GeForce G310 - NvidiaBloggo - All the latest Nvidia news! 2010

Introduction

Once upon a time, the portable PCs were seen as a very expensive tool for business users, and usually offered less performance than a normal desktop PC. Currently, that’s not the situation anymore. A notebook is now a very affordable PC, and the newest technologies make it reliable for many different usage scenarios.

The main issues found on notebooks nowadays, however, lies in the graphic area. Some notebooks now feature a dedicated GPU, with different performance levels, but always taking the energy consumption into consideration, in order not to have a big impact on the battery. Basically, every laptop has a GPU, which are described as being integrated or discrete. The integrated GPUs are those who come within a chip integrated in the chipset, or with the new Intel processors, on the processor package. A discrete GPU is, instead, its own chipset, nVIDIA or ATI usually, that is added to the motherboard and usually with a dedicated memory set.

The whole scenario is very varied: for those who want a biggest autonomy for the battery, an integrated GPU would be the best option. For those who need 3D performances, the discrete GPU would be the choice. But there are also the hybrid systems, that allow users to choose, according to their particular needs, whether to use the discrete or integrated graphic system, or even both at the same time. That’s what we’ll be covering in this article. We’ll also speak about nVIDIA’s new technology, Optimus.

Considerations - Final

Recalling what was said in the beginning of this article, the GF100 architecture was developed by nVIDIA taking into consideration the GPU computing needs. An example of this is the integration of different cache levels, which have consequences when the card is used in a graphic environment, but also in general purpose tasks.

Wih the evolution of nVIDIA architectures, from the G80 to the GT200 and up to now the GF100, it’s clear how the importance of GPU Computing has grown in terms of architectural choices. It didn’t come despite the gaming purposes of a card, but it’s clear how nVIDIA sees the evolution of the graphic card world as offering great gaming performances, but also the possibility of using the video chipset to perform tasks that were always usually assigned to the CPU.

Conclusions - Part 3

The 3D Vision Surround technology is another new feature that will mark the debut of the GeForce GF100 solutions.

It’s evident how nVIDIA wants to try and give players technical elements that allow them to make their PC gaming different from the console, taking advantage of a better performance with tools that go beyond the simple scene details, but that aim to put more realism and encourage the game immersion. The results are actually interesting, even though the 3D gaming isn’t something that all gamers actually want or support.

Conclusions - Part 2

When thinking about the GeForce GF100 cards and their gaming approach, it’s evident how a bigger realism on 3D games will push cards to offer a more extensive tesselation technique usage. They’re also the base of the DirectX 11 APIs, that had already implemented a support in previous generations of ATI Radeon HD cards.

The geometric complexity, obtained thanks to the tesselation techniques and with a reduced performance impact, makes the 3D scenes more realistic and corresponding more to that reality that game developers always want to create.

Conclusions - Part 1

It’s obviously not an easy task trying to make any in-depth considerations on a GPU architecture, having only a few technical specifications and without a card to actually do tests with. From what we could know of the Fermi architecture, the GF100 represents a very important yet complex project to nVIDIA: this could be one of the reasons why the GF100 cards have been delayed on their launch.

The use of a new architecture together with a new process as the 40nm one is in general a combination that could bring some problems during the manufacturing. This seems to be the case on the Fermi GF100 solutions, that will be launched later than nVIDIA had initially planned. We aren’t sure how much that’s to be blamed on nVIDIA or on TSMC, the manufacturing partner: it’s obvious that as the fabrication process advances, there could be more and more manufacturing problems.

An overview about the performance

The initial performance of the first card based on Fermi gave a small possibility of seeing the performances that the card can offer. The frequencies and specifications aren’t known yet, and the very small session consisted of the integrated benchmark on Far Cry 2.

The choice of using a title such as Far Cry 2 wasn’t casual: it’s one of the few titles where the ATI Radeon HD 5000 cards do not reach excellent performances with the anti-aliasing filter on. The values we’ll be giving next were supplied by nVIDIA, and the hardware system used by nVIDIA for the test included an Intel Core i7 960 CPU, 6 DDR3, triple-channel memories, hence results that can be easily achieved without too much hassle.

Far Cry 2 - Ultra Quality / AA 4x / DX10

Resolution: 1920 x 1200

- Average FPS: 84.02
- Minimum FPS: 65.1

The values are to be taken lightly, as there are no information about which drivers or game patches were used. But it’s good for reference, until we can get our hands in a real card.

In fact, the usage of two cards in SLI is not only a necessity in the case of the 3D Surround Gaming, but also highly recommended: the performances are very reduced when using three screens in parallel, while the 3D technology puts yet another strain on the frames per second generated by the card. Having two GPUS operating in SLI makes the impact of the 3 screens and the 3D technology a lot smaller, and allowing users to have a decent playability.

A technical note before passing to the next point: the surround technology allows users to have 3 different monitors connected to the system, but the 3D Vision Surround needs three identical monitors: managing a 3D signal means that the monitors should be able to manage a 120Hz refresh, and using the same monitors would help avoid timing problems.

ATI hasn’t yet implemented the CrossFireX support to the Eyefinity technology; consequently, it’s not yet possible to take advantage of more GPUs in the moment that games are executed in more than one screen with surround gaming, and thus not using all the power the system has in that case. Perhaps with future drivers, ATI will overcome this limitations. nVIDIA has done so already, indeed, it’s not possible to have the surround gaming implemented without the SLI technology at all.

This makes us think that perhaps the 3D Vision Surround technology was developed by nVIDIA as a proper response to the Eyefinity from ATI. Two points lead to that conclusion: one, the necessity of two cards in SLI with the GTX 200 cards, and the lack of support for more than two displays on the GF100 for each GPU.

In order to make the surround technology work, nVIDIA requires at least two cards connected through SLI technology. The compatibility reaches the GeForce GTX 200 cards, based thus on the GT200 GPU, besides those with Fermi architecture, of course.

The need for two cards is a practical one: each GTX 200 card (and the same goes for the Fermi cards) can manage only up to 2 simultaneous screens, despite the fact that the number of display connectors could be higher than that. The presence of two cards connected through SLI allows the cards to manage the 3 displays, and also benefits from two GPUs for all the 3D renderings.

It’s easy to make a comparison with the Eyefinity technology from ATI. Eyefinity allows the card to manage up to six different monitors at the same time. The current approach on the market, featured on the Radeon HD 5000 cards allows for three monitors put together horizontally, making it so the game recognizes the three screens as just one panel.

The strategy used by nVIDIA with the 3D Vision Surround is indeed similar to the Eyefinity technology, except it is limited to 3 screens, while in theory, Eyefinity can manage up to 6 (not on the current models, however). It’s also posssible to enable the surround mode without the 3D Vision mode, for those who don’t want to enable the 3D feature with a specific title, for example.