NVIDIA’s new line of Fermi-based video cards certainly brought more muscle to computing and gaming when it debuted a while back. The new GPUs are very powerful and have allowed new levels of performance in enthusiast and gamer machines.
The Fermi GPUs also offer better performance for other tasks that are able to run on the GPU. ElecomSoft has announced that it is using Fermi-based video cards to massively improve the performance of its password recovery software.
Using a Fermi-based Tesla GPGPU ElecomSoft claims to have realized a 20 times improvement in the speed it recovers passwords at. ElecomSoft products that support the Fermi GPGPU include ElecomSoft Distributed Password Recovery, ElecomSoft Wireless Security Auditor, and ElecomSoft iPhone Password Breaker.
It has been a while since I heard anything out of PNY and the company is back today with a new video card. PNY has added a version of the NVIDIA GTX 465 (PDF) to its line based on the Fermi architecture for gamers to take advantage of. The card has a native mini-HDMI port making it easy to connect to a big screen HDTV.
The video card has 1024MB of GDDR5 RAM and the core clock is 607MHz. PNY clocks the shaders at 1215MHz and the card has 352 shader cores. The GDDR5 RAM gives the card 102.6GB/s of memory bandwidth.
The texture fill rate for the card is 26.7 billion per second and the effective memory data rate is 3206MHZ. The best news about the GTX 465 is that it’s cheap with a MSRP of $279.99 making it the lowest cost offering in the Fermi based line from NVIDIA. PNY is also bundling a pair of full-length movie downloads with its card with options including The Da Vinci Code, Hitch, Big Daddy, As Good As It Gets, 21 and S.W.A.T.
Remember that stonking NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480M Fermi GPU and the Clevo gaming notebook it was expected to first show up in? The Clevo D900F is now up for sale, and if you’ve in the region of $2,959 lying around waiting for a Core i7 based 17-inch monster notebook, you probably won’t be disappointed. Everything from a 2.66GHz Core i7-920 through to a 3.33GHz Core i7-980X Extreme are on offer (factor in an extra $856 for the latter), together with some Xeon quadcores, as well as up to 12GB of DDR3 memory.
There’s also a huge range of storage choices, from a measly 160GB HDD through to triple-bay HDD/SSDs in optional RAID configurations. Other options include Blu-ray burners, Bluetooth (to go along with the WiFi a/b/g/n), various sound cards and TV tuners, while a 3-megapixel webcam and four built-in speakers are standard.
Connectivity includes S-Video, DVI, VGA, FireWire, USB 2.0 and audio in/out, and you can even have the D900F painted in various custom colors. A maxed-out Clevo D900F could easily set you back several thousand dollars, so choose your options wisely.
After speculation earlier this week that NVIDIA had axed their GeForce GTX 470 graphics card, the company has strongly denied that they are deleting the SKU in favor of opening up their mid-range market. Describing the GTX 470 as “our best price-performance product in the enthusiast line,” the NVIDIA statement also hints that a “reasonably priced version of our GF100 [GPU]” is likely next on the cards.
“The GTX 470 is really important for us from a product perspective. It’s basically our best price-performance product in the enthusiast line, so we have absolutely no plans of discontinuing that. Actually we are enhancing that part of the product line over the next month or so … We feel that there’s some room below [the GTX 470 and GTX 480] for a reasonably priced version of our GF100 [GPU]” NVIDIA
That GF100-based card is likely to be the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 465, which leaked earlier this month and was found in benchmarking to come in underneath the GTX 470 and 480 in terms of stream processors and RAM. The new card is expected to arrive on June 2nd.
The NVIDIA GTX 470 and GTX 480 video cards are already fast by all accounts with very impressive performance. When you take those already fast video cards and then overclock them, you squeeze even more performance out of the cards.
Zotac has announced what it claims to be the world’s fastest air-cooled GTX 400 series video cards. The cards are the GTX 470 AMP Edition and the GTX 480 AMP Edition. The cards use a new cooling system to deal with the extra heat generated by overclocking made from a pure copper base and heat pipes with aluminum fins.
The GTX 480 AMP edition has a core clock of 756MHz, a processor clock of 1512MHz, and a memory clock of 3800MHz. The GTX 470 video card has a core clock of 656MHz, processor clock of 1312MHz, and a memory clock of 3402MHz.
NVIDIA have announced their first Fermi-based GPU intended for notebooks, in the shape of the GeForce GTX 480M. Described as “DirectX 11 done right for notebooks”, the GTX 480M has a dedicated Tessellation engine that apparently boosts performance 5x over that of competing mobile GPUs, and three times more CUDA cores than the previous generation of chips.
There’s also NVIDIA 3D Vision for 3D gaming, PhysX technology for improved physics modelling in games, and the company’s Verde drivers system. It’s also possible to combine a pair of the GTX 480M GPUs in SLI configuration.
