Article:
Almost Time for Fermi, Slide Details Leaked

Some more information has come to light regarding nVidia’s long awaited and possibly too late Fermi platform of GPUs due for official release on the 26th of March, just one week from now. This information was leaked from official sources at the firm, showing off some internal slides detailing some of the details that the higher end Fermi cards will share and some specific ones from the GTX 480.

The first slide shows that the GTX 480 will come sporting 1536MB of GDDR5 memory with a 384 bit interface. Power connectors will be a combo 6pin and 8pin, with a power requirement of around 300 watts. SLI will be possible in up to a three way configuration making for a rather powerful but expensive setup, though you’ll need a lot of room for all these cards also, as they’re going to weigh in at a huge 10.5 inches each! The final details on this first slide are that the card will – unsurprisingly – utilise a dual slot fan configuration, offering outputs in the way of dual port DVI, and a singular mini-HDMI.

It’s a shame that core speed and shader counts weren’t released, I’m sure the slide before or after this one would have contained these details. This makes it rather hard to make performance judgements, but previews of the card so far have marked it as being faster than a 5870, but slower than ATI’s dual chip 5890.

The second slide isn’t quite so detailed, with some speculative information along with features listed. In reality it comes across more like one that will receive a round of applause and mutual back patting in an nVidia board meeting than something that was designed to be shown off to the public.

The first line of the slide’s table says “World’s Fastest GPU” with a tick under the GTX 480 column, and a red X in the HD 5870 column - oh no they di’ent! The second column gives nVidia more ticks than the ATI card when discussing “DirectX 11 with Fast Tessellation. It seems that while the 5870 may be able to handle tessellation – you know, like it’s been shown to do with their already released hardware – but not quite as good as the GTX 480, as showcased by the triple ticking.