What is Digg?146 Comments
- dha07030, on 05/21/2008, -9/+124Just a few more generations and then I can play Crysis.
- Vindicoth, on 05/21/2008, -4/+52I like video cards.
- Futurejunior, on 05/21/2008, -1/+39Yea? Well I like turtles, but you don't hear me braggin' about it.
- lamiaconfitor, on 05/21/2008, -1/+37Screw that, im looking forward to the day that my video card is three times the size of my mainboard. and while all those sissy-prissy iphone pricks are running around with their girly web browsers, Ill be running an sli rig that looks like server racks in the social security offices.
- Blakechi, on 05/21/2008, -1/+36I plan on hooking up my house's duct work to the exhaust port and shutting down my furnace.
- borninda818, on 05/21/2008, -0/+32Do you piss money?
- oduska, on 05/21/2008, -2/+32Your computer is already out of date...
- citrusblast, on 05/21/2008, -1/+28Big card, rawr!
Make games go vroom-vroom fast.
Drain wallet faster than you can divide by zer-OH *****. - offtone, on 05/21/2008, -0/+25Vroom vroom?
- macbookhair, on 05/21/2008, -0/+24because a big heavy video card feels good in your hands.
- Abomonog, on 05/21/2008, -1/+23Just like I figured. The CPU's/GPU's will now start getting larger and more complex instead of faster and smaller. Pretty soon we'll be seeing computers as big as semi trucks again. Only this time they will be able to compute the vector of every atom in a hurricane.
- wukillabee, on 05/21/2008, -16/+37why dont these nvidia douchebags learn how to make smaller but faster cards like all other normal technology, soon these huge video cards are gonna require a damn car battery to power it...
- macbookhair, on 05/21/2008, -2/+19So when are we going to need to plug our computer into a washing machine outlet?
- SierraAlpha, on 05/21/2008, -3/+20This makes me feel bad because I just spent $1500 on a PC and it's going to be out of date in like 3 months.
- lamiaconfitor, on 05/21/2008, -0/+16you just might learn how to pay attention.
- gohepcat, on 05/21/2008, -0/+16Ammm...They do. The smallest, cheapest, fan less Nvidia card made today is massively more powerful than the big ass cards from 5 years ago. They currently have a cell phone graphics chip that runs Quake 3 at 1024x768 at 60fps.
They also have to obey those pesky laws of physics and thermodynamics, so their high end cards will always get bigger, and produce more heat, and take more power to run. - MetaDFF, on 05/21/2008, -0/+16Latency is the main reason you want the cache integrated on die. You want data that the CPU is going to use shortly and frequently to be quickly accessible without going to the FSB.
The latency involved in reading / writing data to memory is hundreds of times slower than reading / writing to cache.
For example Intel does have more "space efficient" CPU, they just have less cache, or part of the cache disabled because of manufacturing flaws. - cesclaveria, on 05/21/2008, -0/+15yes, is just like the good old days, when lolcats was just some weird reference on the comments section and not front page material, when the bigger debates were MS vs Linux, ATi vs Nvidia, Intel vs AMD and not Obama vs Hillary or religion bashing, when a front page was earned with accurate, fast and relevant information and not a big group of friends and shouting.... sigh...
- Skahara, on 05/21/2008, -1/+15Yeah, that's a good way of wasting a summer.
- PullingTeeth, on 05/21/2008, -4/+17So much tech in just the description...is this really on digg?
- dualboy24, on 05/21/2008, -0/+13Here is hoping they can drop down to the 45nm soon.
- BugMeNot2, on 05/21/2008, -0/+12In one month, you'll be able to play Crysis at Very High settings at 60+ FPS.
- Matteos, on 05/21/2008, -0/+121996 called, they want their CPU design back.
- dafragsta, on 05/21/2008, -4/+16nVidia has been packing more transistors onto chips than the CPU manufacturers for some time. Now that it's just a well virtualized set of streaming CPUs like Cell, they have a pretty clear roadmap to add speed. Just keep packing on the pipelines and the whole GPPU concept will carry them straight to the front of the pack. Hopefully they'll be writing raytracing implementations soon so that it won't just be about polys and fill rate.
It would also be nice to see more applications come out that use CUDA. It would be nice to offload my VST plugins from Ableton to a streaming processor that'd handle everything. - davidemm, on 05/21/2008, -0/+12Simple answer. The closer the memory is to the chip, the less time it takes to access it. The Cache (L1,L2,L3) is very fast and very close to the CPU. Used primarily for lots of small look-ups: think looping.
- Duggan360, on 05/21/2008, -0/+11Nah he's just stoked, And in debt lol
- troye, on 05/21/2008, -0/+11That sounds good to me :)!
- parallax7d, on 05/21/2008, -0/+11playing at a reasonable resolution is the key.
- roflbrothel, on 05/21/2008, -1/+12You just did.
- Lunarbunny, on 05/21/2008, -0/+10http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_resolution
- piesforyou, on 05/21/2008, -0/+10And then in 10 years time, you realise you've still got a 1.33Ghz t-bird and a 32mb kyro2 card and wonder why the hell you didn't upgrade 9 years ago.
- rockefeller2, on 05/21/2008, -0/+9Uh, I think YOU need to figure out WTF YOU are talking about. "reference to chips doubling speed." It's not the speed, it's the numer of transistors doubling. Base clock speeds have actually reached a plateau over the last few years, hence the reason why multi core chips are the new method for performance increase (I'm referring to mainstream desktop CPUs).
- dha07030, on 05/21/2008, -0/+9True, it's tough to fill 1920x1200.
