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[ashecitism]

"You're not limited in this world to any number of stacks, but from a capacity point of view, this generation-one HBM, each DRAM is a two-gigabit DRAM, so yeah, if you have four stacks you're limited to four gigabytes. You could build things with more stacks, you could build things with less stacks. Capacity of the frame buffer is just one of our concerns. There are many things you can do to utilise that capacity better. So if you have four stacks you're limited to four [gigabytes], but we don't really view that as a performance limitation from an AMD perspective."

"If you actually look at frame buffers and how efficient they are and how efficient the drivers are at managing capacities across the resolutions, you'll find that there's a lot that can be done. We do not see 4GB as a limitation that would cause performance bottlenecks. We just need to do a better job managing the capacities. We were getting free capacity, because with [GDDR5] in order to get more bandwidth we needed to make the memory system wider, so the capacities were increasing. As engineers, we always focus on where the bottleneck is. If you're getting capacity, you don't put as much effort into better utilising that capacity. 4GB is more than sufficient. We've had to go do a little bit of investment in order to better utilise the frame buffer, but we're not really seeing a frame buffer capacity [problem]. You'll be blown away by how much [capacity] is wasted."

http://arstechnica.co.uk/informatio...d-hbm-why-amds-high-bandwidth-memory-matters/

 

[SerTapTap]

Awww comeon, I've been hanging onto my 6950 waiting for a 6+GB hard. Still if this is like ~Titan X and $500 or less I might still bite

 

[Zoned]

It's crazy to think that it's two years after launch and the PS4 still has many benefits over this thing due to the tight integration achieved by Sony and AMD. PS4 still has hUMA and asynchronous compute and a supercharged PC architecture which are all massive advantages available to PS4 devs that simply cannot be replicated on the more open and "Wild West" PC platform. This will mean that despite a small deficit in computational power], that it will take years for PC games to catch up with titles developed specifically to take advantage of the aforementioned PS4 hardware advantages.

I hope this is a joke post.

 

[adamantypants]

It's crazy to think that it's two years after launch and the PS4 still has many benefits over this thing due to the tight integration achieved by Sony and AMD. PS4 still has hUMA and asynchronous compute and a supercharged PC architecture which are all massive advantages available to PS4 devs that simply cannot be replicated on the more open and "Wild West" PC platform. This will mean that despite a small deficit in computational power, that it will take years for PC games to catch up with titles developed specifically to take advantage of the aforementioned PS4 hardware advantages.

Do you just ignore benchmarks?

 

[Cidd]

Nope. Some new current games are >5GB at 4K. And, supposedly, Star Citizens will be hitting 4GB at 1080p.

Its not enough for Lords of the Fallen at 1080p maxed (needs 6GB).

I figured it wouldn't be enough, is AMD even trying at this point.

This better be under $350 or it's DOA imo.

 

[ashecitism]

Guys, it's Horse Armour. Of course he's not serious.

 

[bomblord1]

http://arstechnica.co.uk/informatio...d-hbm-why-amds-high-bandwidth-memory-matters/

Thank I guess I was right. Hopefully's AMD's drivers are up to the task.

 

[mkenyon]

The amount of people that consistently fall for Horse Armour is the reason I click these threads.

Priceless. Every time.

 

[metareferential]

Lol at people getting trolled by Horse Armour xD

He's a master xD

He's joking guys

 

[Besthelboy]

4GB but it'll be around double the band
with of GDDR5 from what I've read.

 

[Doc Holliday]

Isnt comparing the ram on this gpu to prior cards like comparing MHz on different kind of pentium chips? Let's wait for benchmarks gentlemen.

 

[Zeyphersan]

Well this convinces me to wait for Pascal, at least

 

[gruenel]

Lots of broken sarcasm and troll meters in here

 

[shandy706]

Good ole Horse Armour.

 

[Zoned]

Lots of broken sarcasm and troll meters in here

It's difficult to track sarcasm on message boards these days. You never know when people like "Heavy" might chip in.

 

[Koutsoubas]

Well it's gonna cost 850 dollars so.... F@ck logic!

http://www.fudzilla.com/news/graphics/37790-amd-fiji-aims-at-849-retail-price

 

[BennyBlanco]

I really think Horse Armour might be the best NeoGAF poster

 

[gdt]

It's crazy to think that it's two years after launch and the PS4 still has many benefits over this thing due to the tight integration achieved by Sony and AMD. PS4 still has hUMA and asynchronous compute and a supercharged PC architecture which are all massive advantages available to PS4 devs that simply cannot be replicated on the more open and "Wild West" PC platform. This will mean that despite a small deficit in computational power, that it will take years for PC games to catch up with titles developed specifically to take advantage of the aforementioned PS4 hardware advantages.

.....wha

 

[wildfire]

So in a couple of months we might need to relearn that memory capacity isn't everything. For AMD's sake I hope the drastically higher bandwidth renders the capacity concerns pointless.

