Nvidia's 400 series intentionally crippled by Nvidia

[John P. Myers]

In an effort to increase the sales of their Tesla C2050 and Tesla C2070 cards, Nvidia has intentionally crippled the FP64 compute ability by a whopping 75%. If left alone, the GTX 480 would have outperformed ATI's 5870 by at least 20%. Here is a link to Nvidia's own forum where we have been discussing this. You will see there is also a CUDA-Z performance screenshot confirming it, on top of the confirmation by Nvidia's own staff. Nvidia is not publically making anyone aware that this is the case. Anandtech also snuck the update onto page 6 of a 20 page review of the GTX 480/470.

[skier]

well based on your posts i assume you are from nvidia, i think this sums up the whole thread simply:

full-speed double precision performance is a feature we reserve for our professional customers. Consumer applications have little use for double precision, so this does not really affect GeForce users. Having differentiated features and pricing is actually fairer for all. Given the option of enabling all professional features on GeForce and having gamers pay for them, or disabling them on GeForce and offering a more compelling price, we feel the latter is the better choice.

doesnt effect performance for an end-user and keeps cost down, why not cut DPP, i'd like to see actual performance numbers between 100% and 25% DPP tho..

[John P. Myers]

The reason is simple. The chip itself still supports 1/2 FP32 DP speed. They went through EXTRA trouble to disable it by software (that's right. it's not a physical crippling), therefore, their excuse of cost is illogical. the GT200 chips weren't crippled and the C1060 sold just fine. Performance absolutely is effected if you happen to crunch for BOINC or any other application that makes use of GPU compute abilities. No, this doesn't apply to gamers, only the 4+ million people around the world trying to advance the scientific and medical knowledge of mankind.

[skier]

meh. I couldn't care less. not like i'm ever going to have one, and they're still compute monsters

[werty316]

meh. I couldn't care less. not like i'm ever going to have one, and they're still compute monsters

DItto for me sinec the heat and power results aren't to my liking.