AMD GPU14 Tech Event Sept 25 - AMD Hawiian Islands

[ams23]

feathers have been ruffled.

Feathers have been ruffled because any proliferation of an IHV-specific graphics API's in this day and age when open platforms are rapidly growing is a silly and terrible thing. What do you think game development would be like if NVIDIA, Intel, Qualcomm, ImgTech, ARM, etc. also decided to push their own IHV-specific graphics API's? The result would be disastrous and chaotic to say the least. And simply having midrange hardware (by current generation PC standards) inside two upcoming consoles and lower end hardware inside one existing console is just an excuse to push the IHV-specific API. Qualcomm could use their strength in ultra mobile computing as an excuse to push an IHV-specific API. Intel could use their strength in CPU computing as an excuse to push an IHV-specific API. NVIDIA could use their strength in GPU computing as an excuse to push an IHV-specific API. Last but not least, console hardware and PC hardware is always a moving target, and there is no guarantee which hardware vendor will be the preferred choice at any given point in time.

 

[Jaydip]

DICE is pulling PC back towards console..not pushing it forward.

There are a few developers who actually are pushing PC hardware to the limits....you will not see evidence of that in either BF4 or COD...where PC is just an afterthought.

There is little doubt that BF4 will be way better looking than COD ghost and it has some very sweet pc features.So my point is maybe IW won't take it lying flat and will start optimizing for pc as well.Actually people keep talking about NV and AMD while they conveniently forget about the real giant Intel.If Intel sees it as a opportunity AMD will be toast.They already have one of the best compiler out there they just need to push the developers a little more and with their funds it will be too easy for them.

 

[ams23]

By the way, interestingly enough, John Carmack is not even working on consoles right now, so Mantle code from him is completely out of the question in the forseeable future:

I won't be writing any Mantle code in the near future, since I'm not working on consoles now. OpenGL for PC, mac, linux, and mobile

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack

 

[badb0y]

Posted here?

http://www.maximumpc.com/amd_r9_290x_will_be_much_faster_titan_battlefield_4

"The red team says that with Mantle, its new flagship GPU will “ridicule” the GeForce Titan"

Them some fighting words.

 

[Genx87]

Posted here?

http://www.maximumpc.com/amd_r9_290x_will_be_much_faster_titan_battlefield_4

"The red team says that with Mantle, its new flagship GPU will “ridicule” the GeForce Titan"

Them some fighting words.

Maximumpc is getting lots of hits today. This link has only been posted about 3-4 times in the multiple mantle threads.

 

[ams23]

Maximumpc is getting lots of hits today. This link has only been posted about 3-4 times in the multiple mantle threads.

Yup. And that exact same link was posted two pages ago in this very thread Obviously there will be Gaming Evolved games that favor NVIDIA's architecture. We saw that already with Dirt Showdown and Tomb Raider, so no reason to expect that wouldn't be the case with Mantle (and on the flip side, like always, there will be other games that favor NVIDIA's architecture).

 

[Nintendesert]

However this turns out, AMD has been bringing more exciting additions to gaming than Nvidia has lately. A crappy show ended on a pretty big note.

 

[Fastx]

looks like Hawaii could have some kind of hardware solution for frame compositing and pacing. :thumbsup: Tahiti and Pitcairn might still be stuck with software only fix.

http://techreport.com/news/25428/dr...inity-4k-frame-pacing-issues-coming-this-fall

"In our talk, Koduri acknowledged that the frame delivery issues with CrossFire were "unfortunate," and he expressed a desire to make things right. Koduri told me AMD is working on a fix for CrossFire and single-large-surface display configurations, like Eyefinity and tiled 4K monitors, for current Radeon graphics cards. He said AMD plans to deliver a driver with the fix this fall.

AMD's newest Radeon GPU, the "Hawaii" chip that will power the Radeon R9 290 and 290X cards announced earlier today, will of course be a top priority, as well. Although we can't yet divulge too many details, we expect Hawaii-based graphics cards to arrive with a very capable solution for CrossFire frame compositing and pacing already in place.

Some of the new Radeon cards announced today that are based on older GPUs like Tahiti and Pitcairn will presumably have to wait for the fall driver release in order to see this issue resolved."

