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[Kezen]

Hopefully, this will bring more interesting chips for the mid-range sector as well. It's been what... 3 years and the 7850/7870 are still can't be beat.

The R9 280 or even R9 280X can be found for 150-180. Basically mid-range.

 

[shark sandwich]

I own a GTX 970 but it's great to see AMD light a fire under Nvidia's ass.

Now hopefully the heat/noise/power consumption aren't as atrocious as the 290X.

 

[Backfoggen]

Good single GPU 4K performance.. but it's AMD...

 

[Devildoll]

I'm not sure about games. I think game engines are designed with the bandwidth limit in mind. But when it comes to compute stuff, memory management is a big issue, and bandwidth is always limiting.

Okay, the only experience i have with compute is folding and possibly bitcoin mining, they weren't that dependent on bandwidth.
Are you sure the bandwidth limit isnt on the pci-e maximum transfer speed of 16 GB/s ?

For most current applications, and especially gaming, it doesn't make much of a difference, but there are scenarios obviously where 8gb will be an improvement over 4.

But point is, the average consumer may not know this and even if they do, 12gb is likely to be subconciously more alluring.

Oh for sure, that's why you see $50 graphics cards with 4 GB memory in big home electronics retail stores, or computers with a ton of RAM.
Big numbers sell.

What about driver issues though?

When I built my pc I used a ati card and it had a fault that it couldn't run 3d games. I have no idea why but it just shut down on games like borderlands.

Ended up getting the same level of power in a visual and it ran crysis and borderlands at max with no problems.

Would be weary to go back to amd for the graphics cards but their prices are always so tempting

That does not necessarily have to have been a driver issue.

 

[El_Chino]

LOL. I literally hear this every year, like it's a new thing.



I'm sorry. What? Drivers are always pertinent (for PC gaming).

And every year I hear it isn't as bad as people make it seem.

 

[Kronik]

I'm sorry. What? Drivers are always pertinent (for PC gaming).

Not with low level APIs like DX12. With DX12 it's the game engine that does almost everything what the drivers did before. The driver is going to be very thin, with practically zero effect on game performance.

 

[Metal-Geo]

Oh ho ho. This is going to be good.

*rubs hands*

 

[Exuro]

Still 28nm. There won't be 20nm this year, but 16nm is expected for next year.

Such a big jump. I wonder how much the reduction in wire diameter will improve signal speeds due to reduced parasitic capacitance or if that's negligible.

 

[Bl@de]

Nice. But I'm still waiting for 16nm. Wake me up for the 490X announcement for my HTC Vive.

 

[hitsugi]

Good single GPU 4K performance.. but it's AMD...

precisely why NVIDIA prices their cards as they do.

 

[lord pie]

nvidia drivers still prevail

Funny thing is, my experience as a developer has been the opposite. Current project the bug count is 2 to 1 in favor of AMD. Although to be fair, the AMD 'bug' was a mistake I made that the driver didn't handle properly - a compute kernel infinite loop that took down my PC The NVIDIA bugs were both shader compiler issues that were a pain to work around. Things like very specific type of texture gathers returning just one value instead of four, etc.

There are things AMD cards just handle better too, things like large texture UV precision is dramatically better on AMD.

Same experience with past projects. I think my all time favorite was from *way* back in the day on a geforce 2; I once had msn messenger appear in water reflections

 

[DouglasteR]

With my cambial ratio almost at 3.5x, i may have to switch back to AMD

Spoiler

(even with its drivers)

.

Pehaps Liquid VR will make it worth.

 

[MR ARCADE FOREVER]

Good single GPU 4K performance.. but it's AMD...

Haha

 

[Randam]

I own a GTX 970 but it's great to see AMD light a fire under Nvidia's ass.

Now hopefully the heat/noise/power consumption aren't as atrocious as the 290X.

from the link in the op:

 

[NuKERxyz]

Wow if true. Guess my 280x will eventually be replaced by another AMD.

Let them batlle, price wars, etc, its the best for the end user.

 

[The Bookerman]

edit: multiple sources are telling me that nVidia doesn't give a fuck and will probably price the Titan X at over $1000 anyways. I know my next card will be an AMD with HBM memory. nVidia can stick their ludicrous premiums where the sun don't shine

Amen. there's a reason nobody's doing buisness with Nvidia on the console side.

 

[NuKERxyz]

Amen. there's a reason nobody's doing buisness with Nvidia on the console side.

Most of my co-workers that have gaming PC's choose Nvidia because of "best and always new drivers", "games that pop-up Nvidia when they start", "because AMD is worse than intel and Nvidia is for PRO's", "Its more expensive so its better"...

I say..Ok..

 

[FLAguy954]

I thought 980 Ti wasn't possible?

It wasn't possible to beef up a 980 but it is possible to cut down the Titan X.

If the 390 (non x) is priced reasonably, I'm going to sell my 290 and grab one with an aftermarket cooler.

 

[The Shogun]

So 2 things.

