecessors, the RV770 and RV790, were. RV770 made it into notebooks, but the best ATI says they can do is trim the clocks on Juniper and call it a day. We're left with a Mobility Radeon HD 5870 that offers a minimal improvement on its predecessor and wondering why a mobile chip based on the superbly economical Radeon HD 5850 isn't making the rounds. If NVIDIA can do a 100W TDP mobile part, AMD should be able to do the same. Certainly trimming Cypress too much has proven in some ways as troublesome as cutting down Fermi has been; the 5830 sports higher thermals and power draw than the 5850, and the GTX 465 landed on the market with a resounding thud, but desktop parts aren't the same battleground as notebooks and 5830 or GTX 465 levels of performance in a notebook would be substantially faster than what we currently have.
Really, NVIDIA got to sit on the top of the mobile GPU heap for far too long. It's good to see competition, and we can only hope that there's more to come from both companies. We're still a generation behind in terms of desktop performance; even if both companies are now using up-to-date parts, the final clock speeds are a far cry from desktop GPUs. What we really want is more of a Conroe style revolution for mobile GPUs where we get up to 25%-50% more performance without increasing power requirements—or even reducing them!—over last generation hardware. Then again, the P4 architecture was so poor that it made Conroe possible.
It's hard to believe there aren't better options for either manufacturer. Was NVIDIA so upset about losing the mobile crown to ATI—even though the margin wasn't that great to begin with—that it was worth curtailing Fermi's performance so brutally? Wouldn't the prudent thing to do have been to let ATI have their cake for the time being and try and push GF104 into laptops? Or would that just be suggesting NVIDIA do the same thing we're accusing ATI of? Like we said, the GeForce GTX 480M raises more questions than it answers, but all of us armchair engineers have to be wondering why mobile graphics aren't improving faster.
Looking at the big picture, the limiting factor on mobile GPUs is power. Desktop cards keep getting faster, sure, but power requirements are generally increasing as well. ATI's 4870 has higher load power than 3870, and 5870 leapfrogs 4870. Likewise, NVIDIA's GTX 285 needed more than the 9800 GTX, and the GTX 480 ups the ante. Move over to notebooks, and we hit the power wall hard. The biggest power bricks are still 240W (give or take), so there's no going over that limit, even if you can dissipate the heat. We've had the same 220-240W power adapters at the high-end for years, and it doesn't look to be changing. 480M may have bumped the TDP up to 100W, but our battery life tests show that it's about the same as the 50W 5870 when it's not under load, and we've had dual-GPU notebooks that use a lot more power than a single 480M. It's not like you're going to load the GPU without plugging in, and at that point it's more a question of whether cooling is sufficient than how much power you need.
Perhaps a simpler way of stating things is that mobile graphics performance isn't increasing very quickly. AMD likely took the existing GTX 285M and did enough testing and research to make sure 5870 was faster by 10%. Now NVIDIA has gone and done the same thing to regain the lead. They pushed the power envelope harder, but that's more a factor of the Fermi design constraints right now. Give them time for revisions and we'll likely see that drop. Ultimately, process technology refinements and tweaked architectures are the primary means of performance improvements, and 25% faster per year looks to be the goal.
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james.jwb - Thursday, July 8, 2010 - link
Forgot that I use magnification for this site. It's definitely the main cause of the huge performance hit, ouch! (dual-core, pretty fast machine really).I think it would be a lot easier if the space now used for the carousel became something static along the lines of Engadget's chunk for "top stories". It's nice to have something there to point out important reviews/news -- I wouldn't want to see the idea completely gone, it's just a carousel is so December 2009 :-)
Spoelie - Thursday, July 8, 2010 - link
While it seems generally true that power keeps increasing from generation to generation (3870, 4870, 5870), wasn't the big drop from the HD2900 series conveniently left out to make that statement stick?It's not really that power always increases, there's a ceiling which was reached a few generations ago and the only thing you can say is that the latest generations are generally closer to that ceiling than most of the ones before it. What the desktop GTX480 pulls is about the most what we will ever see in a desktop barring some serious cooling/housing/power redesigns.
bennyg - Thursday, July 8, 2010 - link
2900 was the P4 of the gfx card world regardings power/performance. It was only released because ATi had to have something, anything, in the marketplace. If ATi had as much cash in the bank as did Intel, they would have cancelled the 2900 like Intel did Larrabee.Thankfully the 2900 went on from its prematurity to underpin radeons 3, 4 and 5. Whereas Prescott was just brute force attempting to beat thermodynamics. Ask Tejas what won :)
JarredWalton - Thursday, July 8, 2010 - link
That's why I said "generally trending up". When the HD 2900 came out, I'm pretty sure most people had never even considered such a thing as a 1200W PSU. My system from that era has a very large for its time 700W PSU for example. The point of the paragraph is that while desktops have a lot of room for power expansion, there's a pretty set wall on notebooks right now. Not that I really want a 350W power brick.... :)7Enigma - Thursday, July 8, 2010 - link
Thank you for the article as many of us (from an interest standpoint and not necessarily from a buyer's standpoint) were waiting for the 480M in the wild.My major complaint with the article is that this is essentially a GPU review. Sure it's in a laptop since this is a notebook, but the only thing discussed here was the difference between GPU's.
