Nvidia Kepler: Problems (Updated)

Remember in my last article I mentioned "problems", well it turns out that there may be more problems. In my last article what I meant by problems was TSMC's yield/shortage issues. The Gtx 600's appear to have yet more issues besides not being in stock, in fact technical issues. There are already problems with the adaptive V-Sync in some cases, but that will be quickly fixed in a driver update, so that is not the problem in question here. The problem in question is a new mysterious problem, one that many sites claim may involve the recall of all GTX 670, 680, 690 cards. That would mean that the already out of stock cards would require replacement, and that cant be good, add to that the severe shortage issues and you got yourself a problem, and by you I mean Nvidia, and of course the gamers that could be experiencing issues. That is all what is currently known, however we should be seeing more on this problem soon. Anyway, remember how in my last article I said that the Gtx 680 beat the Hd7970, that is because it did, the problem is that it is nearly impossible to find one in stock, the same goes for the Gtx 690, and in some cases the Gtx670. Nvidia has had shortages for the Kepler cards, but are all the Gtx600's running on the Kepler architecture? Well the truth is no, all of the lower end Gtx 600 cards like the GT605 all they way through the GT645 are re-branded Fermi cards, not the new Kepler Cards, bummer eh? Anyway real gamers will probably not be looking at those as an option, but many budget users will not get the benefits of the new architecture. It is a bit disappointing to see the shortages of such great cards, and I hope that there are no serious problems, however Nvidia has announced a few weeks ago that shortages of the Kepler cards are to improve somewhere in May, lets hope this happens, as today it is May 21, and I still don't see any Gtx 680's, 690's, and I only see one Gtx 670 in stock at Newegg.

IMPORTANT UPDATE:

Earlier today the web has spit out rumors about "eventual degradation under load", which lead many of us to believe that the cards may have a problem. However we may lay our minds to rest, Nvidia has announced that these rumors are not true, and that the GK104 chips are fine. According to Xbitlabs, "Before making it to the market, all the new GPUs are vigorously tested in various applications; they also pass Microsoft HCL tests, which not only stress graphics chips, but take hours to complete. Therefore, chances that chips may degrade in performance over time are pretty low." Now all that is left to be fixed are the low production numbers, but hey, thats better then knowing that something is wrong with that shiny new GPU sitting next to you in your case.

Source: http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/graphics/display/20120521120817_Nvidia_Denies_Plans_to_Recall_GeForce_GTX_600_Due_to_Performance_Degradation.html

Nvidia Gtx680- AMD once again defeated?

Hello guys,

The long awaited Nvidia Kepler cards are no longer hidden to us, at least not unofficially.

Now that was the beginning of my blog post a couple of weeks ago, but technology moves so fast that I didn't even have time to post it before the Nvidia Kepler GPU's were released, well at least the Gtx 680. Weeks before the launch of the Nvidia Kepler GPU's I have been looking into all of the rumors I could find, to get a sneak peak at the power that was to be unleashed. I have been a PC gamer for years and I can tell when a rumor is too good to be true. Some of the rumors were in fact, based on the actual product, while some of them were just insane. However as weeks passed and time got closer to the launch date I began seeing rumors that were more and more realistic. The rumors began showing specifications that were actually plausible, and for those of you who check out my blog regularly you will notice that I covered some of these rumors in depth. As time got closer to the rumored launch date (March 22), it turned out to be the launch date if I remember correctly. However the Kepler architecture was announced in September 2010. I will not be talking too much about the rumors, if you want to know what they were then check out my previous post. Anyway about three days before launch I got to see the real benchmarks, they were released by an actual shop owner who had gotten the card, and yet not everyone got to see them. However the benchmarks that he showed had one major problem, if I remember correctly he had run them on an Intel Core i3, along with other components of not the best performance, so many gamers were not satisfied, however it was nice to see some benchmarks that actually showed some truth. The day before the launch I stayed up a bit late, and I got to see the leaked preview video with Nvidia talking about some of the Keplers features. The video was officially released the next day along with the Gtx 680, so I was happy to have seen the real features. Many of them confirmed some new features that were previously rumored, have been confirmed, and are now part of the Gtx 600's series (ie. 670-690). It is amazing how little power the Gtx 680 uses, it has lower power consumption that the competition, ie the AMD Radeon HD 7970, of course us gamers care about power consumption, but that is not even close to as important as the performance a graphics card provides, and the good news is that the Gtx 680 provides loads of power, in fact it leaves the Hd7970 in the dust. Another thing that it has is GPU Boost, which is similar to Intel's Turbo Boost technology, as the card is no longer manually overclocked, it is now overclocked using overheads, for example you move a slider to raise the power overhead, that means that the card will have more power to reach its target boost clock, that means that it is also more likely to do so. In a program like Evga Precision X, or MSI's AfterBurner you can now set overheads, and target clocks which the GPU will boost to under the right conditions, ie. if the temperatures and power consumption allow it to do so. That means if you set a boost clock of +100mhz over the standard boost clock, the card will not always run at that clock speed, it will only do so if it has the right conditions, and if it is running a stressful application like a game or a benchmark. That means the card uses less power and produces less heat when it idles, and it boosts its clock speed when it needs the performance. This technology makes overclocking much easier, as the user simply sets targets, while the card adjusts the clocks, and takes care of the voltage. Other new features include the ability to run up to 4 screens simultaneously off one card, this previously required two cards running in a SLI configuration. Other new features include new anti aliasing features. All this amazing performance runs on TSMC's 28nm process. It is amazing, once again Nvidia beats AMD, and you know what that means, price cuts! The AMD HD7000's cards came out a couple of months ahead of the Gtx 600's (Kepler), so they did have a head start, and that was not to good. Since they had no competition at that time they could set prices as they wished as there was no competition to force that to change. That meant that the HD7000's were not something I would call well priced. Then came the Gtx 680, it embarrassed the Hd 7970, while also being $79 cheaper, coming in at $499. So until now the Gtx 680 looks great, however there is one problem, stay tuned for my next article to find out more about this "problem".

Nvidia Kepler: Closer than you think!

Source:http://www.2dayblog.com/images/2012/march/550x-nvidia-kepler.jpg

         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:

Speculated release in   days.