New high-end 5xxx ATi cards a setback perhaps?

First of all I'm having a bit of a hard time accepting that ATi really pulled an Nvidia again (who's doing it for the 5th time with the mobile 3xx series) by revising similar performance for a "new generation" of mobile GPUs. But I think worse of all, these new "high end" cards have 128 bit memory interfaces and are not guaranteed to have GDDR5 from what I've come to understand. I'm not surprised all too much that ATi decided to not create truly mobile versions of desktop 5 series, since it would've been extremely hard to get decent power efficiency.

I must however, state what truly IS an improvement in these new ATi cards, across the entire board of "new" GPUs: they are revised to take proper advantage of Direct Compute 11, new video/sound decode functions, better GPGPU performance in general, Eyefinity, while being more power efficient to boot thanks to the 40 nm GPU die process. Considering PC gaming as of late has been dependent on console limitations thanks to multiplatforming, gaming performance isn't too huge a deal as it could be but hopefully DX11 will change that considering the consoles are going to be around in their current form for at least another 2 to 3 years. However, even higher end GPUs get bogged down with games at 1080p resolution in many cases.

I just feel that ATi even with GPUs they got now could be make better use of them by making GDDR5 with GDDR3 the "untasteful but allowable" lower end option and not gimping the bus width on the higher end cards. They are starved for proper memory bandwidth. I guess we can still be happy that these cards are more efficient per clock while also being vastly improved for GPGPU functionality.

 

I guess it's because naming the mobile Junipers 58xx rather than 57xx was better for marketing.
They should have made them GDDR5-only though.

 

nvm I am an idiot

 

i agree....so far i have only seen one new card better than the current 260M GTX which is the ATI 5870 with GDDR5...i did not understand either the reasoning behind all those 5 series ATI card with GDDR3.

I have been patiently waiting to buy a laptop in hopes that a new better GPU is coming up soon....ATI 5870 is out of my budget so i have been thinking about pulling the plug on the Asus G51VX from newegg.com

what do you guys think?? do u think there will be a GDDR5 versions of the 260GTX or 280 GTX or other ATI 5 series card coming anytime soon???

thanks

 

No, the HD 5870 GDDR5 should be the best card around for a little while. nVidia won't release GDDR5 into their high end GTX cards yet. I believe they'll just be releasing a higher clocked GTX 280M, the GTX 285M - but still GDDR3.

 

ATI doesn't make the different configurations availble to OEM. They just make the reference design and the only manufacture the cores that are then sent to the OEM who decide if they want to go GDDR3 or 5

 

ohokk..thanks for the info Sgogeta4 and Ayle.

any idea if the prices if the laptop prices with 280m/285 GTX coming down to about $1000 in the near future??

 

Why even bother with the GTX 280M when you can find notebooks out there with the GTX 260M at lower costs? They are only 16 shaders apart from one another with a 7% overclock difference. The ATi Mobility Radeon HD 5870 isn't a bad card, but still not a big step forward. Hopefully the Geforce GTX 380M performs better, but I can't say I expect much from Nvidia.

 

Yes...you are right Cheeseman...but i thought that after CES there should be quite a lot of new and good GPUs coming out but so far i have only seen the ATI 5870....so i was kinda hoping that next gen of Nvidea cards will start showing up soon.

 

Fermi isn't even available for desktops yet and won't be available for desktops for another ~2 more months. I wouldn't expect to see it in a laptop until the second half of this year, at the earliest.

Nvidia is really, really behind at the moment.

 

Nvidia are probably going to use Cebit, and Clevo will be at Cebit also. Cebits only in March so not to long to wait and find out.

 

Nvidia doesn't need GDDR5, as long as ATI is on the 128-bit memory bus. It's not an advantage.

 

ATI should have used 128-bit GDDR5 on all of their 58xx cards. GDDR3 should only be used for mainstream and low-end.

 

Ati don't MAKE the mobility cards however, just the chips, it's the manufacturer who decides whether to use GDDR5/3.

 

The thing is, the 5830 can only do DDR3/GDDR3, the 5850 can do GDDR3/GDDR5, and the 5870 will only do GDDR5. It most certainly was ATI's decision to hobble the 5830 with GDDR3. That said, I don't think it'll be that big of a deal.

 

Pitabred, that is market sectioning. The 5830 and 5850 are basically identical except for the memory they use. If both have the same memory, then whats the point of having both...

 

At the same time, while performance isn't quite at 100% compared with an identical card with 256-bit GDDR3, I bet the cost and/or power consumption would be lower with the 128-bit GDDR5 card.

 

Definately, despite the performance lead to the 5870m, it actually has a lower rated TDP than the 4870m part.
128bit memory interface also directly reduces the costs of the cards, as it lowers the complexity and number of PCB layers required, resulting in a cheaper, easier to produce card, whilst retaining the same performance as GDDR3 with a 256bit interface at equivalent clock speeds.

 

I agree. I think that this was their plan, but the cost of GDDR5 is still a bit too high for vendors to pair GDDR5 with every chip. By the end of this year, I bet that most of the ATI chips that can support it will be using GDDR5 (because of cost parity).

I think 128-bit bus width is actually a great idea. It vastly simplifies chip and board engineering, it decreases the number of PCB layers required for the chip to function properly, and as a result the cost and thermal design limit of the chip is lower. And when paired with GDDR5, you rarely see serious bottlenecking in memory that would be apparent with GDDR3. But that is the KEY to this argument. For 128 bit to be worthwhile (at least at the golden resolution of 1920x1080), it must use GDDR5.

Some might say that the reason so many vendors have released or announced notebooks using mobile versions of the ATI 5000 series within only 6 months of the desktop release is because their is no competition from Nvidia. I argue that the decreased complexity and cost of an ATI 5000 series card compared to high end Nvidia GTX2xx cards to be the real reason.

The card is in no way a set-back. It isn't a rebadge or simple die-shrink *cough Nvidia*. It's more of an extreme design revision of the 4xxx series. This is one of the reasons the series was so much earlier than Nvidia's GF100. Then again, Nvidia has completely redesigned their GPU from the ground up, so when it finally arrives, I think it's going to really give ATI a run for it's money.

 

Oh it will, however it'll also be large, expensive and power hungry, at least in initial revisions (think a much faster 2900XT!).
That said the ATI top bods have said they're well in line for refreshes of the 5 series later this year, and the completely new architecture (currently known as something like Long Islands IIRC) is due for later 2010.

By contrast the 2/3/4/5 series have all been based off the same, key design, so the 6 series will be completely different beasts.

 

Yeah
To compare with desktop cards, I'm pretty sure 256bits GDDR5 on ATI's is cheaper than Nvidia's (overkill)896bits GDDR3.

 

896bit?

Errr...the GT200 series were up to 512bit, not 896.

 

Even though it's a dual GPU, the GTX295 is 896bits

 

Divide that by two. In that case both GPUs have a memory bus width of 448, you can't just add them together, as that's not how it works, each GPU has it's own dedicated memory with a 448bit bus.