New slide notes reveal further sneaky shenanigans from NVIDIA.
Since we had to sit through the stomach-churning presentation of the latest Nvidia renamed product, we feel it is only right to make you do the same. With that in mind, we bring you the latest from Nvidia, the G92, this time renamed to the Geforce GTX 200M.
Yes, another two-year old card, this time renamed to GT200 class, but once again, there is nothing new here. It is the same old same old. Nvidia can't make a GT200 based laptop part, so it is pretend time, and let's hope no one will point this out in a public way...
That said, they claim it is all new, but don't believe it, it is just a 9800 series with a coat of paint, which is an 8800GT with a coat of paint.
The press slide deck was 21 pages, and since we can't publish it, we will just share the notes we got on our unofficial briefing. Prepare to not be awed, it is hard to make recycled material interesting, especially on the fourth time around. That said, there are some hilarious moments in this deck, being vain and desperate does make a company do strange things, but we never thought they would stoop this low. Or make this many maths errors.
Slide 1 is a splash screen showing that the GT200M and GT100M parts are going to be discussed. Slide 2 is marketshare numbers showing that Nvidia has about two thirds of the market in notebooks with discrete GPUs, ATI the other third. They don't want you to know that discrete is about one third of the market, the two thirds without is utterly ruled by Intel and ATI. Nvidia has a miniscule share of this market, and you can usually tell those notebooks by the vertical lines on the screen shortly before they turn black.
Slide 3 is where the funny numbers show up, they claim that 55nm is the 'perfect process' for G92. Funny, we thought those were bad too. Nvidia claims 50 per cent higher performance and 80 per cent higher performance per sq mm. Given how semiconductors are made, and the roughly 30 per cent area change between a 65nm G92 and a 55nm G92, these are the exact same numbers, Nvidia just hopes you are dumb enough not to realise that fact. Sadly, this is a good bet.
They claim higher clocks, full shader (128) count, and the same power budget as before. This is the long way of saying they shrunk the die, and are using the power savings to increase performance. What a shock! This is followed by the claim that the G92 is a 'superior architecture for notebooks'. I guess that means that the newer GT200 architecture must blow for said notebooks, otherwise wouldn't they be touting that?
Slide 4 is a list of notebook segments, enthusiast, high performance, performance and mainstream. Enthusiast used to be 9800M GTX and 9800M GTS, but those have been replaced by the GTX 280M and GTX 260M respectively. Same die though, just a new name and much higher price tag. High performance sees the 9800M GS replaced by the GTS 160M, performance had the 9600M GT but is now GT130M.
In a sleazy PR move, they are trying to claim the 9300 integrated is a discrete part now, but thankfully they are not using the moronic name 'motherboard GPU' any more. In any case the integrated 9300M G for the mainstream segment is now called the G110M. It is still integrated, and still blows for gaming.
We then go on to Slide 5 where they claim that the GTX 280M is now the 'unambiguous performance leader' because it is up to 50 per cent faster than the 9800M GT in some tests that they refuse to specify. It also has SLI and Cuda, but since those are trademarked terms, what can you say besides 'duh'.
The next slide, 6 if you are paying attention, is a bunch of graphs comparing it to the ATI Radeon Mobility 4870, and claiming 'up to 30 per cent faster'. There are nine tests shown, one is 30 per cent faster, two are a hair over 20 per cent faster, and the rest cluster around 10 per cent faster. As usual, the graphs start out at 90 per cent so they look really impressive if your mathematical education ended at age nine.
In any case, they do not specify the notebook, don't even attempt to say that it is the same hardware, and is very likely a cooked benchmark set with very dissimilar hardware and hand-picked games.
Slide 7 shows more or less the same set of vague and cooked benchmarks for a 4870X2 vs 2 280Ms. This one is much worse for averages though, one 30 per cent, one 20 per cent, the rest in the teens or below. We would be interested in seeing the ATI version of this slide, it should utterly kill Nvidia. This is a weak showing.
Slide 8 does the same for the 260M vs the 4850M, but this time they proudly proclaim 20 per cent better, but the average looks to dip below 10 per cent, with many showing no lead over the ATI parts. It amazes me that this is the best they could do with a tame audience that won't question them, hand-picked benchmarks, and no specs given. Sad.
We then move back to hard specs, intermixed with marketing bullpoop. The hard specs on the 280M are 128 'cores', 585MHz, 1463Mhz and 950MHz for the graphics, processor and memory clocks. The memory is 1G of GDDR3 at 256 bits wide. Save some power, gain a bottleneck. The 260M has 112 'cores', 550MHz, 1375MHz and 950MHz, the rest is the same.
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Issue: 107 | December, 2009