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

Weekly News- Gtx 680 Success, PS4 Rumors

Well the last couple of weeks were interesting, we saw the New iPad release, along with the much anticipated Nvidia GTX600's series (Kepler)(Rumors vs. Reality coming soon), and this week we are seeing a lot of rumors considering a possible holiday 2013 PS4, or as rumors call it PS Orbis. The new PlayStation is apparently going to have a AMD processor, much better then the current Cell processor in the current gen PS3, which is just embarrassing. Also we are supposed to see AMD graphics, the Southern Islands cards, the HD7000's series. So that is the good news, much more power at the price of a console, now for the bad news, the games. Apparently game developers and Sony are planning to restrict the PS4 to not be backwards compatible, so us gamers that have been paying 60 bucks per game will not be able to play our games, but that could also be because of the new processor platform, switching from Cell to an AMD processor. Here comes that bad news, the real bad news, games that will be resold used will not be able to be played with all the features enabled as Sony will restrict each game to one console, this saves developers cash, as they save on server support (Battlefield 3 already requires an activation code for online game-play), along with making more money as games will be almost useless when sold used.

         So that is what we have so far as for rumors on the PS4, now lets look back briefly at the Nvidia GTX 680 launch. All you need to know, at least for now is that it beat the AMD HD7970 which is $50-70 more expensive, making Nvidia more affordable and better performing than AMD, once again! 

Nvidia Gtx 600 aka. Kepler: In depth rumors

Hello guys, last article I talked about some of the rumors about the upcoming Nvidia Kepler cards, if you didn't read it or if your not up to date, then read this. In this post I will be further discussing the Keplers, however I will be focusing more on the card, and its specifications etc, rather than release dates, or production, so lets get started. First of all look at these two images: 

Analyzing the images:
If you look at the first two images (click to zoom) you will see what looks like an ordinary Nvidia GPU, well almost. First off what we are seeing is a reference design, which means it is the stock, in other words normal version of the card. The picture on top shows two six pin connectors for this presumed Gtx680. Now the Gtx 580 (reference design) has one six pin connector, and one eight ping connector. So what that means is we can expect it to draw less power than the previous generation. We also can see what seems to be a normal fan, and until it is released or someone opens it, we will not be able to see the PCB, or the cooling. However it is supposed to have similar cooling to the Gtx 500's, an evaporation chamber heatsink, and judging by the six pin power connectors, and the presumed 28nm chip we can say that it should draw less power, and run cooler than previous generations. Besides that its a normal card, it has the standard SLI connectors, and standard outputs, so there is nothing special there.

Analyzing the Specs:
First of all lets look at the leaked specs:
NOTE: THIS SLIDE HAS NOT OFFICIALLY BEEN ANNOUNCED, IT CAN BE FAKE, SO AS ALWAYS, TAKE RUMORS WITH A GRAIN OF SALT

Now from the spec sheet above we can see a couple of things. First of all we have higher clocks than the current gen Gtx 580, and we still have GDDR5 memory. Now one thing that Nvidia is planning to add to this generation is a function that will turn down the clocks when not in heavy use, and speed them up while gaming. The boost clock is what i believe is the boost feature for the card when it is in use (I know, pretty obvious huh?) However it seems to be an average boost, so no heavy boost or OC there. Another new thing would be 2Gb of memory, as the current gen goes up to 1.5GB. Besides that the only other changes are the CUDA, there is almost three times as many (another reason why triple performance may be rumored), PCIE 3.0, and as said earlier two six pin connectors. It also has a lower TDP which means it should use less power, and produce less heat.

Those are the rumors until now, I will continually update my blog with new news as I myself am very curious to know what happens.


Photo sources: 
http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/1004248/gtx-680-spec.jpeg
http://www.2dayblog.com/images/2012/march/550x-nvidia-kepler.jpg 
http://www.2dayblog.com/images/2012/march/550x-nvidia-kepler.jpg 

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.