NVIDIA Pascal Mythbusting

[BertrandH]

+1 Following 

[fehllyy]

NVLink has 5-12 times the speed of PCIe. just saying.

[VagabondWraith]

NVLink has 5-12 times the speed of PCIe. just saying.

Not for consumers though.

[Glenwing]

NVLink has 5-12 times the speed of PCIe. just saying.

It says that in the first sentence of the NVLink section, no?

[fehllyy]

yes but it says about 5 times as fast. I was just correcting. And by the way, I still think that Nvidia will release Pascal cards for gaming, other wise what would be the point of making a successor  GPU processor just so that people can use it for stuff that isn't really in the spotlight. 

 

I mean like 32Gb of V-RAM for a server/rendering PC? Most of those sorts of cards have like 2-4Gb and maybe 8Gb of RAM respectively. Plus, I have never hear any news about a new Quadro card, have I?

 

I think that maybe if Nvidia was a little less 'hyped up' about another workstation card, then I would read this thread and go; hey, this is a good and accurate report on Pascal. And yes, it's pretty cool about the 3D memory, and the much higher transistor count on the new Pascal platform than even the Titan X (around double), and hey, a new Nvidia release is cool, but I still think that this thread is a little to direct about what Nvidia is planning

 

[Glenwing]

yes but it says about 5 times as fast. I was just correcting. And by the way, I still think that Nvidia will release Pascal cards for gaming, other wise what would be the point of making a successor  GPU processor just so that people can use it for stuff that isn't really in the spotlight. 

 

I mean like 32Gb of V-RAM for a server/rendering PC? Most of those sorts of cards have like 2-4Gb and maybe 8Gb of RAM respectively. Plus, I have never hear any news about a new Quadro card, have I?

 

I think that maybe if Nvidia was a little less 'hyped up' about another workstation card, then I would read this thread and go; hey, this is a good and accurate report on Pascal. And yes, it's pretty cool about the 3D memory, and the much higher transistor count on the new Pascal platform than even the Titan X (around double), and hey, a new Nvidia release is cool, but I still think that this thread is a little to direct about what Nvidia is planning

The 5-12x figure is from NVIDIA's more vague quotes if I recall correctly:

NVIDIA® NVLink™ is a high-bandwidth, energy-efficient interconnect that enables ultra-fast communication between the CPU and GPU, and between GPUs. The technology allows data sharing at rates 5 to 12 times faster than the traditional PCIe Gen3 interconnect

http://www.nvidia.com/object/nvlink.html

If you want to be more specific than just "PCIe Gen3" we have the official bandwidth number already, 80 GB/s, which is 5 times the bandwidth of PCIe 3.0 x16 (16GB/s).

Of course NVIDIA will release gaming cards. All I said was that they haven't talked about gaming at all so far, which is accurate. I'm not saying Pascal won't appear in the gaming market.

[fehllyy]

The 5-12x figure is from NVIDIA's more vague quotes if I recall correctly:

If you want to be more specific than just "PCIe Gen3" we have the official bandwidth number already, 80 GB/s, which is 5 times the bandwidth of PCIe 3.0 x16 (16GB/s).

Of course NVIDIA will release gaming cards. All I said was that they haven't talked about gaming at all so far, which is accurate. I'm not saying Pascal won't appear in the gaming market.

 I think that they will wait until games actually require that amount of processing power before releasing Pascal gaming cards. Because who really needs 100+ fps on 4K. either that or they could wait until the 8K platform is a thing...(?). I think personally that they will r;ease the workstation power beast Pascal cards and then maybe Q1-Q2 the next year release a cut down version for gaming (because come on guys, who needs 32Gb of HBM2 3D stacked memory, plus over 16 billion transistors to play their games).

[Glenwing]

I think that they will wait until games actually require that amount of processing power before releasing Pascal gaming cards. Because who really needs 100+ fps on 4K. either that or they could wait until the 8K platform is a thing...(?). I think personally that they will r;ease the workstation power beast Pascal cards and then maybe Q1-Q2 the next year release a cut down version for gaming (because come on guys, who needs 32Gb of HBM2 3D stacked memory, plus over 16 billion transistors to play their games).

