Check this out - Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 May Launch Ahead of Schedule

You Nvidia fan boys will like this. Maximum PC | Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 May Launch Ahead of Schedule

 

Could be a rumor generated by nvidia to slow down AMD 7970 sales. But good to see them new cards coming. The mobile cards will probably arrive in a few months as well. Can't wait to get my hands on the 680m.

 

The article says it should perform like the 7970, which I find completely unexciting.

Obviously we don't know exactly how the new Nvidia line will perform, but the Radeon 7970 28nm which has launched is nothing amazing. "The 7970 is only around 15-25% faster (on average) than the GTX 580 in our tests" from AnandTech - AMD Radeon HD 7970 Review: 28nm And Graphics Core Next, Together As One

In the 2 games I care most about, Starcraft 2 and Battlefield 3, the new architecture and die shrink of the 7970 provided at best a 5% improvement. In other words, side by side you couldn't tell the difference. History shows us that the desktop performance closely mirrors the mobile performance (with mobile just being slower, but the gains are generally the same). Thus, we can say with some confidence that the new mobile Radeon line will get at most a 15-25% increase over the 580m, but it is very game dependent and many games get a sub 5% increase. Maybe Nvidia will be somewhat better? I wouldn't expect anything amazing though, especially since the expectation is for the Nvidia line to be similar, we are talking FPS gains that will be nearly unnoticeable in the real world.

 

Truth be told, I don't care much for performance this generation. The 580M is pretty damn fast, and quite a jump for what laptops are used to (285M, etc.), I'm hoping NVIDIA gets their act together RE: power consumption though. The lower power the card, the higher it can be clocked on battery power.

 

As with most CPU's/GPU's, it's advisable to skip a generation because there's typically not enough substantial improvement to warrant an upgrade.

 

at least one.

 

Yep, that's what I plan to do!

OOC - Typically how much are mobile GPU's when released?

 

I am pretty shure the jump from 40nm to 28nm will bear fruits. We go from Fermi to Kepler and numerous sites have said that Nvidia will focus on power efficiency this time. Which is great for us notebook users.

 

It will reduce heat, but it seems silly to care about the discrete GPU battery performance when you always use the iGPU on battery anyway.

 

Not everyone have Optimus. There are OEMs that refuse to use it because reduced performance of the discrete GPU. Plus who knows what is in Nvidias goodybag about downclock/idling consumption of the Kepler for the high end GPUs etc

 

Who cares about the desktop GTX 680 on a notebook site? The only news from these articles is that the mobile parts are on a different schedule and will likely release in April as well.

That statement doesn't hold weight, when you take into account how often the new generation is bringing both a die shrink and a new architecture.

Using the desktop 7970 and GTX 580 to infer anything about the mobile space is really silly.

 

does anyone know when the mobile parts will launch?

 

Isn't keplar just a direc die shrink of fermi?

Also, reduced power consumption=more potential compute power. You have more headroom in terms of cooling so therefore you can push the componants harder, and in the case of high end mobile GPU's, I'm willing to bet they'll choose that over power saving.

 

Really? Comparing the last 3 GPU refreshes shows both the mobile and desktop chips tend to increase by the same percent over the last generation chips. I would bet money the mobile variants will see performance increases within 5% (faster or slower) of of the desktop chips. The desktops are faster but percentage wise the mobile and desktop chips tend to gain the same amount of performance.

You can choose to believe what you want, but I bet money that AMDs new 28nm mobile 7970 chip will increase performance over the 580m by 5-30%, just like the desktop variants.

EDIT: Looking at the numbers, the mobile variants actually tend to increase about 5-10% less than the desktop chips. Thus, if anything the new mobile chip will be even less impressive than the desktop chip.

 

Honestly, the last 'big' performance-wise jump I remember was from the 7 series to the 8 series (G80). Everything since has just been small upgrades with lots of hype.

 

I'll go with 5 - 20% increase along with better battery life. A massive power increase wouldn't make sense to me, they're trying to push reduced power consumption this time around, at least that's what I reckon.

 

I just don't look at it in pure theory. At least compare what cards each generation was built from.

