Your Tech Insight [Second Edition, 5/24/09]

Hello all. After last weeks shorter intro to Tech Insight, this weeks promises to be much longer, and longer it shall be. Topics I am going to discuss this week are:

1. Windows 7
2. nVidia GT300
3. ATi's Radeon 5800 series

I, for the sake of sanity, dropped the discussion on monitors and various technology to narrow things down a bit, and because I wanted to detail our (nVidia's) GT300 and ATi's RV870.

So, let's get this party started.



Feel free to share your personal experiences using Windows 7, including your likes and dislikes below!

I will not jeopardize my job by revealing information that is under the terms of the Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) regarding current/future nVidia technology.


So, what's new at the nVidia camp? Well, work is busy, as usual (the reasoning for me being a day late on Tech Insight). Needless to say, the work will be worth it.

I told you last week that I would be giving you more information on GT300 (our next major graphics card release). As promised, I shall deliver that information. Keep in mind, the information I share and explain here can probably be found lying around the web, because this information was informally released and is no longer guarded under NDA. Some sites may have more vague information, some may have more detailed information. What I am going to provide all of you with is a layman's explanation of what GT300 is, what it will offer, and leave you all to speculate/judge from there.

Alright, so what is GT300? Well, to put it is perspective, GT200 was our last graphics chip release (I will use the term GPU to denote a graphics chip or card from here on out), and it contained the following cards:

1. GTX 260
2. GTX 260b (216 Core version)
3. GTX 260b.1 (die shrink of 216 Core version)
4. GTX 280
5. GTX 285 (die shrink of GTX 280 with improved speeds/performance)
6. GTX 275 (GR-N chip solution low grade)
7. GTX 295 (dual GPU solution high grade)

GT300's model numbers are still undecided, and are still under NDA, but you can most likely expect more of the same from our marketing camp. (You can take that comment many ways... lol)

As for what GT300 is, well... that is the interesting part, and requires a bit more background into what GPUs are.

Short and sweet (albeit terribly simplified) GPU History:

Back during the transition from 2D to 3D GPUs, it was decided by the gods of the industry to make GPUs very different from CPUs in architecture. This was due, in part, to the lack of technology to accelerate graphics at the speeds needed using CPU architecture.

So, it was decided that GPUs would use SIMD architecture. SIMD stands for "Single Instruction, Multiple Data" This means each "core" of a GPU can process a single instruction but with multiple parts of data at any given moment. A CPU can process multiple instructions with multiple parts of data, making them more versatile, but at the cost of speed (until recently).

GPUs generally leaned towards very fast, very specific architecture. They had a limited range of capability, but could do calculations on that limited range very, very fast.

Some of you may recall a little project that was announced from Intel, going by the name of Larabee. Larabee was designed with the idea that a GPU can do a lot more, if its architecture was designed to be more CPU-like, while still maintaining the speed and precision of a GPU core. A great concept, to say the very least!

So, architecture has changed, no doubt. But, the basis of how GPUs have been designed has remained the same for 16+ years now. That is, until now...

Meet GT300:

What we have done here at nVidia in the past has been the very same thing ATI has done, albeit just done differently. GPUs have remained static, unchanged for years upon years.

Well, that ends with the release of GT300. Now, I could go on and on about how spectacular our engineering team is, and how crucial this movement will be to the GPU industry, and what kind of earth shattering performance you can expect from GT300, but that would be missing the point.

Here and now, we have something that isn't just faster, more powerful; that can play your games at higher settings and higher resolutions then you ever thought possible. We don't just have a lot of new features plugged into GT300, we have a fundamental shift in what defines a GPU as a GPU.

Let's take a peek at the surface of GT300

GT300 Features (released from NDA 5c.7 on 3/19/2009 and NDA 5d.3 on 5/4/2009)

• 512 Core unified, totally parallel design built in 32 core "packages"
• 384bit Memory controller directly connected to core controller in 32bit sections (via 32 core clusters)
• 1GB+ GDDR5 @ 1000MHz+ speeds
• TSMC's 40nm fabrication
• Parallel MIMD operational units operating in Multi-programming mode
• Full CUDA and PhysX acceleration
• cGPU benefits (see below)
• Highly advanced hardware Tessellation
• DirectX 11.0 (to be released with Windows 7)
• Memory bandwidth @ 261GB/sec with internal bandwidth @1Tbps+
• Advanced texture mapping and lightning technologies
• Dispersion shadow technology

What does this mean for you guys? Well, let's start by looking at what the transition from SIMD to MIMD units means.

