Nvidia and AMD's Monoply or Technical challenges?

[henrytowns]

HI,

I have been wondering for all these years if both Nvidia and AMD follow some kind of sales strategy by lowering the Core clocks and shader clocks in new GPUS.
I would expect as the technology grows, things should only get better.

For example once we achieved core clock 1000MHZ and mem bandwidth of 150GB/s then for the same price or more it should only be better meaning at least 1000MHZ and 150gb/s with additional features and nothing less.


for example:

1. http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=670&card2=641

nvidia 560ti : more shader clock = more pixel fill rate
nvidia 660ti : everything more but shader clock is less

2. http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=635&card2=638

radeon 6870: more core clock, more shader clock,
radeon 6970: less core clock , less shader clock


I just wish to understand if its some strategy or really technologically challenging.

Thanks!

 

[DarkSable]

Mostly it stems from the fact that they're using different graphics chips... meaning everything works differently. It's not just improving the SAME model chip over and over.

 

[k1114]

Simply put this is not a hz race like in the single core cpu days. Architecture > stream processors > clocks

But then again specs are pretty irrelevant when all you really care about is the best game performance.

 

[smorizio]

one issue was the gpu vendors were hitting a power wall with there gpu. like amd and intel did with there older cpu. intel found out you can only push silicon chip so far then it just becomes a heat issue. look at the old 200-400 ser nvidia chips and how hot they ran. the gpu chip vendor doing what intel and amd do now pack as many cores into one chip and divide the workload over the whole chip.

 

[palladin9479]

The work that GPU's do lends itself well to extreme parallelism. You get more performance from adding more processing units then you would from cranking up the clock rate. You can further enhance this performance with improved memory technology, either through faster memory, a wider interface, less latency or more accurate prefetch / caching. What you see the GPU manufacturers doing is constantly improving their architectures. Clock rate is determined by whatever thermal envelope they want to keep within.