A lot of excitement and mystery has surrounded Nvidia's Fermi. What are its specs going to be? Will it beat the reigning single core graphics performance king, the 5870? Well as of today some of that mystery has been revealed; Nvidia officially lifted the Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) on some of the details regarding the GF100 GPU. The GF100 has a 512 CUDA processor (unified shader cores), 16 geometry units, 4 raster units, 64 texture units, and 48 ROP engines. It will feature full support of DirectX 11 and the memory will be connected to the 384 bit GDDR5 memory bus. Fermi also has a totally new way of addressing memory that includes 768KB L2 cache that is shared between the four graphics processing clusters.

A more interesting piece of news; not only have some of the specifications been released, but the GF100 has also been benchmarked and it has no problem running Far Cry 2. The card ran Far Cry 2 at a resolution of 1920�1200 with 4x AA and all other settings at Ultra high and it got up to 84 frames per second. The reference card hovered around 50 frames per second with the same settings. And these cards (the Fermi and the reference) were run with an i7 960 CPU with 6gb of memory. Note that it was early rumored that the reference card was a 5870, however later rumors suggested that the reference card was a GTX 285 instead. The true identity of the reference card has not been confirmed.

This early benchmark suggests that the Fermi is doing a great job, but because this is only one test and the added confusion of what the reference card was, it is hard to tell the extent of its performance. So whether or not the card can reclaim Nvidia the performance crown has yet to be seen, and let us not forget that the elusive Fermi has yet to be seen as well.