New gtx 680 Tweet

[lixai]

so, is octane working on GTX 680 ? somebody has some benchmarks ?

[mbetke]

Seems its slower as an Nvidia 460 (unoptimized Octane build).

[Jaberwocky]

Ok so the net result is that we can get 580 - 3GB cards at least a £100 cheaper then before.This is still a result of sorts

[t_3]

Hello,

... so what about a nightly octane build?
just kidding

OK, you'll get your nightly build

We made a build with CUDA 4.2, for the Fermi and Kepler architectures. Licensed customers can find it in the RC testing forum.

--
Roeland

thanks alot - this is really cool!

[Leiurus]

I don't see anything "cool" here.

It seems that with this new architecture Nvidia is aiming at developping more specific cards and therefore release gaming cards dedicated to gaming only, computing cards dedicated to CAD, etc...

The 680 performs very poorly in term of rendering but is a fantastic gaming card, outperforming the latest AMD with a much lower power consumption and heat generation, which totally fulfill the needs of their target: gamers.

For GPU computed rendering we can expect to see some great Quadro and Tesla soon. With the Quadro / Tesla pricetag.

GPU rendering already has enough drawbacks (i.e ridiculously low amount of available RAM), if on top of that to have a decent processing power we have to buy 6000USD of hardware for GPU only (I'm not even adding the CPU, RAM, etc...here), what's the point? For half of this money I can build a very decent render farm.

I can't see anything positive in being able to buy some old generation cards 100 bucks cheaper, I was expecting at least equivalent processing power with higher RAM availbility.

It seems that the "average" 3D visualizer will be totally left out of the game, with products aimed at gamers and enterprise. It's already a pain to have to invest in a 5000USD workstation every 4 or 5 years, if the price tag raise at 10000+ it's a no-no for most artist and even Architecture and Design firms. I've been working for 12 years in the industry, for international firms in 4 different countries and I've never seen an office ready to invest more than 5000/6000USD in a 3D workstation. These kind of investments will be made by dedicated 3D studios or engineering companies.

I sincerely hope I'm wrong but I have the feeling the future of GPU rendering is not as bright as I expected.

[t_3]

I don't see anything "cool" here.

i did indeed find it extremely cool, that roeland made the first "nightly build" of octane i'm aware of, to give us the opportunity doing first tests with a 1 week old new gpu design... despite all the other work they have in .nz

the rest is pure speculation...

[Leiurus]

@ t_3

So did I, all apologies if the brackets around the word has been misleading, a one-night rebuild is not cool, it's fantastic.

The very "uncool" thing is the direction Nvidia seem to take with their latest architecture products. Speculation it is indeed, I'm simply expressing my concerns and hopefully not predicting future.

They are influenced by a rather interesting thread related to this release I've read a few days ago, I can't spot it now as I'm not using my computer, I'll try to put an hand on it ASAP, would sincerely appreciate to have this forum members thoughts and inputs on it.

[t_3]

@ t_3

So did I, all apologies if the brackets around the word has been misleading, a one-night rebuild is not cool, it's fantastic.

The very "uncool" thing is the direction Nvidia seem to take with their latest architecture products. Speculation it is indeed, I'm simply expressing my concerns and hopefully not predicting future.

They are influenced by a rather interesting thread related to this release I've read a few days ago, I can't spot it now as I'm not using my computer, I'll try to put an hand on it ASAP, would sincerely appreciate to have this forum members thoughts and inputs on it.

no problem, i was (and still am ) speculating myself over and over again. that's just how it works with human; e.g. if you are very curious about things and have somewhat high expectations that might be not fullfilled

[Leiurus]

The thing is that the product performs very poorly on all platform, it hasn't been a cold shower for the Octane community only but for all users of GPU accelerated render engine.

The thread I'm refering to is this one, from a Blender users forum (don't know if it's allowed to post links rederecting to other similar websites, however the discussion thread treats of the gtx680 specifically and of GPU rendering in general, so I guess it should be OK. If not just let me know and I'll edit my post):

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?249681-Nvidia-GeForce-GTX680-released...

A particular post retained my attention, written by Stargeizer:

Fair Disclaimer: Yes, i know how hardware works low level, yes i'm not a "proper" coder, but i know my way with C, Lisp, VBA, PHP, and some Assembly code.

Guys, the Chip released by nvidia is the GK104. Nvidia starting with the Fermi family of chips (GFxxx) is doing chips specifically for the 3 platforms they sell: GeForce, Quadro and Tesla. The Chips ended with "0" are the flagship, and are most likely to be used with their high end parts (Quadro, Tesla and the High End Geforces)and the rest ending in a number 1-9 are designed to be used with the GeForce only, because are designed for gaming on mind. This makes the manufacture more economic and less prone to bad chips being produced. (Until now, you designed only one chip, and those who passed all tests were sold as High End , those who failed some tests were downclocked and have some internal parts disabled, and the most "burned out" were sold as entry level cards (cheapest).. This is what AMD and nvidia did for years).

But with Kepler, Nvidia decided that is more viable to create a Chip that is 100% oriented to gaming, another that is 100% oriented to Full OpenGL compilance, and another oriented for GPGPU computing. This way designs are simplified, thus gets cheaper to manufacture, the chips are less prone to failures, and drivers gets easier to code. Is a full win situation for Nvidia.

So, What have to do that with the fact that the GK104 (a.k.a Geforce 680) is slower on OpenCL and CUDA than the older counterparts? Simple: They upgraded the GAMING aspect of the Chip (literally in gaming they send AMD Tahiti to take vacations to the artic ) and to make sure the chip is viable, they simplified the GPGPU part of it, and powered the graphics part of it. This is highly technical so i'm not going to detail here (artists site, remember?? ). This allows 4 objetives: Better and cheaper Chip production, Focused and segmented market control, easier driver support for the chips, and capitalize more money per card. (Remember: THIS IS BUSINESS).

For the consumer, that may not be so great news, since this means you don't have anymore a product that excels to do 3 things at the same time, but 3 products that excels to do one thing and for the other 2 things, results are just average or low:

Geforce: Gaming card, requires good performance, quite some workaround for games, and good PhysX; doesn't require good GPGPU neither full OpenGL compilance, just DirectX compilance. Clocks are higher here.

Quadro: Professional Card, requires good performance, High precision drawing, full OpenGL and DirectX compilance, doesn't require good GPGPU, neither PhysX for gaming. Clocks are slower than gaming, but in applications gives more FPS and precision.

Tesla: It's all about GPGPU. The rest is secondary. Clocks tend to be slower here.

This is what is coming in the future for the GPU market. You want something, you pay for it. This is done because nvidia needs to protect their investments (they invested in raytracing, physics, gpu computing, and general purpose processing) and they expect to more people buys their Quadro and Tesla lines of products for GPGPU if you want to do these.

Of course AMD could change the game, but if you are a gamer, you sell the faster gaming card, not the faster GPGPU card. So is probably AMD will follow the same trend, since the gaming cards is what sells and produces more profits. Professional cards doesn't sell so much, but are not cheap.

TL;DR: It's all about business.

No one can predict future but from my point of view it seems to make sense. What do you guys think about it?

[tehfailsafe]

I'm fine with spending $2,000 on a card if it's works 4 times better than the $500 gaming card...