EVGA GeForce GTX 660 SC review

Posted by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 09/17/2012 06:04 AM [ 5 comment(s) ]

The graphics architecture that is Kepler

The graphics architecture that is Kepler

As you can understand, the massive memory partitions, bus-width and combination of GDDR5 memory (quad data rate) allow the GPU to work with a very high framebuffer bandwidth (effective). Let's again put most of the data in a chart to get an idea and better overview of changes:

Graphics card	GeForce GTX 660	GeForce GTX 660 Ti	GeForce GTX 670	GeForce GTX 680	GeForce GTX 690
Fabrication node	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm
Shader processors	960	1344	1344	1536	3072
Streaming Multiprocessors (SM)	5	7	7	8	16
Texture Units	80	112	112	128	128x2
ROP units	24	24	32	32	32x2
Graphics Clock (Core)	980/1033 MHz	915 / 980MHz	915 / 980MHz	1006/1058MHz	915/1019MHz
Shader Processor Clock	980/1033 MHz	915 / 980MHz	915 / 980MHz	1006/1058MHz	915/1019MHz
Memory Clock / Data rate MHz	1502 / 6008 MHz	1502 / 6008 MHz	1502 / 6008 MHz	1502 / 6008 MHz	1502 / 6008 MHz
Graphics memory	2048 MB	2048 MB	2048 MB	2048 MB	4096 MB
Memory interface	192-bit	192-bit	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit
Memory bandwidth	144 GB/s	144 GB/s	192 GB/s	192 GB/s	192 GB/s
Power connectors	1x6-pin PEG	2x6-pin PEG	2x6-pin PEG	2x6-pin PEG	2x8-pin PEG
Max board power (TDP)	140 Watts	150 Watts	170 Watts	170 Watts	300 Watts
Recommended Power supply	450 Watts	450 Watts	500 Watts	550 Watts	750 Watts
GPU Thermal Threshold	98 degrees C	98 degrees C	98 degrees C	98 degrees C	98 degrees C

So we talked about the core clocks, specifications and memory partitions. Obviously there's a lot more to talk through the GPU architecture for example. To understand a graphics processor you simply need to break it down into pieces to better understand it.

Let's first look at the raw data that most of you can understand and grasp. This bit will be about the Kepler architecture, if you're not interested in g33k talk by all means please browse to the next page.

ASUS GTX 660

So above we see the GK106 block diagram that entails the Kepler architecture. Let's break it down into bits and pieces.

A fully operating GK106 will have:

960 CUDA processors (Shader cores)
192 CUDA core clusters (per SM).
5 geometry units
3 raster Units
80 Texture Units
24 ROP engines
192-bit GDDR5 memory bus
DirectX 11.1

Above thus a fully operating GK106 as used on the GTX 660. So the more important thing to focus on are the SM (block of shader processors) clusters (or SMX as NVIDIA likes to call it for the GTX 660, which has 192 Shader processors. That's radically different from Fermi, the GeForce GTX 580 for example had 32 shader processors per SM cluster. 960 : 192 = 5 Shader clusters (SMs). Let's blow up one such cluster:

GeForce GTX 680

Above the block diagram for a single Shader processor cluster, aka SM or SMX as NVIDIA now calls it. The SMX has quite a bit more bite in terms of shader, texture and geometry processing. 192 CUDA cores, that's six times the number of cores per SM opposed to Fermi. Now, at the end of the pipeline we run into the ROP (Raster Operation) engine and the GTX 660 again has 24 engines for features like pixel blending and AA, the GTX 660 Ti has 24 of these activated.

There's a total of 80 texture filtering units available for the GK106. The math is simple here, each SM has 16 texture units tied to it.

GeForce GTX 580 has 16 SMs X 4 Texture units = 64
GeForce GTX 660 Ti has 5 SMs X 16 Texture units = 80
GeForce GTX 660 Ti has 7 SMs X 16 Texture units = 112
GeForce GTX 670 has 7 SMs X 16 Texture units = 112
GeForce GTX 680 has 8 SMs X 16 Texture units = 128

Above the GK105 host interface - The Gigathread engine, three GPCs, three memory controllers, the ROP partitions, a 384 KB L2 cache. ROP partitions are nearby to the L2 cache, Each shader cluster then is tied to L1 and a shared L2 cache. Shading performance is going be increased quite bit, geometry performance will get a nice boost as well.

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