Is there something new on the horizon from nVidia?

[Transfurzz]

and transfurzz, as long as the discussion remains common to an architecture, FLOPs is a more than adequate description of relative performance for a given processor/memory system. Since all of these chips are G92, whether they have 112 or 128 shaders (alternatively, 506 or 624 gFLOPS at 600/1500 and 650/1700), predictions can easily be extrapolated. i'm not saying performance, or even FLOPS is proportional to the number of shaders on your chip. but what i am saying, is that if you have at least 55GB/s of memory bandwidth, the more shaders you have, the faster you'll be, and i was under the impression earlier the GX2 had 112x2 SPs.

what are you talking about. the gx2 does not have wham-bam performance over 2 GTs, let alone 2 GTS

So... you admit it ? Your operating on pure speculation ? You took a look at hardware specs, and then somehow concoct up some major theory about how the market will settle ?

How are you even sure that your FLOPs are the correct number ? Their two different pieces of hardware, how can you be so sure that the FPU is the same among those ? You'd figure of all the things they'd modify from one series to another, they would modify whatever aspect your going on around about now.

Why are you quoting memory speeds ? What does that have to do with FPU performance ?

FLOPs amount to nothing, it just measures the strength of your floating point unit and nothing more. There are numerous other things in the architechture you might not have taken into account. That's why it's only ever seen as a measure of number crunching ability. Not performance. Graphics cards aren't as one dimensional, nor as end-all, as you expect them to be. It's a TERRIBLE way to measure performance. The FPU isn't the only part that makes up the hardware, even a horrible piece of hardware can have an incredible FPU. In other words, FLOPs never equal to real world performance. That's why the emotion engine has more FLOPs when compared to the Xbox's Celeron.

Unfortunately it does have some wham-bam performance, apparently it's able to make Crysis very playable at 1680x1050. That's pretty damn good. When you start playing at resolutions at that, even a small increase is incredible. Notice it jumped from below 30 in average FPS to above 40 in average FPS ? That's a huge increase, you like to measure increases in percentage. Which to be honest, just diminishes the weightage of the entire aspect to nothing more than raw performance.

Furthermore, the stuff involved in the Call Of Juarez incident can't be wished away with just a single core revision. The article just says that Nvidia wasn't prepared for the changes that giving greater control to developers would bring. They didn't stick to DX10 specs very well as they knew their hardware simply didn't perform too well with shader-assisted MSAA resolves. Nvidia wanted them to work with it's own custom resolve, in other words they didn't heed the call of letting the industry have more control. ATi didn't complain about it at all, apparently Nvidia was caught off-guard.

How is this fixed ? Nvidia just has to make the cards beefier by quite a bit. The core revision wasn't much beefier, it just made the series run much cooler. The leap in performance needed to be larger. In other words, the Geforce 8 series actually wasn't the improvement in performance parts of the industry was looking for. The features are all there, and they run the majority of games well enough though. Consider that Crysis uses shader-assisted resolves quite a bit, that's how they get all that nice lighting. It's quite obvious Nvidia has put some thought into that area.

I hope you also do know that having more memory bandwidth has a positive impact on certain operations we all know and love. For example, AA and AF. Having more bandwidth can have a positive effect on either if the GPU is up to it. That's something you need to take into account too, especially at higher resolutions.