Our new MIMD units allows us to double precision texture work at many times the performance of GT200 or ATI's current offerings. This is because they can do these calculations in tandem, accepting all strings and data simataneously. This means, with Anti-Aliasing, you can expect a 4-20x performance boost over anything on the market. This also means Antroscopic Filtering (AF) will be spectacular; little to no performance loss even when scaling to very high masking levels.

Suffice to say, this means GT300 is already off to a huge performance advantage when compared with GT200. To put it in perspective, you can expect our new single core part to outperform the highest end dual core part (GTX 295) with relative ease.

Also playing into GT300 is the massive memory bandwidth; we can lift and process textures at tremendous speeds with this type of bandwidth.

But... this isn't your normal GPU. GT300 is a totally different creature from that of anything you have seen in the last 16+ years. GT300 can do things no other GPU can do; it does what CPUs can do, but faster and with more accuracy.

Instead of going into details on that, because I want to give ATi's part some of the spotlight, I will just end this by asking you a question:

How would you like it if your graphics card not only did graphics, but physics, sound calculations, and also accelerated your operating system and its features with the only effect being increasing gaming performance?

silly rahja, since when did the GTX275 give you two GPUs? last time i checked, the GTX 275 is basically... well, half of a GTX295 with dramatically higher clock speeds.

Windows 7 -- I am impressed, It works well, no driver issues, good performance, low resource usage. I am using it as my main OS (64bit) and really like it.

As far as video cards, I am more interested in the multi purpose usage then sheer video power, so I am glad I have gone with nvidia.

Plus, heres to hoping dx11 is good as we hope, and it actually gets used in games. dx8 compatibility has to go eventually. Holding us back!

cant wait til i get to see the side by side specs on those cards looks like it gonna be excitement almost wish i could run the tests myself. i've heard a lot of good from windows 7 so i may jump to it quicker then i did to any other os of microsoft. thanks for the tech insight

Windows 7, what can I say?

I've been using it for about a week now. I've never used Vista, so I don't know how it compares. However, I've noticed a few things that rather... irk me about it?

First and foremost, it's dual-screen support is quite subpar. As a programmer/computer science student, I run two 19" monitors, one turned at 90*, another at 270*. It supported these resolutions wonderfully, as well as several other odd resolutions I've been wanting to try out. However, there is a lack of real dual-monitor support. DirectX programs cannot be split across multiple screens past the resolution of one. (E.G., I'm unable to run guild wars at 2100x1680, but I can run it at 1050x1680 and have it in the middle of two screens.) Other programs are seemingly unaffected by this, but I have no option to make the two monitors one gaint monitor, so that when I maximize, the program in question would be split across both screens. Doesn't seem like much, but it really is. Especially when you're used to such things.

I'm also rather disappointed at the lack of classic views. This normally wouldn't be such an issue, but they split several things into different measures, and hid a lot of the old menus. Instead of being able to change folder views on the fly, for example, I now have to go through the control panel to turn on/off hidden files and folders. Because of this, I just left hidden files/folders on, but now I'm stuck with two desktop.ini files on my desktop that get replaced as soon as they're deleted.

Once again, small things that rather irk me, that should've been taken into account.

Aero is cool, but the more and more I use it, the more it seems to be like a poor man's compiz.
And speaking of that...
UAC is still laughable. I turned that off as soon as I could, and because of it (And it's "Security" features), had to re-install several games, Guild Wars included. A poor man's sudo indeed.
They say beggers can't be choosers, but I'd rather have nothing then the UAC. It's obtrusive, meaningless, and isn't "Secure" at all.

The control panel is rather odd. It does what it does, it's organized, but, something just seems to be missing. I can't really place it, on XP I had no qualms with going there for whatever reason necessary, now I try to avoid it like the plague. Maybe it's the tiny font and pictures that are so indistinct, or maybe it's just the new layout.

I will say this about it: Windows 7 seems to want to hold your hand more then an overprotective parent guiding a child across 95 during rush hour. I've had to go into administrative settings, google, and hours of work just to get past some of these hand-holdings.