 

[El_Chino]

http://arstechnica.co.uk/informatio...d-hbm-why-amds-high-bandwidth-memory-matters/

There we go.

 

[Ziffles]

.....wha

If the username didn't give it away yet, the "supercharged PC" should have.

 

[truth411]

4GB but it'll be around double the band
with of GDDR5 from what I've read.

Exactly, I'm no expert on this subject, but reading this thread makes it sound like bandwidth is irrelevant and don't matter and memory capacity is all that matters.

 

[Tenebrous]

That's disappointing. I guess I'm sticking to my 780s for now, then.

 

[Mesoian]

Who the hell is buying a Quadro M6000 for gaming?

 

[Coulomb_Barrier]

Absolutely stupid from AMD if true, as I know they won't release the 390X (if that is what has 4GB HBM) for around $450, which is the price they'll need to launch at to make any dent in the market.

The 390X will likely cost closer to $700, given the "it'll be priced towards the higher end of the spectrum" detail, which will see it get absolutely buried when Nvidia decide to release the 980 ti.

 

[truth411]

Absolutely stupid from AMD if true, as I know they won't release the 390X (if that is what has 4GB HBM) for around $450, which is the price they'll need to launch at to make any dent in the market.

The 390X will likely cost closer to $700, given the "it'll be priced towards the higher end of the spectrum" detail, which will see it get absolutely buried when Nvidia decide to release the 980 ti.

Is memory bandwidth completely irrelevant to you guys? Serious question, not being sarcastic.

 

[dgrdsv]

Seems like a strange design choice for a new generation card. Unless it's going to be cheap.

I'm going to go ahead and guess that several things they weren't expecting happened:
1. 20nm TSMC turned out to be a turd for GPU production.
2. HBM1 took longer than expected to get ready for mass production.
3. New consoles ended up with 8 GB of RAM instead of 4.

All these being true now means that HBM1 doesn't look as hot as it was supposed to look when they've started working on it.

 

[wildfire]

Our well informed sources are telling us that Fiji is not going to be the cheapest chip on the market.

The Fiji XT card should be performing well but the original plan to introduce the card at $799 is not happening, our sources tell us. Such a price had a logic -- the Fiji XT card is faster than Geforce GTX 980 that sells between $550 to $600 and Fiji XT performance is closer to the $999 priced Geforce Titan X. Most Titan cards including a few from Asus and EVGA start at $1049, even more than the suggested retail price of $999. This means $849 is a reasonable price for what you get. .

If you look at all the facts, it turns out that Fiji might be reasonably priced when compared with Titan X, but Nvidia will launch Geforce GTX 980 TI close to the Fiji launch, just to mess with AMD's plan and put some pressure on the company.

We hear Fiji XT will win some and lose some benchmarks to Titan.

It looks like the 4GB card will be the first into the shops. The 8GB card has two GPUs and it won't launch at the same time. The Fiji XT 4GB will launch by middle of June, around E3.

http://www.fudzilla.com/news/graphics/37790-amd-fiji-aims-at-849-retail-price

 

[...Scatter...]

Wait, so will this be enough for 4k?

I was expecting 6GB minimum tbh.

Your menus and cut scenes will be 4k.

 

[Tenebrous]

http://www.fudzilla.com/news/graphics/37790-amd-fiji-aims-at-849-retail-price

That's amazingly disappointing. What's the point in trading power with the Titan X when those cards are aimed at 4K? Surely 4GB won't cut it for the games people buy these flagship games for?

I can't max GTA5 with 3GB VRAM at 1440p, so the idea of buying a 4GB card for the future just seems daft.

 

[zephervack]

If its reasonably priced at < $500 then its all good.

I currently play games at 6400 * 1200, and I have yet to play a game that goes over the 4GB mark with a 290x, GTA V takes around 3.7 GB, with most settings in high and Ultra, I havent played Lords of The Fallen though.

If they pretend to sell these at > $700, then they done goofed.

 

[qa_engineer]

It has no chance to beat the titan x, at least 1/3rd as powerful, and 1/2 as powerful as the Ps4 even.

Your menus and cut scenes will be 4k.

3840x2160pr or dynamic 4k

 

[Red Hood]

Can't say I particularly mind, because I don't plan on switching over to 4K gaming in three years at the very, very most. I'm still rocking 1080p and I'm more than satisfied with it. So it all comes down to price to me. I have a 280X now, so this could be a very good substitute if the price is right.

edit: apparently $849, hmm... Seems to be better than the GTX 980 (priced ~ $550) and close to the Titan X ($1000), so it might be a logic price, but still... that 4Gb thooo...

 

[Dictator93]

If its reasonably priced at < $500 then its all good.

I currently play games at 6400 * 1200, and I have yet to play a game that goes over the 4GB mark with a 290x, GTA V takes around 3.7 GB, with most settings in high and Ultra, I havent played Lords of The Fallen though.

If they pretend to sell these at > $700, then they done goofed.

