Performance-wise, I'm going to wonder what nVidia's point is. I honestly scratch my head at the logic of trying to combine both GDDR5 memory and a bus width of greater than 256 bits. That means with a bus width of 384 bits AND using GDDR5 at the same time, this'll give the 480 in the range of 172.8-230.4 GB/sec of bandwidth. Even with Crysis, it's been pretty solidly understood that even anything near this is drastic overkill; at this point, you're largely going to be limited in the units on the GPU, rather than memory bandwidth. There really simply aren't any screen resolutions high enough to necessitate that much bandwidth. So really, it seems as if the price is gonna be jacked up due to having to buy BOTH the wide interface and the GDDR5, without getting any extra benefit compared to as if one of those two had been dropped. (either using GDDR3 as per what nVidia did before, or dropping to 256-bit like AMD is doing)
Hence, going on this, and knowing how poor yields ALWAYS are with massive GPUs, I honestly wonder how well this card will really compete with the 58/5900 series, namely on price/performance. It looks like it might be a repeat of the GTX200 vs. the Radeon 4800 all over again, only AMD has crammed some mild improvements into their architecture, while GF100 seems to just be a supersized GT200.
[citation][nom]dragonsqrrl[/nom]If I'm counting the mem on the PCB correctly, it looks like the GTX 470 will have a 320 bit GDDR5 memory interface, in comparison to the GTX 480's 384 bit interface.[/citation]
Good eye. That does appear to clearly be a total of 10 RAM chips on the "top" side, with three on either side of the GPU, and 4 "above" it. And yes, 10 chips would mean a 320-bit interface.
[citation][nom]Camikazi[/nom]Is that card and the one in the pic in this article supposed to be the same thing? Cause the layouts are not the same at all, even the cut outs are in different places.[/citation]
They're two different cards; the one spied in this article is the 470, while the one linked is the 480. Notice the contacts on the back of the 470, that indicate the presence of only 10 chips, arranged as I described to dragonsqrrl. Meanwhile, the other has 12.