The GTX 480… it’s hotter, it’s noisier, and it’s more power hungry, all for 10-15% more performance. If you need the fastest thing you can get then the choice is clear, otherwise you’ll have some thinking to decide what you want and what you’re willing to live with in return.

Us on the GTX 480

The GeForce GTX 480 and the associated GF100 GPU have presented us with an interesting situation over the last year. On the one hand NVIDIA reclaimed their crown for the fastest single GPU card on the market, and in time used the same GPU to give rise to a new breed of HPC cards that have significantly expanded the capabilities of GPU computing. On the other hand, like a worn and weary athlete finally crossing the finish line, this didn’t come easy for NVIDIA. GF100 was late, and the GTX 480 while fast was still hot & loud for what it was.

Furthermore GTX 480 and GF100 were clearly not the products that NVIDIA first envisioned. We never saw a product using GF100 ship with all of its SMs enabled – the consumer space topped out at 15 of 16 SMs, and in the HPC space Tesla was only available with 14 of 16 SMs. Meanwhile GF100’s younger, punchier siblings put up quite a fight in the consumer space, and while they never were a threat to GF100, it ended up being quite the surprise for how close they came.

Ultimately the Fermi architecture at the heart of this generation is solid – NVIDIA had to make some tradeoffs to get a good gaming GPU and a good compute GPU in a single product, but it worked out. The same can’t be said for GF100, as its large size coupled with TSMC’s still-maturing 40nm process lead to an unwieldy combination that produced flakey yields and leaky transistors. Regardless of who’s ultimately to blame, GF100 was not the chip it was meant to be.

But time heals all wounds. With GF100 out the door NVIDIA has had a chance to examine their design, and TSMC the chance to work the last kinks out of their 40nm process. GF100 was the first Fermi chip, and it would not be the last. With a lesson in hand and a plan in mind, NVIDIA went back to the drawing board to fix and enhance GF100. The end result: GF110, the next iteration of Fermi. Hot out of the oven, it is launching first in the consumer space and is forming the backbone of the first card in NVIDIA’s next GeForce series: GeForce 500. Launching today is the first such card, the GF110-powered GeForce GTX 580.

  GTX 580 GTX 480 GTX 460 1GB GTX 285
Stream Processors 512 480 336 240
Texture Address / Filtering 64/64 60/60 56/56 80 / 80
ROPs 48 48 32 32
Core Clock 772MHz 700MHz 675MHz 648MHz
Shader Clock 1544MHz 1401MHz 1350MHz 1476MHz
Memory Clock 1002MHz (4008MHz data rate) GDDR5 924MHz (3696MHz data rate) GDDR5 900Mhz (3.6GHz data rate) GDDR5 1242MHz (2484MHz data rate) GDDR3
Memory Bus Width 384-bit 384-bit 256-bit 512-bit
Frame Buffer 1.5GB 1.5GB 1GB 1GB
FP64 1/8 FP32 1/8 FP32 1/12 FP32 1/12 FP32
Transistor Count 3B 3B 1.95B 1.4B
Manufacturing Process TSMC 40nm TSMC 40nm TSMC 40nm TSMC 55nm
Price Point $499 ~$420 ~$190 N/A

GF110 is a mix of old and new. To call it a brand-new design would be disingenuous, but to call it a fixed GF100 would be equally shortsighted. GF110 does have a lot in common with GF100, but as we’ll see when we get in to the design of GF110 it is its own GPU. In terms of physical attributes it’s very close to GF100; the transistor count remains at 3 billion (with NVIDIA undoubtedly taking advantage of the low precision of that number), while the die size is at 520mm2. NVIDIA never did give us the die size for GF100, but commonly accepted values put it at around 530mm2, meaning GF110 is a hair smaller.

But before we get too deep in to GF110, let’s start with today’s launch card, the GeForce GTX 580. GTX 580 is the first member of the GeForce 500 series, giving it the distinction of setting precedent for the rest of the family that NVIDIA claims will soon follow. Much like AMD last month, NVIDIA is on their second trip with the 40nm process, meaning they’ve had the chance to refine their techniques but not the opportunity to significantly overhaul their designs. As a result the 500 series is going to be very familiar to the 400 series – there really aren’t any surprises or miracle features to talk about. So in many senses, what we’re looking at today is a faster version of the GTX 480.

