Now, as most of you probably know, NVIDIA acquired our company back in
early Q2 of 2016. So, you can imagine
how upset our Emerald overlords were when we decided to test 10 years worth
of AMD video cards before giving the
green team the same treatment. Well, we
finally put out the fire in our server room and just in time to bring you the
other side of the GPU performance coin.
Welcome to NVIDIA video cards through
the
ages. Rockat's Plus Force FX features
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out now at the link below. This is going to be a long video, so let's get right
into it. We used a 5960X test bench with
64 gigs of DDR4 RAM to isolate the
performance of the graphics cards. And we used the same benchmarks as AMD GPUs
through the ages for consistency. First up is NVIDIA's ancient flagship, the
8800 GTX. This card was freaking
revolutionary. It brought us an all new architecture called Tesla in the biggest
chip we had ever seen in a GPU code name
G80. It was built on the same 90mm
process node as its predecessor G71, but
was over twice as big with almost 2 and
1/2 times as many transistors devoted to
gaming performance, enabling new DirectX
10 features like SM 4.0 0 and a reduction in API overhead. CUDA, which
is still very much in use today and enabled developers to run generalpurpose
code on the graphics chip and the ability to run three cards at once in
SLI, which isn't to say that its standalone performance wasn't impressive
in its own right. G80 with its 768 megs
of GDDR3 RAM on a wide 384-bit bus
smacked around even two of NVIDIA's
previous flagships in SLI. And all of
that for a measly $100 more, which almost makes me feel better about the
cash grab 8800 Ultra that they released 6 months later for $230 more that was
basically the same thing with a fancy plastic shroud on it. The GeForce 8800
GT wasn't strictly speaking a new
flagship, but rather a weird Tesla
architecture refresh. It was the first built by NVIDIA on TSMC's shiny new 65
nanometer process. This node shrink allowed NVIDIA to drop power consumption
by 60 watts, reduce the die size, and
actually bump up the transistor count at the same time. a modest increase that
you guessed it. No, actually you probably didn't. The 8800 GT was on par
or slower than its predecessor almost
across the board due to its narrower memory bus and 16 fewer shader units.
Where people got excited was the price.
8800 GT was less than half the price of
8800 GTX. It was single slot, enabling
MATX users to run to an SLI with additional expansion cards, and it also
featured an onchip display engine.
Finally, it was the first consumer GPU with a PCI Express 2.0 interface, which
still to this day is barely saturated by
flagship graphics cards. The last flagship silicon before NVIDIA
transitioned to the GTX insert three numbers and maybe a couple letters here
nomenclature was G92, the beating heart
of the 9800 GTX Plus, a skew that
lowered NVIDIA's cost and bumped up performance over the architecturally
identical 9800 GTX by shrinking from 65
to 55 nm and boosting up the clock
speed. Now we get to the GTX 280. Yes,
we know it actually came out before that last one I was talking about, but deal
with it. So, forget everything we said earlier about 55 nanmter. The 280 built
on the mature 65nm process had a massive
576 mm die with 1.4 billion transistors.
And to put that insanity in context,
AMD's closest competitor, the 4870 had a
measly 959 million. And further driving up
complexity, it shipped with a minimum of 1 Gigabyte of graphics memory on a huge
512bit bus, something NVIDIA hasn't done
before or since on a consumer card. The
good news is that it absolutely crushed their previous generation efforts, even
delivering ample performance for stereoscopic 3D gaming, a big push for
NVIDIA at that time. We'll skip over the 300 series because all of these were
just crappy rebrands for notebooks and Best Buy PCs, meaning that the next real
GPU in line is the GTX 480 based on the
then all-new and now infamous Fermy
architecture. This was NVIDIA's first
swing at DirectX11 support, which is still widely used today. And this is
becoming a bit of a common theme. But while the new 40nm process allowed it to
be smaller than the GTX 280, it was still huge with a 529 millimeter die, a
wamping 3 billion transistors, and
support for DDDR5 memory, which again is
still widely used today. Interesting
fact, NVIDIA apparently thought it performed so well not just in gaming but
also in compute which was a big focus for Fermy that the largest configuration
of GF100 silicon never actually made its
way into a shipping product. Or maybe that was due to power constraints. Cuz
uh yeah, even with the theoretical
efficiency advantage of a smaller node, the 480 was such a barbecue that NVIDIA
provided a convenient grill on the face of the card to cook your eggs. Our next
contestant is the GTX 580, and it
featured an optimized and fully enabled Fermy dubbed GF 110. We've got most of