1. Is it true AMD is awful for multi gpu? Because if these specs are real and priced well I'll buy 2 of them.


2. Do we have any clue yet for when these will be officially announced and when release date will be?

 

[El_Chino]

Funny thing is, my experience as a developer has been the opposite. Current project the bug count is 2 to 1 in favor of AMD. Although to be fair, the AMD 'bug' was a mistake I made that the driver didn't handle properly - a compute kernel infinite loop that took down my PC The NVIDIA bugs were both shader compiler issues that were a pain to work around. Things like very specific type of texture gathers returning just one value instead of four, etc.

There are things AMD cards just handle better too, things like large texture UV precision is dramatically better on AMD.

Same experience with past projects. I think my all time favorite was from *way* back in the day on a geforce 2; I once had msn messenger appear in water reflections

Interesting.

 

[thuway]

AMD with the elbow drop.

 

[MR ARCADE FOREVER]

AMD with the elbow drop.

 

[Kaako]

I really hope this is the case; we need AMD to stay competitive in the high end GPU market.

 

[finalflame]

So, to clarify, the 980 SLi 4*4GB is 980s in 4-way SLi?

 

[viveks86]

So, to clarify, the 980 SLi 4*4GB is 980s in 4-way SLi?

yes

 

[Karanlos]

Very interesting results. Hoping to replace my 6950 soon with something a bit more modern
390 hopefully has a price point i can handle. Might even go with 390x. Exciting times!

 

[ThoseDeafMutes]

So, to clarify, the 980 SLi 4*4GB is 980s in 4-way SLi?

No it's supposed to be single SLI, otherwise the perf would make 0 sense (4 way sli only has 1.6x performance of a single card?!). The R9 295 is a dual GPU card and also says 4 * 4, it's just a stupid way of noting it. The chart is probably bogus anyway.

 

[finalflame]

yes

Well, we'll see ifthis turns out to be true. In real world benchmarks, for the most part, 3 and 4-way SLi shows very poor scaling past 2-way (of course, it varies with game/application). 390X is looking like a winner according to these numbers, but then again, AMD.

No it's supposed to be single SLI, otherwise the perf would make 0 sense (4 way sli only has 1.6x performance of a single card?!). The R9 295 is a dual GPU card and also says 4 * 4, it's just a stupid way of noting it. The chart is probably bogus anyway.

Actually, in many games 3 and 4-way SLi doesn't really give THAT much of an improvement over 2-way. Also depends on resolution you're testing at. See: http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphi...ay-and-4-Way-SLI-Performance/Metro-Last-Light

So it all depends on what they were using to test. Like you said, this is probably bogus anyways. We'll have to sit and wait for official benchmarks.

 

[GrooveCommand]

It's impressive that possibly the 4gb Fiji card bests the 12gb Titan X.

But I think its important that AMD gets an 8gb 390X out there asap to really put the heat on Nvidia. Even though an 8gb version of the 390X will only likely yield a 5-10% improvement over a 4gb version, it's important for marketing purposes so that Nvidia can't pull the wool over the eyes of the uninformed consumer who sees 12gb memory as superior to something lower from AMD.

Actually it is rumored that the 390x uses 3D stacked memory which increases the memory bandwidth by an insane amount. This picture is a good example:

Ultimately this means that the 390x could have a memory bandwidth of 512 GB/s – 1024 GB/s. Considering that the Titan X has a memory bw of 336.0 GB/s this could theoretically allow 8GB of 3D Stacked memory to be accessed 2-3 times faster than the TitanX so they end result would actually be that 8GB of 3D Memory would destroy 12GB of "2D" memory.

If they really do have 3D Stacked Memory 1024 GB/s then 4GB would be pretty close to 12GB of 2D memory.

 

[Dreams-Visions]

If that 390 comes out at a reasonable price, I'll be selling my Step Up 970 FTW+ before I ever take it out of the box.

 

[HowZatOZ]

Well, guess I'll be going AMD. Haven't gone red for a good five years or so now, should be nice with the driver changes and suite updates.

Question though, what would be more worthwhile money/performance wise? The R9 295X2 or the new Fiji that beats Titan X?

 

[Tagyhag]

Or maybe people pay attention to the driver situation and be willing to see that AMD has improved their drivers recently. In effect statements like this completely validate the pricing strategy Nvidia is using on their captive market.

It's only been 1 month since I had to switch to nvidia due to the problem. Fool me once, shame on you etc. Etc.

 

[ThoseDeafMutes]

Well, we'll see ifthis turns out to be true. In real world benchmarks, for the most part, 3 and 4-way SLi shows very poor scaling past 2-way (of course, it varies with game/application). 390X is looking like a winner according to these numbers, but then again, AMD.



Actually, in many games 3 and 4-way SLi doesn't really give THAT much of an improvement over 2-way. Also depends on resolution you're testing at. See: http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphi...ay-and-4-Way-SLI-Performance/Metro-Last-Light

So it all depends on what they were using to test. Like you said, this is probably bogus anyways. We'll have to sit and wait for official benchmarks.

If they just tested games where 3 and 4 way SLI don't do anything it (in your link Sniper Elite 3 and Crysis 3 had fantastic scaling, metro not so much) would be a bloody useless test and I don't know why they would bother including that stat. Benching 2 way SLI is much more useful to more people, and I don't know why they would jump straight to 4.

