No kidding, and I'm glad I got off with RX 580. There are a handful of posters still active here whom the moment they post AMD GPUs estimate/expectations I hurt my eyes they roll so far back.
I'm still waiting for the magic code/driver to make Vega amazing.
Don't get me started on RX 480 being 90% of GTX 1080 in DX12 games for $200.
RX 580 was rumored to be GTX 1080, and before RX 590 train tickets were printed, you already had people saying it will be faster than a GTX 1080.
I would love to have AMD back in healthy fighting shape so I have an option in my bracket, but I'll wait for actual reviews.
Yep, because there aren't people doing the same thing on the Nvidia side. There were several posters claiming that Volta was going to bring a +50% per clock improvement over Pascal and at least one claimed it could be a full 100% doubling of per clock performance. That didn't happen (don't think even Turing brought that either, with it being more like 20-45%). Many of them were the same ones constantly bringing up that AMD fans promised AMD would do all these different performance improvements too.
Heck, we never even got
any Volta gaming cards (I say that because some of those people now are saying that Titan cards are not gaming cards, they're pro cards, to explain why the 2080Ti that they claimed was now taking the place of the Titan cards as the top gaming cards and that there wasn't going to be a new Titan for this gen, and we see how that turned out). And then some people have been saying ray tracing is the best thing ever and RTX is revolutionary (while arguing with anyone pointing out how half-baked it is), tried to downplay that DLSS is just upscaling/cheating (while they've been very critical of consoles for checkerboarding and other "cheats").
My point being, both sides pull that crap and have been for years. Remember when Nvidia was going to port Asynchronous Compute back to Maxwell? I think they said that before Pascal even came out. Never happened. Are you still waiting for that?
I'm not sure why, AMD themselves have said they stopped development of it as it turned out to be too difficult to implement. That seems to have been a big part of the situation with Raja, he seemed to want to make AMD like Nvidia and support stuff in software before doing it in hardware or something (I think patents related to Navi indicate it has hardware support for something similar to the NGG fast path discard stuff they were trying to implement in the driver for Vega).
I don't remember many people saying that. Actually if I remember right it was the pro-Nvidia people saying the 480 was supposed to be a 1080 competitor when AMD had for like a year been saying Polaris was mainstream level card.
I don't remember that either, and again, I think you're projecting nonsense that Nvidia people claim AMD fanboys say. By the time the 580 was being discussed, Vega was like 2-3 months away. Either you're actively seeking out the most ridiculous idiots on the web, or you're buying into a lot of just made up nonsense in the back and forth or taking obvious speculation ("what if" type of stuff that isn't actually serious).
Wait, I just googled RX 580 to see when exactly it came out (I couldn't recall if it was out before or after Vega). Are you seeing articles titled "AMD's 1080p contender" and conflating that with the GTX1080?
Next up you'll claim AMD people are saying Navi is a Titan competitor, nevermind AMD has been very deliberate for like a year (if not longer) that Navi is a mainstream market chip like Polaris.
A lot of this stuff is just fun speculation and isn't serious expectation. And some people take that way too seriously and intentionally try to make things into bigger issue than they actually are/were. I've been especially critical of Nvidia because they were literally paying people to spread lies on here and that turned this forum into a total cesspit so often that its why we have this stupid lingering fanboy junk. Even console gamers have largely ditched that crap and that's often with idiot teenagers that know jack$#!^ about anything.
There is no way that any consoles from MS or PS are going to take a giant step backwards and go to Nvidia/ARM. They would have done that already if it was capable of delievering the performance they need. The only way Nvida can make a play is if MS were to adopt their server products and turn the Xbox into a streaming game platform. AMD has the 7nm CPU and GPU goods and Nvidia doesn't. AMD also doesn't charge licensing for use in VM and Nvidia does. Nvidia isn't cost competitive on hardware and AMD would still have the CPU + GPU bid that is going to be the cheapest. If by some miracle Nvidia were to get that bid AMD would still have a partial win because AMD Epyc would certainly be the processor used.
Yeah. Microsoft, Sony, and AMD have all but outright already said that they're working together on the next Xbox and PS5 respectively. I could see Microsoft having a development platform, possibly using Tegra chips as the basis for it for the time being, for future streaming hardware. But I don't think we're there yet, and Microsoft has said that the 2nd new Xbox console is going to be a hybrid design that starts their streaming ambitions. By hybrid, that means they're going to do some local rendering (which would probably explain that chip with the 20CUs that I saw people mention has been rumored) as streaming isn't quite ready for rollout for all games. Microsoft themselves said this so its not just speculation.
I don't doubt that Nvidia is pushing Tegra and trying to get console wins (that was why they made Shield stuff), they clearly did for Nintendo. But because Nvidia seems to have rubbed a lot of companies wrong, few people want to use their stuff in consumer electronics.
Heck wasn't their most recent consumer Tegra (the K2 or X2?) have like the previous gen ARM chips (was using A57 when the A72 cores were already announced?). Which a newer 10nm chip using A76 cores and Turing based GPU would probably be good, but I'm guessing Zen 2 paired with Navi will be better for the PS5/next Xbox). But I'm guessing whatever reason that is keeping people from using Nvidia's stuff will still be there (not sure if that's price, or some other issue, but sure seems like every company that partners with Nvidia feels like they got burned, Sony has been very explicit about how happy they've been working with AMD after Nvidia on the PS3, Microsoft ditched Nvidia after the first Xbox, Samsung ditched them after Tegra 3 in what the S3, their screwup with the X1 in the Switch has not pleased Nintendo).
Why this obsessive focus on NV? If NV did a full custom solution it'd probably be better than what AMD can produce, but they'd have to be willing to do that and they're seemingly not. Nothing off the shelf as they're focusing tegra very strongly on compute for the moment.
The theoretically strongest in terms of technical competence would of course be Apple. They're not at all interested. Intel could theoretically put in a good bid if that internal GPU project works out well for them.
Samsung and Q'comm could both very definitely do something effective enough and might very plausibly bid. Mediatek would be a very cheap option but I dunno if they'd trust them. Samsung might actually represent a decent outside shot.
How do you figure? Nvidia's custom CPUs have flopped hard (wasn't there even some issue where they were practically broken because the translation or whatever they were using to run ARM based code wasn't working right causing errors and performance to not be where it should have been). And AMD will be on 7nm first and has a CPU that should outperform even the high end ARM chips on the same process (outside of Apple's custom ones). Plus 7nm is expensive so I don't know they'll be able to sell mobile chips (especially if pricing was already a factor for why Nvidia's previous ARM SoCs weren't more popular) cheap enough to compete with more powerful AMD hardware (that AMD sells for relatively cheap). Nvidia would almost certainly prioritize their higher end stuff.
If Apple wanted to, they could produce an extremely competitive GPU. Great engineers and unlimited funds goes a long way. I agree, Apple doesn't want to go that direction so NVIDIA and AMD have no worries there, but if they wanted to I have no doubt that Apple would be a contender.
Absolutely. I think AMD and NVidia should be worried though. Because its just a matter of time til Apple switches entirely over to their own chips, at least I think. And while Apple isn't a huge market for AMD's GPUs, it still matters. Once ARM chips take over more, and I think Apple will lead the way on that, consumer market is very different, as they'd be competing with not just each other and possibly Intel, but ARM, Qualcomm, and a bunch of others. I think that's almost inevitable as consumer stuff moves to being mostly networked and I/O focused chips, where its most about efficiency. So Nvidia and AMD (and Intel) are likely already headed to where their stuff is going to be aimed almost entirely at the enterprise/cloud/server market.