Nvidia and AMD launch new salvos in graphics chip battle

Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices are both launching new graphics chips today. Ho hum, you say? Well, strap down. These chips are going to define the state-of-the-art in graphics and will determine which chip maker has the high ground as both head into a looming battle with Intel.

One of the surprises of this latest cycle of competition is that AMD may have the superior strategy. But before we go there, let’s talk about Nvidia first. Nvidia is launching the first chip in the company’s new series of GeForce GTX 200 series graphics chips. The GeForce GTX 280 is a screamer at graphics, but it also represents one of the leading edge designs in the semiconductor industry. The GeForce GTX 260 costs less and has slightly less performance for the budget-minded gamers.

The GTX 280 chip has 1.4 billion transistors, compared to 754 million transistors in the GeForce 8800 GT released in October, 2007. By comparison, the PlayStation 3’s graphics chip from Nvidia has only 300 million transistors. Those numbers indicate the scale of the engineering project, which is akin to the Manhattan Project that put together the atomic bomb (Well, that’s my guess, considering that Intel made the same claim about the Pentium Pro’s design in the 1990s). Interactive entertainment is clearly leading technology forward the way that the space program did in the 1960s.

The GTX 280 graphics chip also has 240 processing cores, or brains, on one piece of silicon, compared to 112 for the GT 8800. Those cores are capable of processing thousands of threads, or independent pieces of code. It’s a massive parallel computing machine with the ability to calculate 933 gigaflops per second. (That’s a lot).

John Montrym, one of the chief architects at Nvidia, told me that this generation is much more efficient in terms of power and processing power compared to the last generation, which consumed slightly more power when in full operation. At standby, the new chip consumes just a third of the power as the old one. The GTX 280 offers 50 percent more gaming performance than the last generation, and it can be used with a total of three graphics cards inside a single computer in what Nvidia calls SLI mode. Montrym said the chips will also have built-in support for physics — such as better cloth simulations — using Nvidia’s recently acquired PhysX technology.

Jason Paul, an Nvidia GPU product manager, said that the game “Crysis,” the bellwether game in terms of performance demands, runs far better on this GPU compared to the past generation. The scene at left is from Ubisoft’s upcoming “Far Cry 2″ game, where the combination of physics to make the leaves of jungle foliage move and the ability to render all of those tree leaves will make for stunning graphics.

AMD, meanwhile, has pursued a very different strategy and is launching a series of chips over the next eight weeks or so that compete across the board against Nvidia’s line-up.

One the one hand, it has created a powerful chip, code named the RV770, that consumes just 110 watts, less than half of Nvidia’s chip. Versions of that chip will be available at different dates, with the ATI Radeon HD 4870 coming on July 8 and the ATI Radeon HD 4850 coming June 25. AMD claims that its chip runs at a teraflop, faster than Nvidia’s even though AMD’s chip is smaller, has faster memory, and uses less power than Nvidia’s chip.

AMD says another advantage is that it can get by with a narrower 256-megabit data path from graphics to memory, while Nvidia uses more.