[David Kanter on Tech Report] - Nvidia VR preemption "possibly catastrophic".

[Genx87]

But it doesn't matter in practice because according to some users who only buy NV from one generation to the next, future proofing for VR, DX12 on Kepler or Maxwell is irrelevant since by the time these features are actually widely utilized/needed, they will have upgraded to Pascal or Volta, and so on. There is certainly some truth to this because realistically speaking next generation 2016-2018 DX12 games should in theory bring more advanced graphical effects/features that will overwhelm existing GPUs. Having said that, a lot more gamers are now prolonging the time between GPU upgrades, and thus I am not sure if this argument is valid for the general PC gaming population. What makes it more disingenuous in my eyes is that NV was marketing full DX12 support and having the most future-proof DX12 GPUs but now we find out that Maxwell's AC engines are broken/possibly catastrophic for DX12 and VR? Not cool as this is GTX970 marketing fiasco #2:

Had NV not done that, all of this wouldn't be such a big deal but it seems the current hardware may or may not back up the claims of their marketing team/slides.

Seeing a November 2013 $699 780Ti being outperformed by a $280 GTX970 in September 2015 is a eye-opener; and as always a great reminder why buying $600+ flagship cards in hopes of "future-proofing" for 4-5 years is a waste of $. This has been true for as long as I can remember.

That's why I am generally against recommending $600-1000+ GPUs for 'future-proofing' beyond 2, maybe 2.5 years. If a gamer cannot afford to buy flagship cards every single generation, it's far better to buy a $300-350 GPU and in 2-3 years another $300-350 GPU rather than buying a $600-700 flagship card and keeping it for 4-5 years. In that sense getting an R9 290/290X/390/970 as a stop-gap GPU (unless you can find a B-stock GTX980 for $370) seems like the smarter bet right now. I think that goes for both AMD and NV because Fury X is limited to 4GB HBM, while Maxwell's performance in VR/DX12 is uncertain. Next generation should bring 8GB HBM2 (and higher), and most likely far more capable DX12/VR architectures from both AMD and NV and a more advanced video decoding/encoding engine and possibly other features.

Why is that an eye opener? Video cards have always been like this since the Voodoos.

 

[raghu78]

I understand people who say DX12 performance doesn't matter at this point for them because they will buy a new card before it becomes relevant. What I don't understand is why the".1" in DX12.1 was so important when they thought it meant that nVidia supported DX12 better than AMD.

People also need to understand that not everyone, probably not even a majority, upgrade every gen. and quit trying to dismiss it as "it doesn't matter".

This is the most important reason. Not everyone buys a new GPU every 2 years. Its not uncommon for a lot of people to keep a GPU for 3-5 years. In fact I would say the percentage of people changing GPUs every 1-2 years is not a majority or even the single largest buyer segment of the overall GPU market.

There are so many people like RS who are sticking to HD 7970 cards for well over 3 years now. So when somebody who had a HD 6970 or GTX 580 wants to buy a GPU now (maybe because their GPU died) then all this matters. The forward looking architecture of AMD GCN 1.1 and 1.2 cards definitely matters. Asynchronous compute has been touted by leading game engine developers like Crytek, DICE and VR companies like Oculus VR.

I also think even though 16/14nm FINFET GPUs with HBM2 will launch in late 2016 the pricing and supply situation will not be good. We are seeing how poor the supply situation is with HBM and Fiji. HBM2 DRAM is going to be manufactured on a more advanced process node than HBM. In fact the HBM2 chips will be manufactured on a bleeding edge process node for memory chips. With so many bleeding edge elements - 16/14nm FINFET GPUs, HBM2 on a bleeding edge memory process node I am not very optimistic about yields and supply volume. I think both AMD and Nvidia are going to raise their mid range flagship GPU (300-350 sq mm die) prices to USD 650 next gen as they will be supply limited and also their costs will be higher than current mid range GPUs like GTX 980 and R9 390X.

So it makes all the sense to buy a mature 28nm R9 390 or even Fury and wait it out till late 2017 when we see the big Pascal/big Artic Island GPUs take the USD 650-USD 700 price point and the mid range Pascal/mid range Artic Island GPUs trickle down to USD 350-400 price point.

