It will probably perform on the same level as AMD's Radeon HD 7800

Apr 10, 2012 08:44 GMT  ·  By

Now that the first NVIDIA Kepler graphics processing unit is officially available as part of the GeForce GTX 680 graphics card, the rumor mill is looking in the direction of its as yet unreleased peers.

The folks at 3DCenter.org are the ones who posted information on the graphics chip that will power the GeForce GTX 660 graphics board, and probably one or more others too.

Called GK106, the GPU is built on the 28 nm manufacturing process (this was obvious, all Kepler chips use this technology) and has a die -area of 210 square millimeters.

Two Graphics Processing Clusters (GPCs) are present, along with four Streaming Multiprocessors (SMXs) and 768 CUDA cores.

Furthermore, the GPU boasts 64 TMUs, 24 ROPs and a 192-bit GDDR5 memory interface (cards will feature 1.5 GB or 2 GB of such VRAM).

Furthermore, PCI Express 3.0 is fully supported and the TDP (thermal design power) of a whole video board should be of around 130W.

All in all, the GK106 Kepler graphics chip, when used in desktop add-in boards, will have a performance on the same level as AMD's Radeon HD 7800 series, or the previous-generation HD 6950 (or NVIDIA's own GeForce GTX 560 Ti).

Finally, the price of the GeForce GTX 660 will be of under $200 (152-200 Euro).

Essentially, there should be a clear difference between the GK106 and the GK104, which we talked about last week.

That one will power the GTX 670 Ti and will lead to prices of $349-399 (266-304 Euro, according to exchange rates). Needless to say, the specs are clearly a notch or two above the ones listed here.

Nevertheless, neither of these is anywhere close to the GK110, expected to land in the GeForce 700 series later this year. Of course, this isn't really a fair comparison. GK110 wipes the floor with the GK104 too, after all.