Finally I have a chance to write my next blog! Home and work kept me so damn busy, but here I am! So about a year ago, Nvidia released a chip that would be significantly better than their Fermi and Kepler chips.
Ladies and Gents, I present to you, Maxwell! Their latest and greatest design at only 28 nm. With this new chips, Nvidia put the focus on power efficiency. This chip was first used in the famous GTX 750 and the Legendary, 750ti. The more popular choice for games as they got all the horse power they needed, without having to worry about an external power adapter that would trip the power of their neighborhood. Although the GTX 760ti is still using Kepler chips. So what is the difference between Maxwell and Kepler? Well apart from being on more of an electricity diet, it boasts with a better TDP(thermal design power), meaning less heat generated by power. It has a better TDP than AMD R9 290X. Maxwell has less CUDA cores per SM(streaming multiprocessors), but there are now twice as many SMs (the Kepler has 8 SMs, for 1536 CUDA cores; the Maxwell GM204 has 16 SMMs, for 2048 cores). Each SMM is further split into four blocks of CUDA cores, each with four warp schedulers, and other dedicated scheduling and buffering hardware. Basically this means greater processing power per SM, as the saying goes: Less is more! Furthermore Maxwell uses what they call Dynamic Super Resolution. This means your GPU renders games at 4K and then the GPU filters and downsamples the output frames to your screen resolution. With Dynamic Super Resolution, the game actually thinks it’s being played on a 4K monitor so it display as 4K, while rendering only 1080p.
The next one is totally awesome. It is called: Voxel Global Illumination! A.k.a GI, this is what makes a game look more realistic, or totally computer faked. Almost like a low budget IMAX movie. Although this technology is really expensive, the new Maxwell chip supports it. For reference, go check out the Unreal Engine 4 “Elemental” tech demo video on youtube.
There is a few more to tell, but I won’t go into many more details, but one thing I can say is Maxwell also gives better MFAA. In short, this technique can offer image quality that approaches 8xAA, while only costing around 4xAA in terms of processing time.
So the difference between Maxwell and Kepler? Kepler does it faster and better, but Maxwell does it fast, more realistic and with more dimensions and overall makes it look better, put with less power usage.
In my next blog I will compare the older but famous 750ti with the best graphic card up to date. Follow me to automatically receive the update on my post.
Cheers
440titaniumheatsink 