 

[Keysplayr]

The question is why. Maybe with it fully enabled performance will tank, or maybe Nvidia for some mysterious reason doesn't have full driver support. Which would be odd considering Nvidia has said they have been working on and contributing to DX12 for years. Either way the argument that DX12 doesn't matter at all on current hardware is nonsense.

Maybe.

 

[cmdrdredd]

By the time this is relevant, I'd bet that NVIDIA will have sorted things out.

That said, it really is interesting just how "future proof" AMD's GCN seems to be.

Performance is what matters to me though. Sure you can play VR games but if they perform like utter crap and what's the point? I think VR will end up being more GPU intensive than 4k myself once it finally gets here for the consumer.

 

[Silverforce11]

Performance is what matters to me though. Sure you can play VR games but if they perform like utter crap and what's the point? I think VR will end up being more GPU intensive than 4k myself.

It's not really viable without CF or SLI, hence they all frequently demo it with multi-GPU. One for one eye, aiming for the magical 90 fps and sub 20ms motion -> photon latency.

The latency is a big deal, but its subjective, not everyone is prone to nausea. Motion sickness is still poorly understood, but different people on a ship... some vomit, some no problems. It's probably related to micro-stutter perception, maybe.

I did see youtuber who has been using VR for awhile, the guy said it made him sick after more than 30 minutes gaming, but he pushed on and after a YEAR, he no longer has nausea in VR, like his brain adapted to it. Amazing stuff really.

 

[cmdrdredd]

It's not really viable without CF or SLI, hence they all frequently demo it with multi-GPU. One for one eye, aiming for the magical 90 fps and sub 20ms motion -> photon latency.

The latency is a big deal, but its subjective, not everyone is prone to nausea. Motion sickness is still poorly understood, but different people on a ship... some vomit, some no problems. It's probably related to micro-stutter perception, maybe.

I did see youtuber who has been using VR for awhile, the guy said it made him sick after more than 30 minutes gaming, but he pushed on and after a YEAR, he no longer has nausea in VR, like his brain adapted to it. Amazing stuff really.

Yes, I think it's similar to how some people can feel input lag. I think people sitting on old AMD cards because they supposedly do all these things will be disappointed to find out that they need more performance anyhow. Performing the tasks, even natively in hardware is not enough for a good gaming experience unless it works fast enough to keep the frame rates high.

I'm not at all interested in VR because of a few reasons. One of which relates to using a 5.1 system from a Receiver. Turning your head changes where the front and rear speakers are and ruins the soundscape. I don't find headsets to offer anything close to the same surround experience. Audio is a very important aspect of gaming to me.

 

[Silverforce11]

Yes, I think it's similar to how some people can feel input lag. I think people sitting on old AMD cards because they supposedly do all these things will be disappointed to find out that they need more performance anyhow. Performing the tasks, even natively in hardware is not enough for a good gaming experience unless it works fast enough to keep the frame rates high.

Yeah but don't forget there's a range of VR devices, not all of them are full HD per eye, or even 2/4K per eye.

The minimum for a good VR exp is surprisingly pretty low res for each eye. Those who aim for the best, have actually built 980Ti SLI or Quad-SLI in anticipation for 2016. There's a lot of angst in the VR enthusiast forums, wonder why NV is still remaining hush..

I'm quite cautious about VR myself, I don't like the thought of gaming with a headset in general. But different strokes for different folks.

 

[Gikaseixas]

I understand people who say DX12 performance doesn't matter at this point for them because they will buy a new card before it becomes relevant. What I don't understand is why the".1" in DX12.1 was so important when they thought it meant that nVidia supported DX12 better than AMD.

Yeah .1 was very important a few months back because it suited a few fanboys but now that AC is lacking in their favorite brand it's not a big deal WOW
This partisanship deal is really annoying

 

[cmdrdredd]

Yeah but don't forget there's a range of VR devices, not all of them are full HD per eye, or even 2/4K per eye.

The minimum for a good VR exp is surprisingly pretty low res for each eye. Those who aim for the best, have actually built 980Ti SLI or Quad-SLI in anticipation for 2016. There's a lot of angst in the VR enthusiast forums, wonder why NV is still remaining hush..

I'm quite cautious about VR myself, I don't like the thought of gaming with a headset in general. But different strokes for different folks.

