Nvidia GF100 (Fermi) GPU

Fermi

Lets preface this article by saying that we saw Fermi in action on several applications and can attest to the fact that the information contained in the Whitepaper is true and accurate. This isn't a here's the info we were handed and regurgitating it blindly.

Fermi is looking very powerful on the order of 100% performance gain, in some applications, and packed with revolutionary technology that could very well change the face of computing. By computing we mean GPGPU or parallel computing which is gaining a firm hold in the PC world. Now we know some of you are saying oh great a folding GPU that isn't going to do crud for us in gaming. Wrong, Fermi games better than the best we've seen to date and we can easily say it is the most powerful single core GPU we have ever seen. However that's not what this article is about. This article is about the newly redefined feature set Nvidia is putting on the plate with Fermi and general Fermi design as related to GTX-2xx.

This isn't a core re-hash it's a top down core redesign and from what we can see it addresses more shortcomings of GTX-2xx (don't get us wrong we love our GTX-2xx lineup of cards) than we expected. Right out of the gate lets do a short but not complete list of features that Fermi got that GTX-2xx didn't, DX11, Tessellation, Parallel polygon processing, shared L2 Cache, up to 32xCSAA (up from 16x), GDDR5, Nvidia Surround (triple monitor acting like one monitor) Nvidia 3D Vision Surround.

Every advantage that Nvidia was being held to task on (In comparison to ATI) that we can think of has been included in this redesign. That leads to another question, how well was it implemented. Even though the software and drivers used for the demos we saw were pretty rough we only saw one crash and that was on a somewhat Beta demo Nvidia is working on to include with Fermi. Every other application we saw ran flawlessly and we can say with a high degree of confidence when Fermi is finally released to the public (End of Q1 2010 at the latest) it will be a highly polished launch.

There are a few items being finalized on Fermi, the fan, packaging, software, drivers but the core is in it's final state before launch. We may see core shrinks, variants to fill the price points, and more mature drivers but Fermi's core is a done deal.