A necessary gesture

NVIDIA views the gaming landscape as a constantly shifting medium that starts with the PC.  But the company also sees mobile gaming, cloud gaming and even console gaming as part of the overall ecosystem.  But that is all tied together by an investment in content – the game developers and game publishers that make the games that we play on PCs, tablets, phones and consoles.

The slide above shows NVIDIA targeting for each segment – expect for consoles obviously.  NVIDIA GRID will address the cloud gaming infrastructure, GeForce and the GeForce Experience will continue with the PC systems and NVIDIA SHIELD and the Tegra SoC will get the focus for the mobile and tablet spaces.  I find it interesting that NVIDIA has specifically called out Steam under the PC – maybe a hint of the future for the upcoming Steam Box?

The primary point of focus for today’s press meeting was to talk about the commitment that NVIDIA has to the gaming world and to developers.  AMD has been talking up their 4-point attack on gaming that starts really with the dominance in the console markets.  But NVIDIA has been the leader in the PC world for many years and doesn’t see that changing.

With several global testing facilities, the most impressive of which exists in Russia, NVIDIA tests more games, more hardware and more settings combinations than you can possibly imagine.  They tune drivers and find optimal playing settings for more than 100 games that are now wrapped up into the GeForce Experience software.  They write tools for developers to find software bottlenecks and test for game streaming latency (with the upcoming SHIELD). They invest more in those areas than any other hardware vendor.

This is a list of technologies that NVIDIA claims they invented or developed – an impressive list that includes things like programmable shaders, GPU compute, Boost technology and more. 

Many of these turned out to be very important in the development and advancement of gaming – not for PCs but for ALL gaming. 

Continue reading our editorial on NVIDIA's stance on it's future in PC gaming!!

GK104 gets cheaper and faster

A week ago today we posted our review of the GeForce GTX 780, NVIDIA's attempt to split the difference between the GTX 680 and the GTX Titan graphics cards in terms of performance and pricing.  Today NVIDIA launches the GeForce GTX 770 that, even though it has a fancy new name, is a card and a GPU that you are very familiar with.

The NVIDIA GK104 GPU Diagram

Based on GK104, the same GPU that powers the GTX 680 (released in March 2012), GTX 670 and the GTX 690 (though in a pair), the new GeForce GTX 770 has very few changes from the previous models that are really worth noting.  NVIDIA has updated the GPU Boost technology to 2.0 (more granular, better controls in software) but the real changes come in the clocks speeds.

The GTX 770 is still built around 4 GPCs and 8 SMXs for a grand total of 1536 CUDA cores, 128 texture units and 32 ROPs.  The clock speeds have increased from 1006 MHz base clock and 1058 MHz Boost up to 1046 MHz base and 1085 MHz Boost.  That is a pretty minor speed bump in reality, an increase of just 4% or so over the previous clock speeds. 

NVIDIA did bump up the GDDR5 memory speed considerably though, going from 6.0 Gbps to 7.0 Gbps, or 1750 MHz.  The memory bus width remains 256-bits wide but the total memory bandwidth has jumped up to 224.3 GB/s.

Maybe the best change for PC gamers is the new starting MSRP for the GeForce GTX 770 at $399 - a full $50-60 less than the GTX 680 was selling for as of yesterday.  If you happened to pick up a GTX 680 recently, you are going to want to look into your return options as this will surely annoying the crap out of you.

If you want more information on the architecture design of the GK104 GPU, check out our initial article on the chips release from last year.  Otherwise, with those few specification changes out of the way, let's move on to some interesting information.

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 2GB Reference Card

Tired of this design yet?  If so, you'll want to look into some of the non-reference options I'll show you on the next page from other vendors, but I for one am still taken with the design of these cards.  You will find a handful of vendors offering up re-branded GTX 770 options at the outset of release but most will have their own SKUs to showcase.

Continue reading our review of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 graphics card!!

GK110 Gets a Lower Price Point

If you want to ask us some questions about the GTX 780 or our review, join us for a LIVE STREAM at 2pm EDT / 11am PDT on our LIVE page.

When NVIDIA released the GeForce GTX Titan in February there was a kind of collective gasp across the enthusiast base.  Half of that intake of air was from people amazed at the performance they were seeing on a single GPU graphics cards powered by the GK110 chip.  The other half was from people aghast of the $1000 price point that NVIDIA launched it at.  The GTX Titan was the fastest single GPU card in the world, without any debate, but with it came a cost we hadn't seen in some time.  Even with the debate between it, the GTX 690 and the HD 7990, the Titan was likely my favorite GPU, cost no concerns.

Today we see the extension of the GK110, by cutting it back some, and releasing a new card.  The GeForce GTX 780 3GB is based on the same chip as the GTX Titan but with additional SMX units disabled, a lower CUDA core count and less memory.  But as you'll soon see, the performance delta between it and the GTX 680 and Radeon HD 7970 GHz is pretty impressive.  The $650 price tag though - maybe not.

We held a live stream the day this review launched at http://pcper.com/live.  You can see the replay that goes over our benchmark results and thoughts on the GTX 780 below.