They'll probably follow their pattern from the last two generations, and release one of the lower GPUs as the "top-end" gaming cards, then release the the higher tier as an even better gaming card 6-12 months later.

To NVIDIA it doesn't matter what people need, it just matters what people will buy.

[Cela1]

It would, however, be cool to see 8 way SLI for extreme consumer GPUs

[digitaldoughnut]

BUT ... BUT ....

I was riding the hype train !... You destroyed my dreams of a killer gpu ...

On the other hand it wouldn't make much sense for nvidia to make a gpu that would destroy it's older lineup.

They did that to the 760, 770, 780 and 780ti though

[Coaxialgamer]

They did that to the 760, 770, 780 and 780ti though

Not really, the 760,770, 780 and 780ti are still very capable and maxwell doeant improve give HUGE improvements over kepler

[WoctorDho]

Thanks for the great post!

[anticeon]

lol ... i know from the start that the story is bullshit ... its like nvidia shut the hell up to boost their Ads

[MadyTehWolfie]

I feel this thread will only help the idiots who failed to read anything nvidia said about pascal. For that this thread gets a thumbs up. However idiots who failed to read or pay attention get a thumbs down.

[Sank]

Thank you! So basically, these won't be consumer grade cards!

[Glenwing]

Thank you! So basically, these won't be consumer grade cards!

 

There will be consumer grade cards based on the architecture, but the main highlights of the GPU are beneficial for professional tasks, they're not focused on gaming.

[prongs1982]

What I need to know is this pascal help me doin enginering rendering works? Help me with catia and so on? If so than it worth the wait.

As far as I see increasing bandwith between CPU and GPU might help my tendering job faster

[Dackzy]

So how  much better will the top end pascal be then the gtx 980 ti?

[Glenwing]

So how  much better will the top end pascal be then the gtx 980 ti?

 

We don't know.

[Dackzy]

We don't know.

I hope it will be 20% or more

[Bojamijams]

I hope it will be 20% or more

 

 

Ok

[madwolfa]

I understand the skepsis, but two-generation die shrink would allow many more processing units on the same die while keeping power and temps under control. We all know that GPU tasks are parallelized much easier, so the performance would grow almost linearly with increased number of SMs. So yeah, I think Pascal is going to be a big deal thanks to a massive die shrink alone. And with such an increase of GPU cores, huge HBM2 memory bandwidth would be beneficial as well.

[Metro]

I understand the skepsis, but two-generation die shrink would allow many more processing units on the same die while keeping power and temps under control. We all know that GPU tasks are parallelized much easier, so the performance would grow almost linearly with increased number of SMs. So yeah, I think Pascal is going to be a big deal thanks to a massive die shrink alone. And with such an increase of GPU cores, huge HBM2 memory bandwidth would be beneficial as well.

 

We know die shrinks do not help increase performance, as seen by recent die shrinks. Do not expect a massive jump as NVIDIA/AMD will want slowly release the GPUs (starting Q2 2016) with incremental performance gains, until you get to high end Pascal (Q2 2017)

[ManWithBeard1990]

You know what happened last time nVidia focused heavily on compute? Fermi.

[Glenwing]

I understand the skepsis, but two-generation die shrink would allow many more processing units on the same die while keeping power and temps under control. We all know that GPU tasks are parallelized much easier, so the performance would grow almost linearly with increased number of SMs. So yeah, I think Pascal is going to be a big deal thanks to a massive die shrink alone. And with such an increase of GPU cores, huge HBM2 memory bandwidth would be beneficial as well.

Certainly. I never said it wouldn't be good. It just won't be 10x performance or replace PCI Express. The point of this thread isn't to say whether it will be good or not, it's just to address myths. NVIDIA stated 17 billion transistors, which is about 2x as many as GM200 and would be in line with the 2x performance increase I predicted in the first section.