NVIDIA’s DirectX 11 Architecture: GF100 (Fermi) In Detail
Compute Architecture
The compute engine is designed to handle the GPGPU side of things and encapsulates features such as CUDA, OpenCL, Direct Compute, and PhysX. Many of these have been around since the G80 days, but the GF100 delivers a number of improvements to make such general purpose computing run better.
The GF100 is designed to handle a wider range of algorithms better to encourage the use of the GPU more for parallel problems. One key area of improvement comes from its better cache system, which allows threads that access the same memory locations to run faster.
Another key improvement allows the GF100 to execute multiple task kernels at once, and the context switching between such tasks is much faster than on previous GPUs. This differs from the GT200 which could only run one task kernel at a time, and had very slow context switching.
And lastly, high level features such as debugging and a C++ programming environment to access GPGPU features are made possible with nVidia’s Nexus plug-in for Visual Studio. Such features simplify programming GPGPU tasks as they assist developers to work at a higher level than was previously possible.
Ray Tracing
The GF100 will not be able to do complex ray tracing (RT) in real time in PC games as in the above image. However, NVIDIA believes that RT is the future of graphics and they expect some implementation of it in conjunction with rasterization fairly soon as developers begin to take advantage of GF100’s new programming capabilities.
ati status
[told] x
benchmarks? none?
Benchmarks in a review of brand new GPU architecture!?!
– when have you seen that before?
We expect to have benchmarks vs. GTX 285 and vs. Radeon when we get the actual cards.
I noticed that you mentioned “time check”. These comments must be approved manually; sorry for any delay.
I thought you guys guys were gonna post something substantial, not this rehash. NDA my ass…
This is what they gave us TTimmy. It is not like other sites got anything different and we got garbage.
However, I do understand that this is not what you all wanted to see. We also wanted to see some more definitive information such as benchmark numbers, clock speeds, release date and pricing but…ABT isn’t releasing a video card (yet), they are.
I wouldn’t call what we posted, a “rehash”. What has happened with this progressive revelation, always happens with new architecture – no matter who releases it, AMD, NVIDIA or Intel. First you get the general information about upcoming architecture, then more and more information is released until it goes into production.
Much of the information about Fermi’s GeForce in our article is brand new information about Fermi’s gaming capabilities. Much of what we wrote about was not disclosed anywhere previously. There is a lot more to add since we wrote about Fermi’s computing architecture last year.
As I understand it, only the devs would have engineering samples of GF100. That means NVIDIA’s partners would not have them nor would any tech review site. There are no fixed clocks, nothing about power consumption nor thermals – and certainly no solid performance benchmarks other than what NVIDIA did internally. Not yet.
I hope Nvidia release a decent mid range $300 Fermi GPU.