From the Twitter QA tonight...

[Oryon22]

One thing I do like about nVidia's cards is that they generally offer higher minimum FPS than a comparable AMD card.

[Vancha]

Originally Posted by Oryon22

One thing I do like about nVidia's cards is that they generally offer higher minimum FPS than a comparable AMD card.

Aye. The way I see it, Nvidia are muscle cars to AMD's electric cars.

[Mutant]

Looks like the new Nvidia GPU architecture known as Kepler due in a few months has hardware optimisations for PhysX in the shader blocks, even helping along the software API code.


Interesting article from charile over at semiaccurate
Physics hardware makes Kepler/GK104 fast

"How many other games have had this level of attention and optimisation gifted upon them is another open question. One thing we can say is that the list of benchmarks shown off by Nvidia where Kepler has an overwhelming advantage all support PhysX. This is not to say that they are all hardware/GPU PhysX accelerated, they are not, most use the software API.

This is important because it strongly suggests that Nvidia is accelerating their own software APIs on Kepler without pointing it out explicitly. Since Kepler is a new card with new drivers, there is no foul play here, and it is a quite legitimate use of the available hardware. Then again, they have been proven to degrade the performance of the competition through either passive or active methods. Since Nvidia controls the APIs and middleware used, the competition can not ‘fix’ these ‘problems with the performance of their hardware’."


It would be interesting to know if SOE have any Nvidia devs working with them on forgelight.

[Oryon22]

I'm personally waiting for Kepler, whether its succeeds or fails, before choosing a team.

[Goku]

I think that article is BS. I'm not buying it. Nvidia isn't that stupid to rely on PhysX to attempt to get the upper hand in a few select games. Maybe PhysX processing has been improved, but it won't be the backbone of this gen. Especially when Nvidia develops these cards for their Tesla and FX lines these days. No reason for them to put old Aegia hardware in such cards as a result, only will be a waste on the die.

[Mutant]

Originally Posted by Goku

I think that article is BS. I'm not buying it. Nvidia isn't that stupid to rely on PhysX to attempt to get the upper hand in a few select games. Maybe PhysX processing has been improved, but it won't be the backbone of this gen. Especially when Nvidia develops these cards for their Tesla and FX lines these days. No reason for them to put old Aegia hardware in such cards as a result, only will be a waste on the die.

While Charlie is not always 100% (by any means lol) there is normally a good pinch of truth in his articles. I am on the fence with this one it seems a tad far fetched but not impossible.

What the article proposes seems possible; ie that kelper will somehow get some sort of hardware improvement (possible in the shader blocks) that gives improved throughput for the types of instructions that physX uses.

This is not necessarily any more drastic than amd going VLIW5 to VLIW4, this change may well be looking at improving compute but at the same time giving a real benefit to physX.

So while similar sized/price nivida and amd chips will have similar perform the nvidia chips will blow away amd for things using physX.
Nvidia pricing GK104 at $300 would seem fit with this.


Time will tell. If there is a lot of truth in this article is will make a big difference for planetside2 players.

[Goku]

Originally Posted by Mutant

While Charlie is not always 100% (by any means lol) there is normally a good pinch of truth in his articles. I am on the fence with this one it seems a tad far fetched but not impossible.

What the article proposes seems possible; ie that kelper will somehow get some sort of hardware improvement (possible in the shader blocks) that gives improved throughput for the types of instructions that physX uses.

This is not necessarily any more drastic than amd going VLIW5 to VLIW4, this change may well be looking at improving compute but at the same time giving a real benefit to physX.

So while similar sized/price nivida and amd chips will have similar perform the nvidia chips will blow away amd for things using physX.
Nvidia pricing GK104 at $300 would seem fit with this.


Time will tell. If there is a lot of truth in this article is will make a big difference for planetside2 players.

I know Charlie has been right in the past and I do get a kick out of his articles. Don't forget he was "bamboozled" into thinking that the GK104 was the second coming of Christ just last week.