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Forums - PC - Latest PC GPUs '24x More Powerful Than Xbox 360 GPU'

Gilgamesh on 14 June 2012

Next-gen consoles have a lot of catching up to do to the latest PC graphics cards, according to a Nvidia engineer.

Published on Jun 14, 2012

The latest PC graphics cards are already "24 times more powerful than the one in the Xbox 360," according to a new report.

An exploration of constantly-improving current-gen console graphics by New Scientistfeatures the comparison by Nvidia's principal engineer Simon Green.

"One day, the whole idea of owning a separate piece of hardware to play games on might be completely redundant," Green suggests.

Reasons graphics keep improving on the same old tech includes greater artistic investment and the continued development of new graphical tricks according to the article, which concludes that "even the next generation of consoles is unlikely to match," the high-end PCs that recently demonstrated Epic's Unreal Engine 4.

The Unreal Engine 4 demo was reportedly shown running via a single Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 card - the latest and most powerful Nvidia card though is the GTX 690, essentially two GTX 680s stuck together. It costs £900.

It's unclear which card Green was referring to, but we'd like to think Xbox Next and PS4 will approach the graphical power of the Unreal Engine 4 demo when they arrive in the next couple of years.

Kink

Can't wait to see what next gen looks like :) Somebody should say the hell with consoles and pull off another crysis moment. Don't no why some companies don't do that, the only really good thing about Crysis was it's graphics and yet millions of people played the game. They got so popular because of the graphics.

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haxxiy on 14 June 2012

He meant the GTX 690 (2x 2880 gigaflops) versus the Xenos' 240 gigaflops. I don't really think that's a comparison meaningful on any aspect.

Anyways a hypothetical GTX 6800 Ultra SLI from 8 years ago would be too 24 times less powerful than the GTX 690. That's more than five Moore cycles ago (32-40 times improvement), so Nvidia is getting a bit sloppy huh.



 

 

 

 

 

NightDragon83 on 14 June 2012

And yet we can still enjoy the same games that PC gamers play on a 7 year old console with a GPU that's apparently 1/24th the power of the latest batch of GPUs.

And the funny thing is that the most successful modern PC games are the ones that don't need the latest technology just to run decently. The biggest hits of the past few years like Portal 2, Starcraft 2, Minecraft, WoW & expansions, Diablo III etc can all run well on a PC setup that's as old as the 360 itself!



On 2/24/13, MB1025 said:
You know I was always wondering why no one ever used the dollar sign for $ony, but then I realized they have no money so it would be pointless.

zarx on 14 June 2012
haxxiy said:
He meant the GTX 690 (2x 2880 gigaflops) versus the Xenos' 240 gigaflops. I don't really think that's a comparison meaningful on any aspect.

Anyways a hypothetical GTX 6800 Ultra SLI from 8 years ago would be too 24 times less powerful than the GTX 690. That's more than five Moore cycles ago (32-40 times improvement), so Nvidia is getting a bit sloppy huh.


not really it's just more transisters are put into things like cache and other components that don't actually conribute directly to the theoretical floating point calculations per seccond metric.



@TheVoxelman on twitter

Check out my hype threads: Cyberpunk, and The Witcher 3!

Stinky on 14 June 2012

£900



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haxxiy on 14 June 2012
zarx said:
haxxiy said:
He meant the GTX 690 (2x 2880 gigaflops) versus the Xenos' 240 gigaflops. I don't really think that's a comparison meaningful on any aspect.

Anyways a hypothetical GTX 6800 Ultra SLI from 8 years ago would be too 24 times less powerful than the GTX 690. That's more than five Moore cycles ago (32-40 times improvement), so Nvidia is getting a bit sloppy huh.


not really it's just more transisters are put into things like cache and other components that don't actually conribute directly to the theoretical floating point calculations per seccond metric.


Even then transistor count didn't increased as it should though. The discrepancy is more likely related to both the inability of the power consumption and heat dissipation to follow the possible increase in performance and the difficulties of some semiconductor manufacturers to keep miniaturizing as efficiently as the market would demand. Of course there's still improvements on the architecture to consider anyways.



 

 

 

 

 

Steven17 on 14 June 2012

Stinky said:
£900

look good



zarx on 14 June 2012
haxxiy said:
zarx said:
haxxiy said:
He meant the GTX 690 (2x 2880 gigaflops) versus the Xenos' 240 gigaflops. I don't really think that's a comparison meaningful on any aspect.

Anyways a hypothetical GTX 6800 Ultra SLI from 8 years ago would be too 24 times less powerful than the GTX 690. That's more than five Moore cycles ago (32-40 times improvement), so Nvidia is getting a bit sloppy huh.


not really it's just more transisters are put into things like cache and other components that don't actually conribute directly to the theoretical floating point calculations per seccond metric.


Even then transistor count didn't increased as it should though. The discrepancy is more likely related to both the inability of the power consumption and heat dissipation to follow the possible increase in performance and the difficulties of some semiconductor manufacturers to keep miniaturizing as efficiently as the market would demand. Of course there's still improvements on the architecture to consider anyways.

Moore's law doubling transister counts possible on a chip every 2 years (the 18 months prediction was actually attributed to David House) predicts that by 2013 we will have GPUs with ~4.8 billion transisters (using the RSX at ~300m as a starting point), a Radeon HD 7970 has 4.3b and a GTX 680 has 3.5b so we are not that far off all things considered.



@TheVoxelman on twitter

Check out my hype threads: Cyberpunk, and The Witcher 3!

IamAwsome on 15 June 2012

Yeahhhhhh, this is what people expect the PS4/720 to pull off?



SnesTea on 15 June 2012
NightDragon83 said:
And yet we can still enjoy the same games that PC gamers play on a 7 year old console with a GPU that's apparently 1/24th the power of the latest batch of GPUs.

And the funny thing is that the most successful modern PC games are the ones that don't need the latest technology just to run decently. The biggest hits of the past few years like Portal 2, Starcraft 2, Minecraft, WoW & expansions, Diablo III etc can all run well on a PC setup that's as old as the 360 itself!

StarCraft II is extremely processor reliant. If you have a dual-core 2.4GHz, you won't even be able to play 3v3s or higher smoothly.

Even my brothers Phenom II X6 1100T drops to around 20FPS in 4v4s at around the 15 minute mark. My processor gets like 8FPS at the same point in time.