14 DAY TRIAL // NVIDIA continues to only have mid-range Maxwell-based graphics cards on sale. Then again, it never planned to release the others before autumn rolled by. Taking that into account, it's a bit soon to see benchmark results for the better chips in the collection.
Nevertheless, that is exactly what we have to share today with you all, assuming the test results posted on Coolaler weren't cooked up simply for laughs.
Considering that the official release is just a month away, it isn't too unbelievable that a sample chip of the Maxwell GPU would land in the hands of testers.
This isn't about the GeForce GTX 880 G1. While that product is coming next month, or even at Gamescom 2014 this week, it is not the subject of today's report. Instead, the GeForce GTX 870 got a bit of attention.
The board was put through the 3DMark 11 in its performance (P) and extreme (X) presets, while part of a PC built around the Intel Core i7-4820K "Ivy Bridge-E" quad-core CPU.
The card cannot be recognized by tech diagnosis and detail software like GPU-Z, but the specs could still be determined in spite of that.
That's why we now know that the GeForce GTX 870 has a base clock speed of 1,051 MHz, a GPU Boost maximum of 1,178 MHz, and 4 GB of GDDR5 VRAM working at 1,753 MHz (7,012 MHz effective).
GPU-Z also discovered 1,664 CUDA cores, 138 TMUs (texture mapping units), 32 ROPs (raster operating units), and a memory interface of 256 bits. All in all, the board has a memory bandwidth of 224 GB/s.
The points scored in 3DMark 11 in the performance preset were P11919 and the score in the extreme preset was of X4625. That is a performance comparable to the GeForce GTX 780, which means that the GTX 870 will be even faster once actual, updated drivers are completed and released.
Also, since this was a sample GPU, the final clocks might be different from the 1,051 MHz Base / 1,178 MHz GPU Boost that we mentioned above.
All things considered, the Maxwell-based line of graphics cards should end up a fair bit faster than the 700 line, as it should. It's a shame it will not be as good as NVIDIA wished it could make it though. The Maxwell GPUs were originally supposed to be created on 20nm technology, but with TSMC's failure to move to that node in time, it had to be redesigned for 28nm instead (the same tech behind the current-gen Kepler).