Doesn't higher resolution have the effect of reducing the headaches or something?

 

[Silverforce11]

Doesn't higher resolution have the effect of reducing the headaches or something?

There's a minimum required res, they didn't mention advantages to nausea reduction above that, it's always latency when they talk about that.

 

[soccerballtux]

There's a minimum required res, they didn't mention advantages to nausea reduction above that, it's always latency when they talk about that.

nausea is refresh rate I'm pretty sure, not resolution

 

[VR Enthusiast]

It's not really viable without CF or SLI, hence they all frequently demo it with multi-GPU. One for one eye, aiming for the magical 90 fps and sub 20ms motion -> photon latency.

Do you have a recent link to this? I remember reading something about CF and SLI being really good for VR but nothing recently.

 

[VR Enthusiast]

nausea is refresh rate I'm pretty sure, not resolution

It's not well understood but latency is a major factor in it. Think about it, you move your head then the image updates instantly vs you move your head and the image updates 30ms later. Which one will cause you to throw up?

 

[monstercameron]

Resolution is the screen door effect.

 

[Pariah]

VR is the next 3D TV. It will hyped to no end, but the public will never buy into it. The only difference being that VR will have even worse market penetration. Lots of people have 3D TV's only because any decent TV had the feature already not because they wanted a 3D TV. Anyone who wants VR will have to buy a VR headset which has no other use. Unless developers come up with a mainstream non-gaming application, VR will never gain any more penetration than steering wheels and flight sticks do now.

 

[Dribble]

VR is the next 3D TV. It will hyped to no end, but the public will never buy into it. The only difference being that VR will have even worse market penetration. Lots of people have 3D TV's only because any decent TV had the feature already not because they wanted a 3D TV. Anyone who wants VR will have to buy a VR headset which has no other use. Unless developers come up with a mainstream non-gaming application, VR will never gain any more penetration than steering wheels and flight sticks do now.

This, if you think 3D TV was a hard sell you should try VR - needs super high end hardware to provide really high refresh rates and really low latency. Even then it'll still make a lot of people feel ill. 3D has movie and photo's, so it wasn't just games. Also all the 3D monitors were just plain better for non-3D twitch gaming so you had more reason then just 3D to get one. VR doesn't have either of those things, it only has games and can only be used for VR, that's a really hard sell.

I love 3D, in particular 3D photo's, I have a 3D monitor and will probably go for VR if something decent comes out (I was programming VR back in the 90's so it's not exactly new to me). However I bet I am very much in the minority.

As to all this latency async compute talk, seems to be someone trying very hard to make a mountain out of a mole hill. Fundimentally VR is no different to 2D, or 3D, you need to minimise latency - it's just as much of a problem if in your 2D game you have mouse lag, input lag on the monitor, or lag drawing the next frame.

VR replaces that mouse with a headset to track movement but it's basically no different and yes that headset needs very low input latency (which I hope is nothing to do with the gpu and they have some dedicated hardware to do that properly). No one seems to complain Nvidia suffers higher latency due to redraw playing games then AMD. It'll be no different with VR, as long as the frame rate is high enough then latency is fine.

 

[Schmide]

This makes me wonder what kind of under the hood pipeline tricks nvidia has. I can't imagine what type of memory locking would be necessary to stall a modern compute system for a 60th of a second.

 

[VR Enthusiast]

VR - needs super high end hardware to provide really high refresh rates and really low latency.

No this can be done on consoles too because consoles have the async compute engines. Console VR sales (2/3rds) will be much higher than PC (1/3rd) sales. This is good because when games are developed on consoles they will transfer to PC's with AMD cards, meaning only PC market who bought Nvidia will lose out on the vital optimisations.

Even then it'll still make a lot of people feel ill.

This is why it's important for people who are buying cards today understand that Nvidia is a bad option for VR. This new industry needed a common ground and AMD provides it with LiquidVR and GCN. As gamers and tech enthusiasts we should do all we can to make sure everybody knows that AMD is the best option for VR now, knowing that Nvidia will be back to fight another day.

