Reviewer's Guide
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Reviewer’s Guide NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 280 GeForce® GTX 260 Graphics Processing Units TABLE OF CONTENTS NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 200 GPUS.....................................................................3 Two Personalities, One GPU ........................................................................................................ 3 Beyond Gaming ............................................................................................................................. 3 GPU-Powered Video Transcoding............................................................................................... 3 GPU Powered Folding@Home..................................................................................................... 4 Industry wide support for CUDA.................................................................................................. 4 Gaming Beyond ............................................................................................................................. 5 Dynamic Realism.......................................................................................................................... 5 Introducing GeForce GTX 200 GPUs ........................................................................................... 9 Optimized PC and Heterogeneous Computing.......................................................................... 9 GeForce GTX 200 GPUs – Architectural Improvements.......................................................... 10 Power Management Enhancements.......................................................................................... 11 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 and GTX 260 Specifications ........................................................... 12 GeForce GTX 200 Board Design................................................................................................ 13 Features and Benefits: GeForce GTX 200 GPUs ...................................................................... 14 Reference Performance Results HERE..................................................................................... 16 SLI Performance.......................................................................................................................... 18 NVIDIA HybridPower Technology .............................................................................................. 20 PureVideo HD............................................................................................................................... 20 INSTALLATION GUIDE .....................................................................................22 CPU ............................................................................................................................................ 22 Motherboards............................................................................................................................. 22 Power Supply ............................................................................................................................. 22 Windows Vista Service Pack 1................................................................................................... 22 Graphics Driver .......................................................................................................................... 22 Game Benchmarking ................................................................................................................. 22 Appendix A ................................................................................................................................... 23 NVIDIA CONTACT INFORMATION...................................................................24 2 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 200 GPUs Two Personalities, One GPU Built with over 1.4 billion transistors, NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 280 and 260 GPUs are the largest and most complex GPUs ever created. Featuring 240 shader processors, 80 texture processors, and 1 GB of frame buffer, the GeForce GTX 280 offers peerless performance in all of today’s hottest titles. But it is more than just the world’s fastest GPU. Thanks to NVIDIA’s CUDA technology, the GeForce GTX 280 is also an immensely powerful, many-core, parallel processor. When operating in computing mode, the GeForce GTX 280 becomes a fully programmable multiprocessor with 240 cores, on-die shared memory, random read and write capability, and 1 GB of dedicated memory. In computing mode, the GeForce GTX 280 turns an ordinary PC into a miniature supercomputer, providing almost one teraflop of horsepower for advanced visual computing, video transcoding, physics acceleration, and scientific computing. Beyond Gaming With over 70 million CUDA-enabled GeForce 8 and 9 Series GPUs shipped to market, numerous rich-media and visual-computing applications are becoming CUDA-enabled. These applications are joining the ever-growing trend of apps that are enjoying phenomenal performance speedups that started with high-end professional and scientific applications upon the initial release of CUDA. GPU-Powered Video Transcoding Transcoding is one of the most time-consuming desktop applications today. Transcoding a movie from one format to another can take half a day, making the process extremely unfriendly to the end user. Faster CPUs can reduce the time by minor increments, but the final waiting time is still many hours. With CUDA technology, video transcoding time can be cut by up to 18×, reducing waiting time from hours to minutes. The RapidHD video transcoder from Elemental Technologies uses CUDA to achieve this exact feat, allowing video to be quickly converted from one format to another, making them easier to share and enjoy. GPU Powered Folding@Home Stanford University’s Folding@Home client allows the home PC user to perform protein simulations to help scientists better understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases. Now powered by CUDA, Folding@Home will tap into the power of the GPU, allowing tens of millions of GeForce users advance medical science with this distributed program. Even if 1% of NVIDIA users participated in Folding@Home, it would offer a stratospheric increase in the total computing power of the Folding@Home distributed cluster. Industry wide support for CUDA Countless math-intensive applications benefit from CUDA and the power of the GPU. Figure 1 shows the incredible speedups achieved for both consumer and professional applications. Appendix A lists references and details for these applications. Figure 1. GPU Speedups Versus CPU 4 Gaming Beyond Today’s games have great visuals, but they do not behave with great realism. Animation is often unconvincing, particle effects do not take into account of physics, and geometry is static and unchanging. GeForce GTX 200 GPUs take gaming beyond static realism, into dynamic realism. Dynamic Realism While prior-generation GPUs could deliver real-time images that appeared true-to-life in many cases, frame rates could drop to unplayable levels in complex scenes with significant animation, numerous physical effects, and multiple characters. The combination of the sheer shader processing power of GeForce GTX 200 GPUs and NVIDIA’s new GPU PhysX technology facilitates many new high-end graphics effects including: Convincing facial animation Multiple ultra-high polygon characters in complex environments Advanced volumetric effects like smoke, fog, and mist Fluid and cloth simulation Fully simulated physical effects such as live debris, explosions, and fires. Physical weather effects such as accumulating snow and water, sand storms, soaking, drying, dampening, overheating, and freezing Better lighting for dramatic and spectacular effect, including ambient occlusion, global illumination, soft shadows, color bleeding, indirect lighting, and accurate reflections. In Figure 2 below, you can see a comparison of our previous “Adrianne” demo used to highlight the capabilities of the GeForce 8-series GPUs to our new Medusa demo used to demonstrate the power of the GeForce GTX 200 GPUs. Adrianne was a single, complex character existing primarily in a cubemap environment. Prior- generation GPUs only had enough horsepower to render a single complex character, like Adrianne, in a scene. With the GeForce GTX 200 GPUs, we have enough horsepower to render two characters (each more complex than Adrianne) within an incredibly complex environment all on one GPU. 5 Figure 2. Facial Expressions in Medusa Numerous "blendshapes" are used in the Medusa demo. Blendshapes are the facial poses that are combined to produce facial expressions in animation. Hollywood movies can use a hundred or more of these blendshapes per character to capture all the nuances of human expression. Previous demos like Adrianne were able to maintain about 25-30 blendshapes with only five active in any individual frame. In the Medusa demo, the Medusa and warrior characters each have 130 blendshapes with over 30 active in an individual frame. Looking at Adrianne, you'll notice her expressions were a bit "plastic" looking. She had a few extreme expressions of happy, sad, puzzled, etc., but the Medusa characters show a much broader range of emotion. We can now create scenes where the characters are truly acting. We used a key DirectX 10 feature called “stream out” extensively in Medusa. When using the same model several times in the same frame, stream out allows processing the geometry for the model once, streaming it out to local video memory, and then reusing the processed geometry over and over. The characters in Medusa must be rendered