Nvidia GeForce GTX 200

Family Portrait

The new naming system Nvidia selected for their graphics cards on G200 chip, where the model number is placed after the suffix, seems pretty reasonable and gives a lot of flexibility with adding new models in the future. Unlike the old system that has reached its logical limit, the new one will allow to continue with new Nvidia GeForce generations, such as GTX 300, GTX 400, etc. The new Nvidia GeForce GTX 200 was at launch represented by two models: the flagship GeForce GTX 280 and less powerful GeForce GTX 260 with the recommended prices of $649 and $399 respectively. However, constantly growing pressure from ATI forced Nvidia to lower the first price to $499 so that this product could compete against ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2, and the second price point – to $299 in order to compete against ATI Radeon HD 4870.

As a result, the portrait of the new Nvidia GeForce GTX 200 family looks as follows:

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

The first thing that catches your eye right away is the size and complexity of the new core. Here Nvidia is an indisputable leader. They are in fact the first graphics chip developer to exceed 1 billion transistors. Together with not the most advanced 65nm production process the company strategy of designing highest performing monolithic GPUs paid back: G200 frequency potential turned out considerably lower than that of G92, while the chip size exceeded all possible limits.

A standard 300mm silicon wafer can accommodate less than 100 G200 chips, which significantly increases the production costs and lowers the yields. As a result, G200 based graphics cards cannot possibly be cheap. According to Rick Bergman, the head of AMD graphics division,  G200 has every chance to become the last monolithic graphics core for the premium market segment, because further performance increase within Nvidia’s strategic concept will require enormous investments and will inevitably result in even higher end-product pricing.

While ATI used GDDR5 chips that can work at extremely high frequencies to achieve high memory bandwidth and at the same time keep the PCB layout simple, Nvidia chose a familiar solution and increased the memory bus width to 512bit. As a result, they managed to hit record-breaking results with their flagship model, but it inevitably increased the complexity of the PCB layout and raised the production costs. This is another reason why Nvidia GeForce G200 graphics cards can not be cheap and any price reduction will mean financial losses for the manufacturer.

G200 has 240 ALU, 80 TMU and 32 RBE, although Nvidia’s texture processors architecture makes the performance of these 80 TMU about half as fast. It is interesting that the dual-chip Nvidia GeForce 9800 GX2 seemed to be much better “armed” than GeForce GTX 280 in terms of both: the computational potential as well as texture processors performance.  It may also turn out faster in games, which we are going to check later.

Trying to increase the texture performance of their new G200, Nvidia acted pretty wastefully. However, since Nvidia works very closely with game developers it could be their indirect attempt to influence them, since the tendency towards multi-platform gaming titles has been growing pretty strong for quite some time now. As a result, they use fewer graphics effects requiring fast TMU, since the graphics processors of contemporary gaming consoles are much weaker in this aspect than the PC GPUs.

As for the features of specific Nvidia GeForce GTX 200 models from the new family, they obviously differ by their clock speeds and the number of active GPU units. As a result, Nvidia may be making their GeForce GTX 260 solutions using not only some of the G200 chips that failed to meet the maximum frequency potential requirements, but also those that have several defective functional units. From the functional standpoint, this solution looks just as good as ATI Radeon HD 4870, at least first glance. Besides, they are currently priced very closely – somewhere around $300.

So, despite pretty surprising for 2008 combination of computational and texturing capacities, Nvidia G200 still has to boast relatively good potential, but only the benchmark results will be able to reveal that. Today we are not going to dwell on gaming performance, but will discuss in detail the new Nvidia GPU architecture and see how new it actually is.