Lots of info on Nvidia's Fermi

From hardwarecanucks.com, an (almost) exhaustive preview of the specs and capabilities of the GeForce GF100. I'll throw up a few random bits to get the juices flowing:

Framerate comparison in Far Cry 2 (DX10)

Tessellation Performance

For those of you wondering what the tests above represent, the first three on the left show tessellation performance with an increasingly higher level of geometric complexity. The next two focus on situations that use a combination of geometry processing and DirectCompute operations to render a high-resolution scene and finally the last test is run on a direct draw call from Unigine’s tessellation engine.

We know from experience that while ATI’s 5000 series was the first on the market with DX11 compliance, it has some serious issues rendering scenes with more advanced DX11 features. NVIDIA meanwhile made an investment towards geometry performance which should vastly improve DX11 performance.

Prospectus

The increased rendering efficiency does seem to go a long way in making the GF100 a viable solution for the future but let’s put this into context for a minute. This is one complicated GPU and as such has proven to be extremely hard to produce in sufficient quantities as is evidenced from it being MIA in the current marketplace. Meanwhile, the overall complexity and integrated cache contribute to that massive 3 billion transistor count which leads to a cause for concern on the power consumption front as well. So, while we do know more than we did last month about the GF100, there will still be some fine tuning needed on NVIDIA’s part before its ready for primetime. What we can say is that we are confident the 512 core GF100 should consume under 300W under load.

On the plus side, the GF100’s architecture really does seem to be a departure from the GT200 in terms of scalability. As was discussed in the Modular Architecture section, NVIDIA is aiming to have a chip that can efficiently scale down for appropriate markets. This will eventually lead to a long line of GF100 derivatives and finally replace the endlessly renamed G92-based cards of yesteryear. To make matters even better, this new class of cards will fall under the umbrella of NVIDIA’s Unified Driver Architecture program so they will be able to continue releasing one driver for all of their products.

Still no official word yet on price, final clock speeds, memory sizes, and availability, but you'll still go blind reading all of it.