Tech Update: The Land Of Graphics

NVIDIA

The latest news from NVIDIA involves the release of their latest graphics card and the soon-to-be-released new core.

NVIDIA has just released the GeForce GTX 275, which is like a trimmed down GTX 285 and is the equivalent of a single GPU concealed in the Dual-GPU Card, the GTX 295. NVIDIA released this to battle and counter ATI’s card, the Radeon 4890. This card fills the gap between the GTX 260+ and the 285. It has 240 stream processors and a 448-bit memory bus width; its core is clocked at 633MHz; its memory clocked at 2268 MHz DDR and its shaders at 1404MHz. It contains a GT200 core, like all currently released modern-day cards.

The 275 and the 4890 are very similar in performance but the 275 is a bit more expensive than the 4890 currently.

Leaked information says that NVIDIA is releasing a new core: the GT300. I’m not completely confident about the current specifics, but it’s probably similar to what it will be.

The GT300’s structure will be completely different unlike the GT200’s, whose architecture was similar to the GT100 but just updated and a bit better. It also moves from the SIMD to the MIMDstructure.

SIMD stands for Single Instruction Multiple Data and is currently used by both ATI and NVIDIA companies. MMID stands for Multiple Instruction Multiple Data (as you may have probably guessed) and is completely different to the GT200, making it quite revolutionary. The major difference is that it makes your GPU being able to perform tasks which previously had to be performed by your CPU, making it more versatile.

No one really knows the core frequency yet, and probably won’t until NVIDIA actually releases news on the GT300, but tech experts believe that it should nearly double performance (which is pretty spectacular). It’ll probably have up to 512 shader cores in groups of 32 and be built on a 40nm process. It’s also said that it’s going to supporty DirectX 11. I’m really excited about this new core!

ATI/AMD

AMD has just released the RV740, which only comes with their latest card: the Radeon 4770. It is to counter the 9800 GT. It has 60 shader cores running at 850MHz, 512MB of GDDR5 RAM at 3200MHz but has a skinny memory bus of 128-bit, but the 4770 is still a monster. It has a 6-pin power connector and its core is a 40nm process.

Other than its new core size, the 4770 is most easily compared to the Radeon 4830. They both have the same number of stream processors but the 4770 runs it at a higher frequency. However, the 4770’s slim 128-bit memory bus can be countered by its super fast GDDR5 RAM. The 4770 is only a bit more expensive than the 9800 GT, maybe $15 more.

The 4770 still performs very well, and it beats the 4830 in tests for frame rates and is only about slower than the 4850. It also outperforms the 9800 GT just slightly.

Are You Ready For FarCry?

Crysis was a big disappointment for me personally. After the amazement of the graphics and physics wore out, which didn’t take long, you start to realize that everything else is a mess. Basically, the entire game was a mod of Far Cry with GFX and physics overkill.

Now, Far Cry 2 has set a release date of March 25, 2008, just 3 months away. This will be THE game. It will have the great storyline of Far Cry 1, and it uses a new engine called Dunia, which is perhaps more advanced than CryENGINE2 (Crysis).

Screen Shots, click for full image.