With that being the case why is there no POWER CONSUMPTION numbers when gaming? It's been stated for almost every AVA laptop that these are glorified portable desktop computers with batteries that are essentially used only for moving from one outlet to the next.
I think the biggest potential pitfall for the new 480M is to see with performance only marginally better than the 5870 (disgusts me to even write that name due to the neutered design) is to see how much more power it is drawing from the wall during these gaming scenarios.
Going along with power usage would be fan noise, of which I see nothing mentioned in the review. Having that much more juice needed under load should surely make the fan noise increased compared to the 5870....right?
These are two very quick measurements that could be done to beef up the substance of an otherwise good review.
7Enigma - Friday, July 9, 2010 - link
Really no one else agrees? Guess it's just me then.....JarredWalton - Friday, July 9, 2010 - link
We're working to get Dustin a power meter. Noise testing requires a bit more hardware so probably not going to have that for the time being unfortunately. I brought this up with Anand, though, and when he gets his meter Dustin can respond (and/or update the article text).7Enigma - Monday, July 12, 2010 - link
Thanks Jarred!For all the other laptop types I don't think it matters but for these glorified UPS-systems it would be an important factor when purchasing.
Thanks again for taking the time to respond.
therealnickdanger - Thursday, July 8, 2010 - link
"Presently the 480M isn't supported in CS5; in fact the only NVIDIA hardware supported by the Mercury Playback Engine are the GeForce GTX 285 and several of NVIDIA's expensive workstation-class cards."I did the following with my 1GB 9800GT and it's an incredible boost. Multiple HD streams with effects without pausing.
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/632143
I figured out how to activate CUDA acceleration without a GTX 285 or Quadro... I'm pretty sure it should work with other 200 GPUs. Note that i'm using 2 monitors and there's a extra tweak to play with CUDA seamlessly with 2 monitors.
Here are the steps:
Step 1. Go to the Premiere CS5 installation folder.
Step 2. Find the file "GPUSniffer.exe" and run it in a command prompt (cmd.exe). You should see something like that:
----------------------------------------------------
Device: 00000000001D4208 has video RAM(MB): 896
Device: 00000000001D4208 has video RAM(MB): 896
Vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
Renderer string: GeForce GTX 295/PCI/SSE2
Version string: 3.0.0
OpenGL version as determined by Extensionator...
OpenGL Version 2.0
Supports shaders!
Supports BGRA -> BGRA Shader
Supports VUYA Shader -> BGRA
Supports UYVY/YUYV ->BGRA Shader
Supports YUV 4:2:0 -> BGRA Shader
Testing for CUDA support...
Found 2 devices supporting CUDA.
CUDA Device # 0 properties -
CUDA device details:
Name: GeForce GTX 295 Compute capability: 1.3
Total Video Memory: 877MB
CUDA Device # 1 properties -
CUDA device details:
Name: GeForce GTX 295 Compute capability: 1.3
Total Video Memory: 877MB
CUDA Device # 0 not choosen because it did not match the named list of cards
Completed shader test!
Internal return value: 7
------------------------------------------------------------
If you look at the last line it says the CUDA device is not chosen because it's not in the named list of card. That's fine. Let's add it.
Step 3. Find the file: "cuda_supported_cards.txt" and edit it and add your card (take the name from the line: CUDA device details: Name: GeForce GTX 295 Compute capability: 1.3
So in my case the name to add is: GeForce GTX 295
Step 4. Save that file and we're almost ready.
Step 5. Go to your Nvidia Drivercontrol panel (im using the latest 197.45) under "Manage 3D Settings", Click "Add" and browse to your Premiere CS5 install directory and select the executable file: "Adobe Premiere Pro.exe"
Step 6. In the field "multi-display/mixed-GPU acceleration" switch from "multiple display performance mode" to "compatibilty performance mode"
Step 7. That's it. Boot Premiere and go to your project setting / general and activate CUDA
therealnickdanger - Thursday, July 8, 2010 - link
Sorry, I should have said for ANY CUDA card with 786MB RAM or more. It's quite remarkable.