 

[StrangerGuy]

This, if you think 3D TV was a hard sell you should try VR - needs super high end hardware to provide really high refresh rates and really low latency. Even then it'll still make a lot of people feel ill. 3D has movie and photo's, so it wasn't just games. Also all the 3D monitors were just plain better for non-3D twitch gaming so you had more reason then just 3D to get one. VR doesn't have either of those things, it only has games and can only be used for VR, that's a really hard sell.
.

I can see VR as being successful as non-Apple smartwatches, which is totally not at all. The public is simply way too wary and sick of fads or gimmicks by this point. The only way I see it remotely succeeding is a massive coordinated hardware and software push like how Apple does things, which can't be found any of the players of the PC market.

 

[LTC8K6]

Relatively few people are going to want to wear the headgear, imo.

 

[Tuna-Fish]

nausea is refresh rate I'm pretty sure, not resolution

For VR, refresh rate is only important because of the impact it has on latency. If you only draw a scene 30 times a second, but can draw it from position determination -> photons on last line of display in 1 ms, and then blank the display for the next 32 ms, it causes no vr nausea. (But the flashing can be distracting.) However, as it usually goes, your display takes roughly the inverse of it's refresh rate just to transmit the data to the screen and draw all pixels, so 60Hz refresh rate screen takes approx 17ms for drawing. This leaves you 3ms to render your scene to hit that magical 20ms limit, and for ~14ms for each frame your GPU will be idle.

This is why you want high refresh rate screens -- a 100Hz refresh rate screen will draw in 10ms, and your GPU can spend all that 10ms on drawing the scene. It's notable that you don't always have to actually update the screen at this rate -- a 120Hz screen updating and being blank on alternate frames gives similar nausea-free experience as running full 120Hz. On PC there's little point, as you need all the hardware to be able to run properly at 120Hz. On mobile it means you save half your power.

 

[Qwertilot]

I can see this wave of VR failing, or taking a while to get going. Can't see VR as an idea not happening at scale at some point. It seems to be one of those ideas which is hugely attractive to peoples imaginations - look how firmly embedded it is in the collective imagination/culture.

There's plenty of ways that might happen besides gaming of course. Don't forget who brought Oculus. Something like video messaging/a second lifeish sort of thing has to be a plausible enough way for it to mainstream. Or something like hiking simulators (you have to imagine Google are at least dreaming of a VR version of earth.). That'd maybe be more niche I guess. Still teaching, say?

We'll see. Fairly daft thinking about preparing for it when buying this gen of video cards mind
(The die shrunk architectures will presumably be better suited - and much faster anyway - but it might well take the generation or two after that to be really designed for it.).

 

[tential]

I can see this wave of VR failing, or taking a while to get going. Can't see VR as an idea not happening at scale at some point. It seems to be one of those ideas which is hugely attractive to peoples imaginations - look how firmly embedded it is in the collective imagination/culture.

There's plenty of ways that might happen besides gaming of course. Don't forget who brought Oculus. Something like video messaging/a second lifeish sort of thing has to be a plausible enough way for it to mainstream. Or something like hiking simulators (you have to imagine Google are at least dreaming of a VR version of earth.). That'd maybe be more niche I guess. Still teaching, say?

We'll see. Fairly daft thinking about preparing for it when buying this gen of video cards mind
(The die shrunk architectures will presumably be better suited - and much faster anyway - but it might well take the generation or two after that to be really designed for it.).

The fact that we keep trying means we want it lol....
VR, 3D, etc.
Yes sure, some technologies will fail, but it's only getting more and more advanced, until eventually we get Caprica/Battlestar Galactica!

 

[Headfoot]

for a forum of supposed tech enthusiasts, you all sure don't seem to have enthusiasm for anything new. All I see is complaining and talking every new tech down for no reason at all.

 

[gorobei]

for a forum of supposed tech enthusiasts, you all sure don't seem to have enthusiasm for anything new. All I see is complaining and talking every new tech down for no reason at all.

im quite enthused for the coming wave of vr, im the planning type so my main issue is that i would rather the hardware not be so vendor exclusive. the valve lighthouse system is better than oculus' camera system, but the oculus hand controllers look like they have more potential than valve's. since the headset display panels are the same it is going to come down to who has the better system in terms of reliability and expandability. right now it is a toss up.



since they have likely taped out pascal, does anyone know if nv will have had enough time to fix the async compute issues with pascal or will they have to wait to do it with volta?