One last thing: The "New and Improved" start menu is somewhat of a joke. It's clunky and doesn't do it's job. It seems to me like they wanted to add all of these features, but didn't think that mushing 10 things together was a bad idea. The old hover-over directory thing from XP was clunky and took up a lot of space, but it was easier to browse, and allowed for dragging and dropping without the menu freezing. The search function is also somewhat lacking, it fails to specify if it just searches the start menu or your entire system. I don't have a need for it, and haven't used it much, so I'm still uncertain on that too.

I think that I'll be sticking to Linux for my computer needs, despite quartering my framerate in video games.

no 3D game can split across multiple displays on any windows operating systems. the only way to do this is with proprietary hardware.

btw, if you want to have classic menus to appear, press ALT.

Not true. On my XP system I ran guild wars both in windowed and full screen mode at 3360x1050. Same with Oblivion, Assassin's Creed (Albeit in full screen only), Morrowind, Portal, and the list goes on.
The alt tidbit is interesting, shame it goes away as soon as you take focus away from the bar.

Very cool. I have a few questions, if you don't mind:

1) Windows 7 still has a "Windows Classic" theme (this is, in fact, the default in Server 2008 R2). Is this what you meant by Classic view, or am I thinking of something else?
2) I have noticed that, while GW isn't getting terrible framerates on 7 compared to XP (but, predictably, a little lower), I can somehow improve them by switching it into windowed mode then re-maximising to full-screen. But the problem returns when I zone into another area - framerate halves again. Running a 6600GT (little old these days, I know) so I suspected it might just be an nVidia driver defect, but the way you've put it, it sounds like it might not be. Have you heard of this by any chance? (Very, very rare instance where you can find someone who knows about nVidia stuff, and GW, and Windows 7...!)
3) When is the GT300 series tentatively scheduled for release? I was considering building a new computer soon (again, 6600GT, the rest is pretty similar) and was looking at the GTX285. But ... if the GT300 series isn't far away, it sounds like I might as well wait for that, since it will be so much more powerful?

Thanks for these posts by the way, it is always interesting to hear about this sort of thing.

Well, if windows plans to release directx 11 with win 7, and 7 is planned for release in time for holiday season, q4 probably isnt too unreasonable of a guess. On the other hand, end of aug was a pretty popular time for cards last year

if that is true, then you've completely negated the need for hardware such as matrox's triplehead2go. outside of some wierd hacked drivers and such, i don't see how it's possible, unless of course, the actual game supports it (which guild wars does not).

frankly, this has nothing to do with windows 7, but more to do with 3rd party drivers.

Great article! You shoulda teased us with something to look forward to in the next edition though. It was what the first edition had that made me come back for the second.

Still debating on what I want to write about next week. I had to cut out 2 sections from this weeks because of sheer length. I didn't want too many people going "TLR" etc. It will just have to be a big surprise.

I'm sorry what? I just can't agree with most of what you said. You tried Windows 7 for 1 week? A single week... and already consider it to be a waste of time over Linux? Madness.

First off Windows 7 does have "classic / ugly" theme, what more could you want? Here a screenshot to prove it:



UAC I can totally agree with, but if you had used Vista you'd understand just how annoying UAC can really be, personally I have it disabled since I'm completely sure of all my actions on the PC, but UAC codes have its uses for people who clearly don't know what their doing. My job as a IT tech is a testament to that lol

UAC btw did not prevent me from install Guild Wars, so how did it stop you I don't know.

What is wrong with the Start Menu? Doesn't really seem any majorly different from the old Windows XP one?

To be honest, and don't take this the wrong way but you are a classic example of someone who hates change, the type who pimps his XP with bloated 3rd party applications to make it look like Vista or get cool 3Deezzzz slipping cube stuff... which Windows 7 can provide out of the box, if you want that is.

The XP control panel is old and tired.... Add and Remove Programs? When does any use it to ADD any programs to it? Never that's that's when, unless you get the need to add a couple of minor Windows features once and then never again.

Games and programs across two screens, I've never seen the appeal of it... why would you want 1-2 inch worth of monitor boarders in the middle of your game? Some games could benefit from two screens however, the Nintendo DS shows that time and again.

But lets more onto the real issue here, Windows XP was release in 2001! Its nearly 9 years old... its time to look into the future. Its a old and tired system, which by the way runs great. But Windows 7 has been proven to Start quicker and run better then Windows XP and Vista.

On that final note, Windows 7 is the sequel to Vista, and not XP. And most of your complaints come from never having used Vista. Saying that Windows 7 is a billion times better then Vista, which frankly is crap.

