Topic: GK104: nVidia's Kepler to be the First Mining Card? (Read 8346 times)

WOW. This would be heaven if true.

Can you say 14 GPU Nvidia mining rig with a relatively cheap motherboard ?

The only thing that may kill it is the crap MH/$ value but prices will drop anyway ...

Per the NDA lifted today, this was a blatant error. The ALUs will run at 1006-1058 MHz, which should allow this card to mine at an upper bound of 450-470 Mh/s (80-85% the speed of a HD 7970.) This is assuming of course thar Nvidia added a BFI_INT-like instruction to the architecture, which is not certain. If not, performance would be much lower...

Newegg listed "Shader clock: 2012MHz".

Interesting... 1536 ALUs at 2012MHz would give it more processing power than a HD 6990. Either the GTX 680 is going to be the fastest GPU for mining, or it is a blatant mistake from Newegg or the microarchitecture has undisclosed limitations that would prevent exploiting all this apparent power.

I hope AMD counters with a drop in 7970 prices.  If they do, I just might go with some 7970s instead of waiting for the 7990.

549 Euros for a card w/ retail price of $500?  Ouch.  Guess some people had to have it.

549 Euros for a card w/ retail price of $500?  Ouch.  Guess some people had to have it.

I don't understand the people buying brand new 7970's thinking the resell value will be better, it's going to lose a few hundred $ in value the first few months, while a 5970 still maintains the majority if not all of it's value if you bought one when the 7970 came out.  Anyway more for me I guess.

First, we launch a single run of the Central Park level at 1920x1080 in DirectX 11 mode, without anti-aliasing. We get a 72.3 FPS result, and we observe GPU Boost pushing the GeForce GTX 680 between 1071 and 1124 MHz during the run (up from the 1006 MHz base).

The top chart shows that we’re bouncing around the upper end of GK104’s power ceiling. So, we increase the target board power by 15%. The result is a small jump to 74.2 FPS, along with clocks that vacillate between 1145 and 1197 MHz.

Figuring the power target boost likely freed up some thermal headroom, we then increase the offset by 100 MHz, which enables even better performance—76.1 FPS. This time, however, we get a constant 1215 MHz. Nvidia says this is basically as fast as the card will go given our workload and the power limit.

So why not up the target power again? At 130% (basically, the interface’s 225 W specification), performance actually drops to 75.6 FPS, and the graph over time shows a constant 1202 MHz. We expected more performance, not less. What gives? This is where folks are going to find a problem with GPU Boost. Because outcome is dependent on factors continually being monitored, performance does change over time. As a GPU heats up, current leakage increases. And as that happens, variables like frequency and voltage are brought down to counter a vicious cycle.

The effect is similar to heat soak in an engine. If you’re on a dynamometer doing back to back pulls, you expect to see a drop in horsepower if you don’t wait long enough between runs. Similarly, it’s easy to get consistently-high numbers after a few minute-long benchmarks. But if you’re gaming for hours, GPU Boost cannot be as effective.

Our attempt to push a 200 MHz offset demonstrates that, even though this technology tries to keep you at the highest frequency under a given power ceiling, increasing both limits still makes it easy to exceed the board’s potential and seize up.

Sliding back a bit to a 150 MHz offset gives us stability, but performance isn’t any better than the 100 MHz setting. No doubt, it’ll take more tinkering to find the right overclock with GPU Boost in the mix and always on.

Kepler’s shaders run at the processor’s frequency (1:1)

Newegg listed "Shader clock: 2012MHz".

Interesting... 1536 ALUs at 2012MHz would give it more processing power than a HD 6990. Either the GTX 680 is going to be the fastest GPU for mining, or it is a blatant mistake from Newegg or the microarchitecture has undisclosed limitations that would prevent exploiting all this apparent power.

So according to that article, it is horrible at FP ops, and the 7970 beats the pants off of it in that benchmark. Wonder if they compensated by giving better integer ops? One can only hope....