Nvidia's GTX480/Fermi is broken

[1337 Gamer]

greenmedic88 said:

Soleron said:
UPDATE:

http://www.semiaccurate.com/2010/02/20/semiaccurate-gets-some-gtx480-scores/

The GTX480 is 5% faster than a 5870 on average. So worse than we thought.

The GTX470 is 10-15% slower than that, so probably has a slight lead on the 5850.

Given the massive die size, yield problems and power issues, I don't believe there's a price Nvidia can put them at that is both profitable and competitive.

Also another issue: the chip's DX11 support is not ready. It has image quality issues on parts of the DX11 Unigine benchmark.

Nvidia was claiming/shooting for 60% greater performance than Cypress, so this puts them in a pretty bad spot. They're not going to be able to sell them for much more than the current $399 and $299 prices of the HD5870 and HD5850. The MSRP on those cards is supposed to be $379 and $259 even though they've been selling for more. I just don't see how a 5% increase in overall performance can be expected to command any sort of price premium over that.

The article also mentions only 5,000-8,000 are being produced with losess expected on each unit? It's almost like these cards are just place holders so that Nvidia can have something competitive with Cypress VGA cards.

Hoping some of these issues could be fixed with driver revisions, but that thermal envelope and die size is a serious liability. 70% fan speed on idle @70C is a bit disturbing. No headroom for overclocking.

First off i doubt nvidia will release these cards without DX11 support. That is a sure way to make these cards fail commercially at the very least they will add in the drivers so they can say their cards support DX11.

 

But yes i agree with you these cards are an obvious screwup. They tried to do something that is just a bit past today's technology and theyre going to pay for it. If all these rumors turn out to be true the Nvidia is screwed. They could potentially be in the same place as ATI was back with the launch of the 2xxx Series (R600) and thats not where they want to be stuck with a line of cards that cost a fortune to produce and dont have the performance to back it up.