- lacronicus, on 05/21/2008, -0/+8yeah, as the guy above me said, "out of date" here only means "not top of the line." You'll get great performance for a few years, even though there will be better parts out there. Your computer doesn't suddenly become ***** when something better comes out; it's as good as it always was.
- MuskokasFinest, on 05/21/2008, -1/+9I wonder if the guys in Bell Labs were thinking that a mere 60 years later we'd be selling 1 Billion transistors, on a chip that's about 1/8th the size of their initial transistor.
- macbookhair, on 05/21/2008, -4/+12It seriously isn't THAT expensive. A kid could work all summer and end up with 2-3 grand and build a really kick ass computer set with a huge monitor and all the fixins.
- StormTroopr, on 05/21/2008, -0/+8Depends what your lcd's native res is.
- lamiaconfitor, on 05/21/2008, -0/+8heh heh heh. It wont be out of date, your video card just wont be cutting edge. Solution: sell the old one and buy a new one. that is, if you care that much.
- Sal4, on 05/21/2008, -1/+9I don't really understand, but it sounds good, I guess? Can someone put it in easy-speak?
- kerrmudgeon, on 05/21/2008, -0/+8You're quite wrong. With the GF8, they didn't just double every quantitative specification from the GeForce 7 serise.
The GeForce 8 series cards were the first with unified vertex and pixel shaders. That is, the same hardware runs both vertex and pixel shader programs rather than having dedicated units for each purpose. A sophisticated scheduler runs numerous threads concurrently, many more than there are actual data paths. The hardware scales well to individual 3D applications which may demand more computation for running pixel shader programs or more for vertex shaders.
With dedicated units, a mismatch in the performance of the pixel and vertex units results in poor utilization and needlessly slow performance. - Wayms, on 05/21/2008, -2/+10Finally, something revolutionary rather then a slightly improved previous generation core.
- KMartSheriff, on 05/21/2008, -0/+7(New) people constantly tell me "dude you can change the settings to not see politics" but they just don't understand...
I miss the old Digg. :(
Keep your politics out of my Digg. - trollick, on 05/21/2008, -2/+8I predict that within 100 years, video cards will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them.
- Stevethegreat, on 05/21/2008, -0/+6That's like loving living in Cuba. Of course you don't have to get a 2008 car model but since everyone else are also driving their 60s cars it is ok.
These arguments for (?) consoles are bunk by design, nobody stops you from NOT upgrading. In fact that's what I do, my PC is always as powerful as it always was (the same with your console) it's only that others have bigger e-penis than me for which I don't care as soon as I have the real stuff..... - ausfahrt, on 05/21/2008, -0/+6More's Law is that it won't take over. Learn here you have it messed up. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law
- sexybobo, on 05/21/2008, -0/+6Last generation of cores went from 90nm to 65nm that is a significant improvement. Allowing more transistors to operate faster and with less heat. Each improvement might not seam that significant but if they didn't do the 65nm transition none of the stuff in this article would be possible.
- reginaldino, on 05/21/2008, -2/+7sounds toasty
- kerrmudgeon, on 05/21/2008, -1/+6You're quite wrong. Specifically, your data points are almost entirely incorrect and your conclusions are off-base.
Dollar per FLOP, GPUs are the most cost-effective high-performance computing solution available by a considerable margin. Dollar per watt, they're also among the most power efficient. Their performance margin over CPUs is large and growing.
While NVIDIA is indeed adding more transistors and increasing clock speeds, their impression that adding more data paths increases performance is precisely correct. Each additional datapath [well, each multiprocessor with sixteen stream shaders now] permits a pixel shader to run on an additional block of pixels in parallel to the others. More pixels rendered in a given amount of time is by definition higher performance. They've increased the memory bus size to accommodate higher memory bandwidths of GDDR3 memory to avoid memory bottlenecks to the additional shader units. The 3D rasterization problem, being embarrassingly parallel and suited to SIMD-style compute architectures, is a rather straightforward application to realize these performance benefits from.
"10% more FPS"??? Not sure where it says that, but what is more impressive than an increase in frame rate is the additional amount of computation that may go into each pixel of each frame.
> Yet the perfromance yeild after each successive generation of GPU's is not a significant improvement
The peak theoretical performance more than doubles with each generation. That's significant.
> "definitely not woth the price these new cards cost."
The new cards of each generation are expensive and typically only affordable by people with ridiculous budgets or by businesses. The HPC community has been particularly excited by GPUs as high-performance computing solutions because $2 grand for a multiple TeraFLOP device you can keep on your desk is a pretty good deal.
The Pentium 4 was power-inefficient due to the deep pipelining and the out-of-order execution units. The Core2 has shorter pipelines [smaller branch misprediction penalty] operating in parallel. GPUs have been in-order and massively parallel from the start. That's the attribute that is increasing with each new architecture.
"Accelerating the death of PC gaming"???! This is the most ridiculous argument you've mentioned. The same GPU technology that goes into PCs enters into consoles, only the product cycle for PCs is a lot shorter so it's cheaper to have the latest technology on PCs.
"If I can get a sub-$400 game console that offers the same quality and innovative gaming as a PC with a $800+ video card, why bother buying an nVidia video card." You can't even come close. This card is $135 from Newegg http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8 ... and knocks the pants off the PS3 and the XBox360 any day of the week, not that you could run either of those consoles at the same graphics quality as you would on a PC. - dha07030, on 05/21/2008, -0/+5Or maybe I bought a 24 inch monitor before the game came out.
- TheGuruStud, on 05/21/2008, -0/+5You mean that you haven't done that already? Freakin noobs on digg, I swear :P
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