- The 6970M came from the desktop 6850, 960 shaders, 32 ROPS, 680/900

- The 7970M is coming from either the deskstop 7870 or 7850, so that's 1408 or 1280 shaders (and improved ones at that), 34 ROPS, clocks unknown

The 7870 is rumored to equal the (desktop) 6970 in performance.

I just don't take that data and guess at a small increase in performance. When the day comes, I'll openly admit I was wrong though.

 

Just a different way to look at it. I just use the actual performance numbers.

I mean compare the 7970 to the 6970, AnandTech - AMD Radeon HD 7970 Review: 28nm And Graphics Core Next, Together As One.

It has significantly more of everything, yet the performance gains are not amazing, and in some games like BF3 and SC2 it only gains 5% or less in performance even though it has 512 more shaders and another step up in texture units not to mention higher clocks and everything.

Even if the 7970M gets the 1408 shader upgrade that is only 448 additional shaders, which is less than the desktop card received, which means the laptop card will gain even less performance than the desktop card.

Is there some flaw in this way of thinking that I don't see? It seems to hold up for the last 3 refreshes, the desktop and mobile cards gain the same amount of performance.

 

Why doesn't this hold weight? You wouldn't want to upgrade your 6970m to a 7970m would you?

 

Starcraft is not important since nobody cares if the game runs 60FPS or 80FPS. Also go to other websites, 90% of other websites are more positive..
EDIT: ?? 7970: 70FPS 6970: 50FPS -> you call that not a noticable improvement???

Open your mind there are a lot of games where the 7970 pwns, tesselationwise you can roughly say it has double the performance of a 6970. In many games it's about 30% faster. But like people said before you cannot compare both. Since they are a different architecture, different clockspeed, 384bit vs 256bit, 7970 has lower TDP, etc.

The 6970M and def the 6990M had unreal TDP (80-100W is just insane for mobility devices). What we all know is the 7700M/7800M/7900M will bring much lower TDPs and higher performance.

They have to make a choice, if they go the 100W way again, performance increase will be huge.
If they go the smart way and reduce it to a 65W highend part, performance increase will still be noticable, but not as drastic (but tesselation will in both cases). The heat will be more under control + better oc

 

There is big improvement from 25fps to 35fps.

 

I honestly don't know why people would be excited about this. What game is there (besides maybe witcher 2 at max settings) that will demand more GPU power than a 580 or 6970?

BF3 was a nice treat but still nothing that would bring systems to their knees the way we saw crysis 1 do. The game industry is more or less at a brick wall in terms of graphics and actual demand from the GPU.

Everyone is scaling their graphics down to consoles and those who tout "higher res textures" for PC usually amounts to very little difference in regards to how much extra GPU power they actually demand.

That said, I think it's good that the GPU market is progressing but I'd like to see the developers progress in their visual quality that would actually necessitate a $500+ video card.

 

Just something to bear in mind. The comparisons with the 7970 aren't exactly representative of what it can do. It's a new architecture so it'll take time for the drivers to really show what it's capable of. Give it a month or so and you'll probably see an improvement.

I'm not trying to imply that it'll suddenly double in performance, but it could quite reasonably go from 20-30% faster than the 6970 to 50% faster.

 

metro 2033...and crysis 2 fully patched

 

The 7970M and GTX 680M will push the TDP barrier again. Anything near a 65W high-end GPU is a technologically impossible pipe dream, besides the fact that the majority of gamers who're shelling out for these high performance notebooks want as much horsepower as possible, not low power consumption.

When the next generation of game consoles hits, our GPUs will be pushed to the max.

 

Course, nothing is announced yet, so we are still at least a year away from new consoles, most likely 2 years, as they generally hit around the holidays. By then we can get an 8xx series that will be a massive improvement from current cards, and perform better on the new games.

 

Rumor says the next Xbox will have an HD 7000 card in it. So I recommend you aim for having something strong around the time of its release.

 

i agree with this. I want as much performance as possble. i don't want 65w parts.

My current 6990m when overclocked is already eating about 120-125w