14 DAY TRIAL // NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 750 (Ti) graphics card(s) may be powered by the Maxwell architecture, but the GM107 GPU is a pretty weak example, all told. Which is why any information, no matter how speculative, on the GeForce 800 series is getting attention.
Thanks to some folks at PCTuning Tyden.cz and Expreview, we at least have some (totally unconfirmed) information to go on.
Said information is that the GeForce GTX 880 video card will be powered by a graphics processing unit called GM204.
Said graphics processing unit will have 3,200 CUDA cores, 200 TMUs (texture mapping units), 32 ROPs (raster operating units) and a GDDR5 memory interface of 256 bits.
The specifications are pretty odd really, with very few ROPs and the 256-bit interface being pretty narrow, although we suppose it will be enough for 4 GB.
But with the GeForce GTX Titan and 780 Ti coming in 6 GB models now, and with the dual-GPU Titan-Z featuring 12 GB, the 4 GB of GTX 880 seem low.
Nevertheless, these are the specs, as the people on the web expect them. They probably aren't accurate, but they're more than was available before now.
DirectX 12 will be supported by the chip which, by the way, will feature an SMM (streaming multiprocessor Maxwell) SIMD design.
There will be more SMMs than on the GTX 750 Ti of course, but they will be spread over extra GPCs (graphics processing clusters).
Since this is the GM204 silicon, it will be eventually followed by the GM110, which will outperform everything else NVIDIA has.
In the meanwhile, the GK110 Kepler high-end chip will be outperformed, in turn, by the GM204, the same way the GK104 outdid the GF110 fermi.
NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 880 Maxwell graphics card will likely come to market before the end of the year, but not in the third quarter. Its GPU clocks will be of around 900 MHz / 950 MHz GPU Boost, while the memory will operate at 7.4 GHz.
Again, these numbers are all speculative, in no way confirmed by NVIDIA itself, and they won't be for some more months still. If they do get confirmed, so will the 238 GB/s memory bandwidth and TDP of 230W (thermal design power).
It will be interesting to see how the Maxwell-based card measures up to the GTX 780 Titan Black and AMD's Radeon R9 290X. Or how well it does against dual-GPU boards like GTX Titan Z and AMD R9 295 X2.