It has been over a year since Nvidia has released its powerhouse the Gtx 580 (announced Nov 4,2010) on the Fermi platform. Now gamers all around the world looking for a new GPU are drooling (including me) over the release date and performance of the Kepler cards. Amd has announced and released their new cards, the Radeon HD 7000 series a few months ago, and they (Hd 7970) outperform(s) the Gtx 580 from Nvidia, so gamers are expecting an update. The first Kepler rumors stated that the Kepler cards were supposed to come out this Monday, however I thought of it as highly unlikely, considering that the plant that is supposed to be manufacturing the 28nm silicon chips for the Keplers is having a temporary shutdown causing delays for the hard to produce 28nm chips. If other manufactures were able to get their hands on 28nm chips, like AMD for their Hd7000 series, then why cant Nvidia? Well there are many rumors arguing about that, however to summarize there are two problems, it is either the wafers that are is small availability, it could be the manufacturing process that is too slow or has shut down temporarily. There is a third possibility, that the shutdown was due to problems with the production process, or because they are planning to change something in the process or design itself.
Now, enough with the negative rumors (that we will attempt to forget), time for the positive side of all of this, the performance. Sadly all the benchmarks I have seen to date seem to be fake, some of them even make me laugh, however there is one indicator of performance, Unreal Engine 4, and the Samaritan Demo. Unreal Engine 4, along with the demo game Samaritan (which is built on Unreal 4) is a next generation game, and last year they ran the game at a event on 3 Gtx580's in SLI. Yes thats right, it took three of the massive 1.5GB powerhouses to run the game. Here is the fun part, the same game was run this year, this time on what they say was a unreleased Kepler card, yes just one Kepler card. Now none of the card specs were announced, but some people speculate a triple performance boost from the Fermi's like the Gtx 580. It is easy to see how they got to that conclusion, here is the equation: "3Gtx 580= 1 Kepler, so Kepler=3*Gtx 580." Now is this true, personally I really wish it is, but do I fully believe it? No, I don't. Amd's new cards beat the current Nvidia cards by a bit, and every new generation has an average performance increase of between 7 and 25%, not 300%!!! So it is unlikely that it will be such an increase, but I do think that they will be a great improvement over the Fermi cards (gtx 400's, 500's), and they should be better than the AMD cards.
Yaay! More rumors! Well here is some more information on the cards. First of all they seem to be launching a bit pricey, but that will go down with the competition between AMD and Nvidia. Second of all they are supposed to be much more energy efficient, and feature PCIE 3.0, which means much higher Pcie bandwith, which should result in better FPS in SLI configurations. There is another rumor, but this one makes me a bit sad, it is claimed that the first Keplers may not be overclockable, with later versions being able to do so. I personally don't think that this will happen, but if it does than it will not be too good, considering we will not be able to squeeze out that extra performance. However even if this does happen (very unlikely) then they still will have versions without such limits. Again I doubt it will actually happen, since that would not be good for competition, since you can overclock the Hd 7000's from AMD, and Nvidia would not risk that.
So when exactly will they come out? well the answer that is currently being given all around the web is the possibility of a March 23 release, however it is unsure due to the rumored problems (see first paragraph)
Here is the countdown to the speculated release:
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