You guys should educate yourselves before speaking as an authority on technical subjects. You simply miss the point in so many ways. But bottom line is that insiders know that there are many, many applications being written right now where IEEE double precision floats are reqired. You will see the first applicaitons in scientific and engineering apps, things like CAD model FEA analysis simply BEG for acceleration and have for years. Then there's image processing, NLP, etc etc etc. I don't have time to enumerate the many apps where this will be big but bottom line is that you are confused. Take a breather, get your college education you put off to surf the web and come back being able to talk sense rather than spew balony and we all will be the better for it.

This may be the most abreviation-soaked "what does it mean in the real world?" article ever. This is the kind of thing that gives techs a bad name. ;o)

We are always faced with a crossroads when it comes to technological innovation. From 16-32-64 bit. From CLI to GUI. Yes you can include now from SP to DP. At this moment there are few things that will take advantage of double precision, but that's partially due to the lack of relatively cheap DP capable equipment. Particularly DP equipment that isn't a nightmare to code on.

The areas it will likely be used in, research, educational environs, et al, are not like the retail sector. The retail sector is too cheap to move from 32-64bit software & drivers right now. Look at the research realm, and ask yourself how many mid-high end research environs still use 32bit. I know of several friends in particle physics alone that switched before MS had even created XP x64 edition (much less Vista) because of the advantages. I know they will love DP in their calculations (as well as those involved in Fluid Dynamics and numerous other engineering fields).

The present always seems like enough, unless you were looking for more in the first place. The present always seems like enough, until you're dragged into the next generation and realize what you were missing. I doubt single precision will be enough for anyone that could, just could, benefit in a tiny from double precision.

Try it ... on anything but the most trivial scenes it breaks horribly. Even double precision is only barely adequate in some cases (think intersecting isosurfaces)

For scientific apps, single precision is at best good enough for a rough guess of the answer. You can see this by glancing over papers in the relevant fields - the only people doing single precision work are the people using GPGPUs. And the only use their code gets is to show some factor of improvement for some particular configuration that doesn't break when using single precision. Anyone doing the "real" work in the field has requirements that can't be satisfied by single precision.

To put this in context, I'm in the group of people using (or trying to use) GPUs for scientific applications, rather than the group doing the real work. Most of my time is spent trying to find parts of the problem that take up a lot of time and don't break under single precision.

Finally some technical info here at the Inq, instead of the ordinary biased trash.


GTX 280 GTX 260 9800 GX2 9800 GTX 8800 GTS 512 8800 GT 
Stream Processors 240 192 256 128 128 112 
Texture Address / Filtering 80 / 80 64 / 64 128 / 128 64 / 64 56 / 56 56 / 56 
ROPs 32 28 32 16 16 16 
Core Clock 602MHz 576MHz 600MHz 675MHz 650MHz 600MHz 
Shader Clock 1296MHz 1242MHz 1500MHz 1690MHz 1625MHz 1500MHz 
Memory Clock 1107MHz 999MHz 1000MHz 1100MHz 970MHz 900MHz 
Memory Bus Width 512-bit 448-bit 256-bit x 2 256-bit 256-bit 256-bit 
Frame Buffer 1GB 896MB 1GB 512MB 512MB 512MB 
Transistor Count 1.4B 1.4B 1.5B 754M 754M 754M 
Manufacturing Process TSMC 65nm TSMC 65nm TSMC 65nm TSMC 65nm TSMC 65nm TSMC 65nm 
Price Point $650 $400 $500 $300 $280 $170-$230

To Read, All first numbers are 280, next 260 number, then 9800X2, as in first list of Card Numbers each order is eaxactly same order of cards compared. 
Theres So Much to remember, Like heart, Brain, Kidney & lung transplant w/free Pancreas, Where Do You Start.
PHYS X is big Booster, Some Vantage Score (Whicher everone it is ops/s=125,000) from 20,000 range is unbelievable, yet apparently true. Just Having:PhysX is More Key Than Any ToolBar Hardware/Math report indicates. 4870 beats 9800 by $100 & higher Vantage number(S), so better 16 ROPS, Yet NO PhysX in ethier, How Amaturish. 280 does lots more with less stream processors than 9800 While stronger 4780 announce 970 Mhz/s Core coming. Go,Go Figure.Save Your Brains, you Might Need Them.
SomeOne Gonna Have to Mix Cake in Lotta varieties to Find true TOP.

Stole My Own Number chart. drashek

i believe NV didn't disable the shader, rather, they can make those parts with 1-2 defective shader working and sell them.