Just to reiterate, their listing for 295x says "4 * 4" but does not say SLI, yet has comparable perf. So it's basically certain that it's meaning to say dual GPU setups, not that they are 4 way SLI setups.

 

[viveks86]

No it's supposed to be single SLI, otherwise the perf would make 0 sense (4 way sli only has 1.6x performance of a single card?!). The R9 295 is a dual GPU card and also says 4 * 4, it's just a stupid way of noting it. The chart is probably bogus anyway.

These are game performance figures. They rarely scale similar to benchmark software, especially beyond 2 way SLI. Agree that the chart could very well be bogus in any case.

 

[Inuhanyou]

AMD, going all in. Just a shame HBM isn't available in higher sizes yet. 8GB of that could have really put Titan X in a bad position, now people can just make the 'well more ram" argument

 

[Dreams-Visions]

And every year I hear it isn't as bad as people make it seem.

In my recent experiences with the 970, I've had more driver crashes with it than I had with any AMD drivers and cards in the last 3 years combined. Not an exaggeration. I'd say I had maybe ~10 driver crashes in the last 2.5 months with the 970 and the latest Nvidia drivers. I can only think of a couple of occasions in the last 3 years that my AMD drivers crashed. They had other issues like making the mouse cursor bug out...but driver crashes? Only when stress testing OC's.

AMD may not release drivers as often, but they're for damn sure more stable and reliable than what Nvidia is putting out. Fuck what anyone else tells you. I'll be happy to go back to AMD than deal with this sketchy shit. We'll see when the next Nvidia drivers are released how things go.

 

[tuxfool]

Better, but they still suck on OpenGL front, which is critical for things like Dolphin Emulator.

I'll wait for confirmation on powet consumption and noise levels, things AMD had trouble with in recent times.

Curiously enough AMD cards are better for dolphin on windows. Maxwell may have caught up on account of the added integer operations.

 

[ThoseDeafMutes]

AMD may not release drivers as often, but they're for damn sure more stable and reliable than what Nvidia is putting out. Fuck what anyone else tells you.

Yeah, fuck what anyone else tells you, trust one person's experience.

That's just as stupid as when people say "I had problems with AMD drivers, therefore they're all shit".

 

[Shozuki]

I went for the R9 295X2 instead of the Titan Z last time...

Can't help feel that was a mistake... Nvidia's aftermarket driver support for newer games just seems better.

I bought 2x R9 295X2's and pretty much nothing supports crossfire...

 

[tuxfool]

LOL. I literally hear this every year, like it's a new thing.

Yeah, it is weird how drivers improve as time goes by.

I'm sorry. What? Drivers are always pertinent (for PC gaming).

You are aware that the reason driver download sizes generally balloon is not just because of features but also game specific hacks or corrections to improve performance. DX12 won't eliminate the need for good drivers, but it makes dependencies on thick driver optimizations less significant, as those optimizations are supposed to happen at the game/engine level, not in the driver.

 

[Rogue_Ledr]

You trippin'

You must know nothing about NVIDIA.

My sentiments exactly! These guys overprice like mad.

 

[Crzy1]

Wish the TDP numbers were lower for the "390X", looks like Nvidia is probably still going to have the better overclocking card, but if they price it under the GTX 980 they're going to have a real winner regardless of how well it can overclock. Hopefully they don't fuck the launch up with shitty, loud stock coolers again.

 

[crabman]

AMD, going all in. Just a shame HBM isn't available in higher sizes yet. 8GB of that could have really put Titan X in a bad position, now people can just make the 'well more ram" argument

There is still hope!

 

[Skux]

Have rumoured pre-release benchmarks been accurate in the past?

 

[viveks86]

Have rumoured pre-release benchmarks been accurate in the past?

I'd like to know this too

 

[cleveridea]

If DX12 moves prior driver code into the game, isn't that a large burden for developers? I would think it means whoever has the strongest developer support wins vs best hardware. Either that or there is a slow transition.

 

[tuxfool]

It's only been 1 month since I had to switch to nvidia due to the problem. Fool me once, shame on you etc. Etc.

I can't say I've been completely problem free on either flavour and I understand your sentiment. However, I've noticed quite a few people saying things like "AMD better improve so I can get a cheaper Nvidia card". If that is the attitude taken, how will AMD improve? They're in a completely different financial situation and it costs money to improve.

Frankly I think Nvidia users deserve the higher prices, they are after all paying for greater quality. That extra quality is obviously worth a lot, with plenty of people willing to pay that premium, since Nvidia is doing fine.

 

[CariusD]

If DX12 moves prior driver code into the game, isn't that a large burden for developers? I would think it means whoever has the strongest developer support wins vs best hardware. Either that or there is a slow transition.

Yes there are more ways to shoot your foot. However for the major developers the API isn't that bad, and MS + vendors are putting vast amounts of resources into helping with this transition.

 

[cyberheater]

There is still hope!

Designed for VR immersion. Awesome. I hope it's not too loud or requires too much power.

 

[Inuhanyou]

There is still hope!

I dunno, i've heard that that scan is doctored to begin with. Would be really interesting if it was real though