Thanks for posting this info. :thumbsup:

 

[imaheadcase]

Posted here?

http://www.maximumpc.com/amd_r9_290x_will_be_much_faster_titan_battlefield_4

"The red team says that with Mantle, its new flagship GPU will “ridicule” the GeForce Titan"

Them some fighting words.

I seriously doubt DICE is dumb enough to make the GPUS far apart in benchmarks. It does not matter if Mantle could offer %50 faster (haha), they won't, ever, alienate a whole user base by crippling it.

 

[Carfax83]

$1,300 of overclocked GPUs to beat a $650 card doesn't count as catching up in my book.

21% faster than 770 and 23% faster than 680 doesn't seem like catching up to me. 770 costs $380-450 for crying out loud. The Tahiti XT chip is nearly 2 years old too! :sneaky:

You're using a graph from an older review. Since then, NVidia has upated it's drivers and the game was probably patched, so the results are far more even. I get very good performance in Tomb Raider on my machine:

The GTX 680 is right on the heels of the 7970 Ghz, so the GTX 770 would be right about even.

 

[raghu78]

You're using a graph from an older review. Since then, NVidia has upated it's drivers and the results are far more even. I get very good performance in Tomb Raider on my machine:

The GTX 680 is right on the heels of the 7970 Ghz, so the GTX 770 would be right about even.

nope. same performance. GTX 770 is slightly slower than HD 7970 Ghz and GTX 680 scores are same in both reviews.

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/foru...1369-nvidia-geforce-gtx-770-2gb-review-8.html

 

[ams23]

Before you all go nuts on mantle. It still only work on CGN and it wont work on anything else. Thats the drawback. Some future new AMD GPU uarch might not work with it either.

And in terms of SteamOS, if you look on the steam hardware survey about CGN able users. Its not pretty.

Not only that, but according to an AMD rep at B3D, more development work will be required on Mantle vs. using an industry-standard API such as DirectX or OpenGL in order to achieve optimal results. So as mentioned earlier, AMD will need to pay developers to use their API (which, considering their dwindling cash balance and heavy debt load, is not so great).

 

[Rikard]

I seriously doubt DICE is dumb enough to make the GPUS far apart in benchmarks. It does not matter if Mantle could offer %50 faster (haha), they won't, ever, alienate a whole user base by crippling it.

That does not make any sense... Mantle does not cripple anything, it just gives a boost to GCN. I would think users would be a lot more angry if DICE artificially crippled Mantle so that Nvidia would perform as well as GCN. Assuming it really works, that is.

 

[ShintaiDK]

That does not make any sense... Mantle does not cripple anything, it just gives a boost to GCN. I would think users would be a lot more angry if DICE artificially crippled Mantle so that Nvidia would perform as well as GCN. Assuming it really works, that is.

Well, unless AMD payed for the entire mantle path. It did cripple something. Be it DX path or the game itself. Resources and money needs to come from somewhere.

Thats also why multipath renders is a terrible idea.

 

[Triglet]

I seriously doubt DICE is dumb enough to make the GPUS far apart in benchmarks. It does not matter if Mantle could offer %50 faster (haha), they won't, ever, alienate a whole user base by crippling it.

Why do you think DICE would care in the slightest?

 

[Carfax83]

nope. same performance. GTX 770 is slightly slower than HD 7970 Ghz and GTX 680 scores are same in both reviews.

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/foru...1369-nvidia-geforce-gtx-770-2gb-review-8.html

Hmm, makes you wonder how much recycling goes on in this reviews..

At any rate, the performance delta isn't huge or insurmountable no matter what way you slice it.

 

[Granseth]

Isn't Mantel an open API, wouldn't it be possible to pick it apart and port the code for other GPUs? Of course it would be some job, and a lot of problems, but I wouldn't mind dropping DirectX.

And I remember Glide and Voodoo (especially #2) and thought that was fantastic, but I still prefer competition. So I'm sort of torn between getting more out of my GPU and having a healthy competition. Lets hope this doesn't split the PC marked too much and at the same time brings it forward.

 

[ams23]

nope. same performance. GTX 770 is slightly slower than HD 7970 Ghz and GTX 680 scores are same in both reviews.