The GeForce GTX 780 - A Cut Down GK110

As I mentioned above, the GTX 780 is a pared-down GK110 GPU and for more information on that particular architecture change, you should really take a look at my original GTX Titan launch article from February.  There is a lot more that is different on this part compared to GK104 than simple shader counts, but for gamers most of the focus will rest there. 

The chip itself is a 7.1 billion mega-ton beast though a card with the GTX 780 label is actually utilizing much fewer than that.  Below you will find a couple of block diagrams that represent the reduced functionality of the GTX 780 versus the GTX Titan:

Continue reading our review of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 3GB GK110 Graphics Card!!

Our 4K Testing Methods

You may have recently seen a story and video on PC Perspective about a new TV that made its way into the office.  Of particular interest is the fact that the SEIKI SE50UY04 50-in TV is a 4K television; it has a native resolution of 3840x2160.  For those that are unfamiliar with the new upcoming TV and display standards, 3840x2160 is exactly four times the resolution of current 1080p TVs and displays.  Oh, and this TV only cost us $1300.

In that short preview we validated that both NVIDIA and AMD current generation graphics cards support output to this TV at 3840x2160 using an HDMI cable.  You might be surprised to find that HDMI 1.4 can support 4K resolutions, but it can do so only at 30 Hz (60 Hz 4K TVs won't be available until 2014 most likely), half the refresh rate of most TVs and monitors at 60 Hz.  That doesn't mean we are limited to 30 FPS of performance though, far from it.  As you'll see in our testing on the coming pages we were able to push out much higher frame rates using some very high end graphics solutions.

I should point out that I am not a TV reviewer and I don't claim to be one, so I'll leave the technical merits of the monitor itself to others.  Instead I will only report on my experiences with it while using Windows and playing games - it's pretty freaking awesome.  The only downside I have found in my time with the TV as a gaming monitor thus far is with the 30 Hz refresh rate and Vsync disabled situations.  Because you are seeing fewer screen refreshes over the same amount of time than you would with a 60 Hz panel, all else being equal, you are getting twice as many "frames" of the game being pushed to the monitor each refresh cycle.  This means that the horizontal tearing associated with Vsync will likely be more apparent than it would otherwise. 

Image from Digital Trends

I would likely recommend enabling Vsync for a tear-free experience on this TV once you are happy with performance levels, but obviously for our testing we wanted to keep it off to gauge performance of these graphics cards.

Continue reading our results from testing 4K 3840x2160 gaming on high end graphics cards!!

A very early look at the future of Catalyst

Today is a very interesting day for AMD.  It marks both the release of the reference design of the Radeon HD 7990 graphics card, a dual-GPU Tahiti behemoth, and the first sample of a change to the CrossFire technology that will improve animation performance across the board.  Both stories are incredibly interesting and as it turns out both feed off of each other in a very important way: the HD 7990 depends on CrossFire and CrossFire depends on this driver. 

If you already read our review (or any review that is using the FCAT / frame capture system) of the Radeon HD 7990, you likely came away somewhat unimpressed.  The combination of a two AMD Tahiti GPUs on a single PCB with 6GB of frame buffer SHOULD have been an incredibly exciting release for us and would likely have become the single fastest graphics card on the planet.  That didn't happen though and our results clearly state why that is the case: AMD CrossFire technology has some serious issues with animation smoothness, runt frames and giving users what they are promised. 

Our first results using our Frame Rating performance analysis method were shown during the release of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan card in February.  Since then we have been in constant talks with the folks at AMD to figure out what was wrong, how they could fix it, and what it would mean to gamers to implement frame metering technology.  We followed that story up with several more that showed the current state of performance on the GPU market using Frame Rating that painted CrossFire in a very negative light.  Even though we were accused by some outlets of being biased or that AMD wasn't doing anything incorrectly, we stuck by our results and as it turns out, so does AMD. 

Today's preview of a very early prototype driver shows that the company is serious about fixing the problems we discovered. 

If you are just catching up on the story, you really need some background information.  The best place to start is our article published in late March that goes into detail about how game engines work, how our completely new testing methods work and the problems with AMD CrossFire technology very specifically.  From that piece:

It will become painfully apparent as we dive through the benchmark results on the following pages, but I feel that addressing the issues that CrossFire and Eyefinity are creating up front will make the results easier to understand.  We showed you for the first time in Frame Rating Part 3, AMD CrossFire configurations have a tendency to produce a lot of runt frames, and in many cases nearly perfectly in an alternating pattern.  Not only does this mean that frame time variance will be high, but it also tells me that the value of performance gained by of adding a second GPU is completely useless in this case.  Obviously the story would become then, “In Battlefield 3, does it even make sense to use a CrossFire configuration?”  My answer based on the below graph would be no.

An example of a runt frame in a CrossFire configuration

NVIDIA's solution for getting around this potential problem with SLI was to integrate frame metering, a technology that balances frame presentation to the user and to the game engine in a way that enabled smoother, more consistent frame times and thus smoother animations on the screen.  For GeForce cards, frame metering began as a software solution but was actually integrated as a hardware function on the Fermi design, taking some load off of the driver.

Continue reading our article on the new prototype driver from AMD to address frame pacing issues in CrossFire!!