Give it a month when you get use to the new layout of Windows 7 and your grow to love it, and week is hardly long enough. Took me more then a week to get use to Windows XP!



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Now onto my two cents about Windows 7, its amazing. Compare it to the performance of Windows Vista and XP, and it really does shine. Starts up like a greased up bolt of lighting. This by the way is the time it takes from Power button on to bring up the Start menu and the menu can be used.

UAC still needs a lot of work, it does tend of babysit you a little bit too much, and sort of treat you like a 'special' child at times, but it does have it place nevertheless. Besides it can be adjusted to make it less annoying or you can turn it off like I did, so I don't see the issue.

The Windows Firewall by the way in Windows 7 has been vastly improved, allowing you much greater control of options for port forwarding. I've tested it using BitTorrent port forwarding and it works nicely. But there are still better software Firewall options out there, but at its a step in the right direction.

Aero is sexy, not needed but really sexy. Considering all the transparency going on, it really doesn't slow down at all, unless of course your PC really sucks.

Mine is a AMD 64 3200+ CPU, 2GB (Unbranded) RAM, ATI X1950X Pro. hardly up-to-date or fast, but still works great.

There also lots of other small things, such as the new Action Centre which gives all your PC warning in a single location, most of which are good suggestions. Or maybe the tabbed toolbar / start menu which really works in your favour.

Windows 7 needs love and time to get use to. I gave myself 1 month to get use to it, which by the way is how long it took me to get use to Windows XP

I never said it was a waste of time over Linux, only that I preferred it.
You misunderstood me. I was talking about Windows Explorer, and the control panel.
Once again, you read my post incorrectly. I never stated it "Stopped" me from doing so, only that it installed improperly, so it was incompatible with my keyboard and mouse (Yes, keyboard AND mouse.) and Matty's Multi Loader. Several other games had problems as well, such as Oblivion and the Oblivion mod loader.
(A), the fact that you're unable to have open both your commonly-used programs and all installed programs at the same time, which makes dragging/dropping rather hard (I still haven't found a way to do it, although this may be through a lack of trying) to the "Commonly Used" section of the start menu, for lack of a better name. It also lacks what I called the "Pinup" area, where no matter how unused a program is, it stayed at the top of said bar. It was rather convenient for programs that I would use a lot in a short period and then stop using for some time.
(B), the need to click on everything, instead of just mouse-overing. This really irks me, it's not uncommon for me to spend 10 seconds waiting for a folder to open because they removed this.
I'm not too sure there's a way to take this the right way, but alright. Personally, I like a rather draconian feel to my desktop. Compiz is a desktop manager for Linux, and it had several features that I tried, but didn't like(Including the cube feature you so mentioned), and several I'm finding hard to live without (Such as Maxumize). I don't mind much of what 7 has to offer, I've turned off what really annoys me and kept on what I can live with, which is why I really didn't mention this besides comparing it to something that's been out for as long as XP has. That, I also mention, Microsoft just implemented (And rather poorly, if you ask me) in Vista.
I'll admit. The old XP panel is old, but it's implementation was FAR greater then that of Windows 7. The add/remove programs? No one ever used it to add programs, however, I found it invaluable when removing programs that were not nice enough to come with an un-installer, and it made a convenient... Gouping? Of all the un-installers for programs I did have there, instead of searching through my program files, or going through the god-forsaken registry.
I don't know what monitor(s) you have, but try to play a video game at a 9:16 or 10:16 ratio. Once again, because programming takes precedence over gaming any day. ... And, admittedly, my monitors are kinda cheesy and don't support 90* turns, so I have to lean them in place, and that's a pain to do every time I want to program after gaming. For me, an inch of black boarder isn't bad, you get used to it after an hour or so of gaming.

I'll agree with you here, it does start up very fast. However, the first service pack will fix that. Windows XP without service packs loads faster then 7. And there will be service packs.
Alright, I'm going to address this sentence by sentence.
(1) True, I understand that, and never stated differently. I compared it to XP, because all 7 is, is Vista SP2. Maybe a few shiny features, but ya know.
(2) My complaints come from never using Vista? If I had used Vista, I would have made these complaints about Vista, and not have re-stated myself because they'd most likely still be here in 7. I don't really get what you're trying to say here, A rose by a different name still has thorns.
(3) I think you have it reversed, did you mean to say "Saying that XP is a billion times better then 7 is frankly crap."? If so, I never disagreed with you. I'm comparing XP to Vista, and some of the changes made that were... Downgrades? Rather then upgrades.
I've been using XP for (As you stated) almost 9 years now, and I still don't like XP.