So what makes GTX 580 faster? We’ll start with the obvious: it’s a complete chip. All the L2 cache, all the ROPs, all the SMs, it’s all enabled. When it comes to gaming this is as fast as GF110 can be, and it’s only through NVIDIA’s artificial FP64 limitations that double-precision computing isn’t equally unrestricted. We have wondered for quite some time what a full GF100 chip would perform like – given that GTX 480 was short on texture units, shaders, and polymorph engines, but not ROPs – and now the answer is at hand. From all of this GTX 580 has 6.6% more shading, texturing, and geometric performance than the GTX 480 at the same clockspeeds. Meanwhile the ROP count and L2 cache remains unchanged; 48 ROPs are attached to 768KB L2 cache, which in turn are attached to 6 64bit memory controllers.


GeForce GTX 580

The second change of course is clockspeeds. The reference GTX 480 design ran at 700MHz for the core and 924MHz (3696MHz data rate) for the GDDR5. Meanwhile GTX 580 brings that up to 772MHz for the core and 1002MHz (4008MHz data rate), marking a 72MHz(10%) increase in core clockspeed and a slightly more modest 78MHz (8%) increase in memory bandwidth. This is a near-equal increase in the amount of work that GTX 580 can process and the amount of work its memory can feed it, which should offer a relatively straightforward increase in performance.

Last but certainly not least change coming from GTX 480 is in GF110 itself. NViDIA has ported over GF104’s faster FP16 (half-precision) texture filtering capabilities, giving GF110/GTX580 the ability to filter 4 FP16 pixels per clock, versus 2 on GF100/GTX480. The other change ties in well with the company’s heavy focus on tessellation, with a revised Z-culling/rejection engine that will do a better job of throwing out pixels early, giving GF110/GTX580 more time to spend on rendering the pixels that will actually be seen. This is harder to quantify (and impossible for us to test), but NVIDIA puts this at another 8% performance improvement.

Meanwhile NVIDIA hasn’t ignored GTX 480’s hot and loud history, and has spent some time working on things from that angle. We’ll dive in to NVIDIA’s specific changes later, but the end result is that through some optimization work they’ve managed to reduce their official TDP from 250W on the GTX 480 to 244W on the GTX 580, and in practice the difference is greater than that. NVIDIA’s cooling system of choice has also been updated, working in tandem with GTX 580’s lower power consumption to bring down temperatures and noises. The end result is a card that should be and is cooler and quieter while at the same being faster than GTX 480.


GF110

The downside to this is that if it sounds like a fairy tale, it almost is. As you’ll see we have a rather high opinion of GTX 580, but we’re not convinced you’re going to be able to get one quite yet. NVIDIA is technically hard-launching GTX 580 today at $499 (GTX 480’s old price point), but they aren’t being very talkative about the launch quantity. They claim it’s for competitive reasons (to keep AMD from finding out) and we can certainly respect that, but at the same time it’s rare in this industry for someone to withhold information because it’s a good thing. We really hope to be surprised today and see GTX 580s available for everyone that wants one, but we strongly suspect that it’s going to be available in low quantities and will sell out very quickly. After that it’s anyone’s guess on what the refresh supply will be like; our impression of matters is that yields are reasonable for such a large chip, but that NVIDIA didn’t spend a lot of time stockpiling for today’s launch.

In any case, with GTX 580 taking the $500 spot and GF110 ultimately destined to replace GF100, GF100 based cards are going to be on their way out. NVIDIA doesn’t have an official timeline, but we can’t imagine they’ll continue producing GF100 GPUs any longer than necessary. As a result the GTX 480 and GTX 470 are priced to go, falling between the GTX 580 and the GTX 460 in NVIDIA’s lineup for now until they’re ultimately replaced with other 500 series parts. For the time being this puts the GTX 480 at around $400-$420, and the GTX 470 – still doing battle with the Radeon HD 6870 – is at $239-$259.

Meanwhile AMD does not have a direct competitor for the GTX 580 at the moment, so their closest competition is going to be multi-GPU configurations. In the single card space there’s the Radeon HD 5970, which is destined for replacement soon and as a result AMD is doing what they can to sell off Cypress GPUs by the end of the year. The last reference 5970 you can find on Newegg is a Sapphire card, which is quite blatantly priced against the GTX 580 at $499 with a $30 rebate. Given that it’s the last 5970, we’d be surprised if it was in stock for much longer than the initial GTX 580 shipments.

For cards you do stand a good chance of getting, a pair of 6870s will set you back between $480 and $500, making it a straightforward competitor to the GTX 580 in terms of price. A pair of cards isn’t the best competitor, but CrossFire support is widely available on motherboards so it’s a practical solution at that price.