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/foru...1369-nvidia-geforce-gtx-770-2gb-review-8.html

The difference between GTX 770 and 7970 GHz is only ~ 2fps. Anyway, I think you are missing his point. In the past, the 7970 GHz was ~ 20% faster than the GTX 770 in Tomb Raider with TressFX enabled. With newer drivers, that deficit has been cut down to ~ 6% , which is a huge difference.

 

[ams23]

Isn't Mantel an open API, wouldn't it be possible to pick it apart and port the code for other GPUs? Of course it would be some job, and a lot of problems, but I wouldn't mind dropping DirectX.

No, it is not an open API, it is specific to GCN-equipped GPU's. It can be used on different (aka "open") platforms, but the GPU must be GCN-equipped, and therefore it is really not an open API at all.

 

[Nintendesert]

Isn't Mantel an open API, wouldn't it be possible to pick it apart and port the code for other GPUs? Of course it would be some job, and a lot of problems, but I wouldn't mind dropping DirectX.

And I remember Glide and Voodoo (especially #2) and thought that was fantastic, but I still prefer competition. So I'm sort of torn between getting more out of my GPU and having a healthy competition. Lets hope this doesn't split the PC marked too much and at the same time brings it forward.

There are only 2 players in the discreet GPU industry now. I don't see why Nvidia would need to pick apart anything. They did buy 3dfx and Glide awhile back. It's not like they haven't had access to a low level API for all these years. I'm really not sure what Nvidia did with 3dfx but I know many of us thought they'd leverage some of the 3dfx technologies and I'm really surprised they never created a Glide-Geforce API.

 

[tigersty1e]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kenmitch

So in a round-a-bout way your saying Microsoft doesn't want to sell Xbone's?

Mantle will allow developers to harness the power of the under spec'd consoles to it's fullest. How is that the enemy? Seems like wowing potential buyers of both consoles and games with visual quality, smoother game play would be a good thing.

I just don't understand why the hostility towards Mantle. Or is it just the undying hatred towards AMD shining thru. Possibly the love for NVidia is to strong?

Mantle won't kill NVidia performance. It's only going to give GCN a performance boost if developers choose so.


He already said why and John Carmack agrees. MS will be hostile because Mantle could potentially be used by Steam OS and others to compete against DX and Xbone and that isn't something MS would ever want. Imagine if Google gets really serious about pushing an Android variant on the desktop and they include Mantle support with it? That would seriously jeopardize direct X and in turn Windows + Xbone sales. Although in reality all of this is overblown, we already have OpenGL and that never got anywhere either. AMD is too small a player in the industry to push a new API to be widely used. Only a few select companies (e.g. Microsoft) can pull that off.

Quote:


John Carmack
‏@ID_AA_Carmack
Considering the boost Mantle could give to a steambox, MS and Sony may wind up being downright hostile to it.

this is the same guy who made rage on the PC.

his opinion should be the last one that matters.


Posted from Anandtech.com App for Android

 

[Bubbleawsome]

I'm assuming mantle will work on gcn 2.0 and maybe 3.0. I mean, we have ~8 years of this.

 

[lopri]

Sorry I didn't follow this thread, let alone the event. I just looked at some slides. Assuming they are rebranding, is the $89 one (250X?) = formerly 7790? The slide says GDDR5 so 7790 for $89 sounds great, bordering on too good to be true? What's the speculation on this one?

 

[Granseth]

There are only 2 players in the discreet GPU industry now. I don't see why Nvidia would need to pick apart anything. They did buy 3dfx and Glide awhile back. It's not like they haven't had access to a low level API for all these years. I'm really not sure what Nvidia did with 3dfx but I know many of us thought they'd leverage some of the 3dfx technologies and I'm really surprised they never created a Glide-Geforce API.

What I mean is that if the Mantel API is open they can pick it apart and make a tool to port code for their own API. If it isn't open that could get much harder.

 

[SiliconWars]

Sorry I didn't follow this thread, let alone the event. I just looked at some slides. Assuming they are rebranding, is the $89 one (250X?) = formerly 7790? The slide says GDDR5 so 7790 for $89 sounds great, bordering on too good to be true? What's the speculation on this one?

No the 7790 is likely to be the 260X. The 250 is probably the 7750 I guess?