the usual improvements here. more VRAMm, higher clock speeds, and a slightly
smaller die, but nothing as exciting as video card cooking, which we mean in a
good way. 580 performed noticeably better than 480 while also managing
lower temperatures, noise, and power consumption. It was kind of like the GTX
480S, if that makes sense to the Apple fans out there. In the seventh corner of
our showdown, this must be a weird looking ring. We have the GTX 680. Ah,
yes. Goodbye Fermy. Hello Kepler. A lot
of things changed here. 4K 60 Hz output
was enabled via DisplayPort 1.2. PCI
Express 3.0 burst onto the scene with double the bandwidth of version two. The
die size shrunk way down to 294 mm. And
the GDDR5 got kicked up a notch to 6 GHz
thanks to a newly redesigned memory controller. Finally, we got it. Wait a
minute. We dropped down to a 256 bit
bus. Hold on a sec. Look at that code
name. NVIDIA top tier chips usually end
in a zero. Well, what they did was they
used AMD's complacency and a new 28nmter
process along with some dynamic power tricks called GPU Boost to crank up
performance so much that they gave us a
stepdown chip as a replacement for a top
tier one to save a buck and still manage to make it look like an upgrade. Not
that they passed any of those savings to the consumer. It was priced at $500,
same as the GTX 580. Though, I guess at least we got hardware H.264 encoding for
game stream and Shadow Play, G-Sync variable refresh rate technology, and
support for the Vulcan API. Now, the
next logical stop in our journey might seem like GTX 780, but in February 2013,
NVIDIA kicked convention and logic in the head with a Titan card based on the
chip that might have been GTX 680 in a
parallel universe where AMD had been keeping up, but instead it turned into
780 and then 780 Ti. So, we're going to
go with that since it was kind of the final form of the GK 110. Now, not much
changed product or feature-wise here.
Big Kepler was a much bigger, much
better 680 with a 90% bigger die, more
than double the transistors at a whopping 7 billion, and a $699 price tag
to go with it. Ouch. At least though,
this amounted to a sizable bump in performance over last generation's 680
in basically every application. In another unconventional move, NVIDIA
completely skipped over 800 series and went straight to 900. So, even though
the 980 and the 980 Ti were 9 months
apart, we're going to bunch them together cuz apparently that's what
everybody's doing. So, the 900 series was actually based on the same 28nm
process as Kepler. Shrinking silicon got
a lot harder in the early 2010s, but 2
years later, we were due for some kind of performance improvement. So, NVIDIA's
engineers brought us Maxwell. These GPUs
feature an integrated ARM CPU, which according to NVIDIA provides more
independence from a given systems primary CPU. The 980, again a step down
chip in big kid clothes, performs a little better than the Kepler GTX 780
Ti, which is an impressive feat. But the
big story is efficiency. It boasts an 85
watt lower TDP. The 980 Ti was a bit of
a different story, though. It rocked 8 billion transistors, an unheard of 601
square millimeter die, NVIDIA's biggest ever, 6 gigs of VRAM, and all the API
support you could ever want, except maybe DirectX12, depending on who you
ask. While Maxwell was marketed as fully
DirectX12 capable, the developer of Ashes of the Singularity, Oxide Games,
found that Maxwell cards performed very poorly with Async compute enabled, which
is kind of a big deal. So, all of this amounted to an astonishing performance
improvement considering the lack of process node change, and HDMI 2.0
support was a nice touch. Finally, we arrive at the modern day.
The GTX 1080 and 1080 Ti based on the
Pascal architecture. 10 series GPUs have
brought a lot to the table, including GDDR 5X at the top end, which increased
memory speeds to up to 10 GHz. Multiple
DisplayPort 1.4 four ports for 8K and
high refresh 4K monitor support, high
bandwidth SLI bridges, not to mention the elimination of 3-way and 4-way SLI
for gaming, and the smallest manufacturing node yet, 16 nanmter. 1080
launched in May of 2016 with 7.2 billion
transistors. And this is becoming a pattern now, a small performance
improvement over the 980 Ti. Then 1080
Ti followed with a much more substantial
bump. One of the biggest stories here though was really compute. Pascal was
designed to be a compute powerhouse with
the top tier GP100 chip going actually
unused in gaming products. So 1080 Ti
and its Titan analog were instead based
on GP 102, a new in between tier.
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description. Thanks for watching NVIDIA GPUs through the ages. If this video
sucked, you know what to do. But if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit the like button, or check out the link to
where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description. Also linked down
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forum, which you should totally join.