Fall 2010 Video Card MSRPs
NVIDIA Price AMD
GeForce GTX 580
$500 Radeon HD 5970
$420  
 
$300 Radeon HD 5870
$240 Radeon HD 6870
$180 Radeon HD 6850
GF110: Fermi Learns Some New Tricks
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  • wtfbbqlol - Thursday, November 11, 2010 - link

    Most likely an anomaly. Just compare the GTX480 to the GTX470 minimum framerate. There's no way the GTX480 is twice as fast as the GTX470.
  • Oxford Guy - Friday, November 12, 2010 - link

    It does not look like an anomaly since at least one of the few minimum frame rate tests posted by Anandtech also showed the 480 beating the 580.

    We need to see Unigine Heaven minimum frame rates, at the bare minimum, from Anandtech, too.
  • Oxford Guy - Saturday, November 13, 2010 - link

    To put it more clearly... Anandtech only posted minimum frame rates for one test: Crysis.

    In those, we see the 480 SLI beating the 580 SLI at 1920x1200. Why is that?

    It seems to fit with the pattern of the 480 being stronger in minimum frame rates in some situations -- especially Unigine -- provided that the resolution is below 2K.

    I do hope someone will clear up this issue.
  • wtfbbqlol - Wednesday, November 10, 2010 - link

    It's really disturbing how the throttling happens without any real indication. I was really excited reading about all the improvements nVidia made to the GTX580 then I read this annoying "feature".

    When any piece of hardware in my PC throttles, I want to know about it. Otherwise it just adds another variable when troubleshooting performance problem.

    Is it a valid test to rename, say, crysis.exe to furmark.exe and see if throttling kicks in mid-game?
  • wtfbbqlol - Wednesday, November 10, 2010 - link

    Well it looks like there is *some* official information about the current implementation of the throttling.

    http://nvidia.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/nvidia.cfg/php/...

    Copy and paste of the message:
    "NVIDIA has implemented a new power monitoring feature on GeForce GTX 580 graphics cards. Similar to our thermal protection mechanisms that protect the GPU and system from overheating, the new power monitoring feature helps protect the graphics card and system from issues caused by excessive power draw.

    The feature works as follows:
    • Dedicated hardware circuitry on the GTX 580 graphics card performs real-time monitoring of current and voltage on each 12V rail (6-pin, 8-pin, and PCI-Express).
    • The graphics driver monitors the power levels and will dynamically adjust performance in certain stress applications such as Furmark 1.8 and OCCT if power levels exceed the card’s spec.
    • Power monitoring adjusts performance only if power specs are exceeded AND if the application is one of the stress apps we have defined in our driver to monitor such as Furmark 1.8 and OCCT.
    - Real world games will not throttle due to power monitoring.
    - When power monitoring adjusts performance, clocks inside the chip are reduced by 50%.

    Note that future drivers may update the power monitoring implementation, including the list of applications affected."
  • Sihastru - Wednesday, November 10, 2010 - link

    I never heard anyone from the AMD camp complaining about that "feature" with their cards and all current AMD cards have it. And what would be the purpose of renaming your Crysis exe? Do you have problems with the "Crysis" name? You think the game should be called "Furmark"?

    So this is a non issue.
  • flyck - Wednesday, November 10, 2010 - link

    the use of renaming is that nvidia uses name tags to identify wether it should throttle or not.... suppose person x creates a program and you use an older driver that does not include this name tag, you can break things.....
  • Gonemad - Wednesday, November 10, 2010 - link

    Big fat YES. Please do rename the executable from crysis.exe to furmark.exe, and tell us.

    Get furmark and go all the way around, rename it to Crysis.exe, but be sure to have a fire extinguisher in the premises. Caveat Emptor.

    Perhaps just renaming in not enough, some checksumming is involved. It is pretty easy to change checksum without altering the running code, though. When compiling source code, you can insert comments in the code. When compiling, the comments are not dropped, they are compiled together with the running code. Change the comment, change the checksum. But furmark alone can do that.

    Open the furmark on a hex editor and change some bytes, but try to do that in a long sequence of zeros at the end of the file. Usually compilers finish executables in round kilobytes, filling with zeros. It shouldn't harm the running code, but it changes the checksum, without changing byte size.

    If it works, rename it Program X.

    Ooops.
  • iwodo - Wednesday, November 10, 2010 - link

    The good thing about GPU is that it scales VERY well ( if not linearly ) with transistors. 1 Node Die Shrink, Double the transistor account, double the performance.

    Combined there are not bottleneck with Memory, which GDDR5 still have lots of headroom, we are very limited by process and not the design.
  • techcurious - Wednesday, November 10, 2010 - link

    I didnt read through ALL the comments, so maybe this was already suggested. But, can't the idle sound level be reduced simply by lowering the fan speed and compromising idle temperatures a bit? I bet you could sink below 40db if you are willing to put up with an acceptable 45 C temp instead of 37 C temp. 45 C is still an acceptable idle temp.

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