The Action Center was in XP. You know, that annoying little shield that told you it wasn't happy with the way YOU ran YOUR computer? Although they are good suggestions, if vague and supporting Microsoft products.

The right-click menu for the taskbar has been considerably changed. There's no more "Move" option, Max or minimize option, all of which are very commonly used. In order to get that old menu back, you have to right-click on the top bar, next to the close/max/minimize buttons, which defeats the purpose.

Default Nvidia drivers supports this, I'm running an 8800GT, slightly overclocked. Or was, until I switched to 7. I do remember setting up the desktops in the tool that Nvidia packaged with their drivers, there was two options, (A) One large display(At a resolution of 3360x1050), and (B) Two displays. The one large display is what I commonly used, and allowed for guild wars to select "3360x1050" as a display option, in full screen mode. I was also able to stretch it in Windowed mode to roughly these dimensions in both one and two displays. Perhaps you're thinking of two video CARDs, from my understanding, then you would be correct. I don't have two video cards to attempt this on, and I'm also too lazy to re-install XP to try it. It's been a while since I've done this, the last driver I remember installing for XP was 170.whatever, or maybe 171.whatever. Maybe you're forgetting that most video cards now-a-days come with two DVI outs and an SVideo out? Because that "triplehead2go" is for computers with only one video out, as far as I can tell.

Good reply, you hit some key points I was thinking about all the same. i think in this case we can both meet in the middle.

Its too early to say how good Windows 7 will be in the long run. And I'll admit you have to do some tweaking to get it more Windows XP user friendly.

I hope Microsoft have no gone too much "Out of the box" when designing Windows 7.

Time will tell I guess?

Eh. Alot of that isn't that important to me tbh. Physics acceleration i don't really care for either way, basically it's a bonus and not a decision maker in what i buy. And as for audio.. i'd rather leave to a chip specifically for it output wise, but if it can help encoding/transcoding and such then i may be a little more interested.

Correct me if i'm wrong but... Isn't AA more tied to the Raster Ops than it is the Texture units?



Also, i think it's unfair to say that nvidia's chips will be the only ones capable of doing general purpose/non-graphical stuff as your posts seem to imply. I seem to recall one part of DX11 called the "compute shader". Which is supposed to do similar to what cuda does. Which means ati cards could do the same things as well and won't be entirely bound to "graphics graphics graphics".

Not to be a spoil-sport, but citations needed. It helps make informative posts look less like company press releases and paid ads.

For all the hype nV is pushing about CUDA and PhysX, there's not enough support for either right now (or even in the foreseeable future) for average consumers to care. Pushing polygons in games is still the only real metric that Joe Sixpack needs to care about.

As for Windows 7, I'm going to see if its sufficiently improved over Vista to be worth another $100+.

And for all the bitching, UAC doesn't actually affect the average user. More to the point, developers need to adopt better programming practices so they aren't constantly modifying files in the registry and protected system folders. On all of my Windows machines, I run tighter configurations than 99% of the people out there whining about UAC (limited user accounts, Software Restriction Policy, DEP, no Java, etc.) and there are maybe two or three legacy apps that ever gave me any issues. And hey, VMs are great for legacy apps.

A few thoughts:

1 - Win 7 has looked appealing to me for a few months now and I most likely will take advantage of the free use option in the relatively near future. Basically what I have read of it elsewhere (and that was affirmed here btw) is that it has some of the "good" features of Vista, but less sluggish, and with far better driver and software support (at least it's anticipated to be that way). I'm very happy with XP right now, but I realize that it's getting old and soon I will be wanting to benefit from more than 3.2 GB of Ram Xp64bit wasn't much of a go for me due to lack of program compatibility and Vista is just bloated and the only reason I ever got it was to learn it's quirks and how to fix them for others. :P --- so yeah - high expectations for Win7. XD

2 - Any GPU that can multi-task along the lines of a CPU sounds cool to me, but if I understood correctly the RV870 will be as good or better for 3D graphics and likely be cheaper to produce and thereby a better buy for the graphics oriented individual???

3 - Good read and I look forward to the next one.

4 - Oops... I got a bit long winded and rambling on #1 there... chalk it up to old age. :s