As for real-world results, NVIDIA say the GTX 480M will transcode video ten times faster than rivals. There are 352 CUDA cores, a 425MHz graphics clock and 850MHz processor clock, capable of 897 CUDA gigaflops, 76.8 GB/sec memory bandwidth and an 18.7 bn/sec texture fill rate. Clevo will be offering the first notebook to use the GPU, though they’re likely to be the first of many.
NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 470 certainly fell into the shadow of its more-capable GTX 480 sibling, but are the two cards so similar that the company has decided to axe it altogether? That’s the rumor coming out of KitGuru, who have heard from sources in Taiwan that NVIDIA are no longer taking orders for the Fermi-based GTX 470.
As for the reasoning behind the move – which is still unconfirmed by NVIDIA themselves – there are two main avenues of speculation. First, is that the company are using the GTX 470 production for the new GeForce GTX 465, a mid-range card based on the same GF100 GPU only with fewer enabled stream processors.
Secondly, there’s talk of a new GeForce GTX 490, a dual-GPU 375W card. This new model could use a pair of the GTX 470 cores, it’s suggested, with the overall effect being a reduction in potential overcrowding in the $300 to $350 price bracket.
NVIDIA are looking to take on Qualcomm in the Android arena, with CEO Jen-Hsun Huang positioning the company’s second-gen Tegra chipset as a more multimedia- and performance-focused alternative for high-end devices. Huang complimented Qualcomm and TI’s mobile chipsets, describing them as “wonderful application processors”, but went on to say that “our differentiation and our contribution to the space is where multimedia, high resolution snappy graphics [are] really necessary.” He also highlighted Tegra’s possibilities for larger-scale, iPad rivalling Android tablets, such as Notion Ink’s Adam.
“With iPad and next-generation smartphones, resolution’s a huge issue, and you need to have very snappy graphics with a 10×7 display, if not even bigger by that, even higher resolution than that. You’re just not going to do that with a application processor that’s not designed for that. And so that’s our contribution and that’s our differentiation and that’s what people are seeking out in the market.” Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO, NVIDIA
NVIDIA will be looking to pair their second-gen Tegra with the third generation of Android, with initial devices beginning production in the second half of 2010. Huang also named Apple’s A4 SoC – which is found in the iPad and believed to be powering the fourth-gen iPhone HD – as a key competitor.
Meanwhile, he also commented on Fermi and responded to investor and analyst suggestions that NVIDIA’s roll-out of graphics cards based on the new GPUs had been disappointing. ”The amount of testing that we have to do for Fermi GPUs [is] longer than mainstream products,” Huang explained, “because they’re just much, much larger GPUs. The Fermi GPU, as you know, is some 3 billion transistors, and so there’s a lot of testing to do in it.” Seeking Alpha have a full transcript of the call here.
Microsoft’s Kin One and Kin Two might not turn out to be the most auspicious devices for Tegra’s debut in the smartphone arena, but NVIDIA seems to be learning from its mistakes. Admitting that the company committed too strongly to Microsoft with the first-gen iteration, Jen-Hsun Huang has now said that the second generation of Tegra will look to Android devices first and foremost. This newfound focus will materialize with both smartphones and tablets in the third and fourth quarter of this year, and will, according to Jen-Hsun, offer device makers a viable competitor to Apple’s A4 SOC. In other news, NVIDIA has now shipped “a few hundred thousand” Fermi cards, and has also achieved 70 design wins with its Optimus graphics switching technology. Eleven of those are now out in the wild, but the vast majority are still to come, mostly as part of the seasonal “back to school” refresh at the end of the summer. These revelations came during the company’s earnings call for the first quarter of its 2011 fiscal year, and you can find the full transcript at the source below.
Details of NVIDIA’s upcoming mid-range Fermi based video card – until now known as the GeForce GTX 460 – have leaked, with Chinese site eNet claiming to have acquired a GF100 GPU based video card. According to their sources, the chip will show up in the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 465 on June 2nd; they’ve also been testing it, discovering that NVIDIA have disabled several elements of the GPU (the GF100 also powers the GTX 470/480) including limiting stream processors to 352 and RAM to 1GB.
There’s also a 256-bit memory interface, while clock speeds 607MHz for the GPU, 1,215MHz for the shaders and an effective 3,206MHz for the GDDR5 RAM. In contrast, the GeForce GTX 470 launched earlier this year has 4480 stream processors, 1,280MB of memory and a 320-bit interface, along with a faster memory clock speed.
They’ve also been benchmarking the leaked card, pitting it against ATI’s Radeon HD 5830 and HD 5870. The GeForce GTX 465 apparently was faster than the HD 5870 in Far Cry 2, “significantly” slower than the HD 5830 in Crysis Warhead, and fell in-between the two in the Heaven benchmarks.
Price is tipped at around $300 and the new card is expected to launch at Computex.
Remember that stonking 
The NVIDIA GTX 470 and GTX 480 video cards are already fast by all accounts with very impressive performance. When you take those already fast video cards and then overclock them, you squeeze even more performance out of the cards.