At that resolution Star Citizen, missing tons of assets and still using placeholder textures, uses about 5.5 to 6 gigs of VRAM.

Or just check out wolfenstein TNO with uncompressed textures.,

A number of games have crossed the 4 GB barrier with the highest texture settings.

 

[Vanillalite]

Isnt comparing the ram on this gpu to prior cards like comparing MHz on different kind of pentium chips? Let's wait for benchmarks gentlemen.

At some point you just need the space to hold all of the textures and shit. No amount of speed fixes this.

 

[R10Neymarfan]

At that resolution Star Citizen, missing tons of assets and still using placeholder textures, uses about 5.5 to 6 gigs of VRAM.

Or just check out wolfenstein TNO with uncompressed textures.,

A number of games have crossed the 4 GB barrier with the highest texture settings.

Star Citizen isn't to even a point of optimization. Those 5.5-6GB of VRAM can be reduced significantly

 

[Dictator93]

Star Citizen isn't to even a point of optimization. Those 5.5-6GB of VRAM can be reduced significantly

Given how the game is already using one of the best texture streamers that exists (Crysis 3 and Ryse have ridiculous texture quality for their VRAM usage). And the fact that Star Citizen is targetting absurd texture (everything) quality, I actually imagine that the amount used will stay similar, but the quality will just get higher.

 

[SliChillax]

How does HBM benefit gaming? Why would I want a gpu with HBM rather than a gpu with more vram?

 

[Stumpokapow]

Treat me like I'm stupid. I need a new video card. I can buy it anywhere from now until ~September or so. I want to buy a little bit above the price sweetspot, probably around $250-350 for a video card. Not a titan. I want a single card, I don't want to SLI.

I was going to be waiting for the summer announcements in case they were cheaper, more powerful, or had more DX12 features.

 

[Kezen]

It's crazy to think that it's two years after launch and the PS4 still has many benefits over this thing due to the tight integration achieved by Sony and AMD. PS4 still has hUMA and asynchronous compute and a supercharged PC architecture which are all massive advantages available to PS4 devs that simply cannot be replicated on the more open and "Wild West" PC platform. This will mean that despite a small deficit in computational power, that it will take years for PC games to catch up with titles developed specifically to take advantage of the aforementioned PS4 hardware advantages.

Timothy Lottes believed likewise :
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=510076

The real reason to get excited about a PS4 is what Sony as a company does with the OS and system libraries as a platform, and what this enables 1st party studios to do, when they make PS4-only games. If PS4 has a real-time OS, with a libGCM style low level access to the GPU, then the PS4 1st party games will be years ahead of the PC simply because it opens up what is possible on the GPU

I'm not seeing anything on PS4 "lightyears" ahead of PC's best looking games, even on mid-range GPUs.
But hey, maybe it will happen.

 

[Tenebrous]

Treat me like I'm stupid. I need a new video card. I can buy it anywhere from now until ~September or so. I want to buy a little bit above the price sweetspot, probably around $250-350 for a video card. Not a titan. I want a single card, I don't want to SLI.

I was going to be waiting for the summer announcements in case they were cheaper, more powerful, or had more DX12 features.

Wait until the summer for price drops if nothing else. If you were to go out and grab a card now, the GTX970 is an absolute no brainer at the higher end of your budget.

 

[Foxyone]

I'm feeling very optimistic for some reason, but at 4GB HBM1, I'm feeling even $550 is too high to expect.

 

[Coulomb_Barrier]

Is memory bandwidth completely irrelevant to you guys? Serious question, not being sarcastic.

To be honest, it's not really that big of a deal for me.

But it's more of a frustration with AMD as I would like them to be more competitive. If these rumours are true, from a marketing P.O.V, they will fail miserably at marketing this card as an alternative to the Titan X even though (with the $850 price rumour I just read) it's approaching the same price-bracket as the Nvidia card and apparently matches it in benchmarks. They'll fail miserably as their's still this perception that 4GB of memory is not enough for a future-proof GPU, even if that type of memory is HBM. 12GB GDDR5 is probably still more effective marketing than 4GB HBM.

They'll also fail miserably at marketing this as a competitor to the 980, which will be significantly cheaper when the 390X lands (price-cut incoming), and it'll unfortunately be trumped by a hypothetical 980 Ti, packing 6GB memory and similar price/performance to the new AMD flagship.

 

[DouglasteR]

You had one job AMD.

Price this card well or burst.

 

[OnionPowder]

How does HBM benefit gaming? Why would I want a gpu with HBM rather than a gpu with more vram?

HBM has a significantly higher bandwidth and next year HBM will have a higher capacity than any other VRAM solution. This is just the first version of it.

 

[Dictator93]

HBM has a significantly higher bandwidth and next year HBM will have a higher capacity than any other VRAM solution. This is just the first version of it.

notevenmyfinalform.jpg

 

[Tenebrous]

Is memory bandwidth completely irrelevant to you guys? Serious question, not being sarcastic.

Can't remember being affected by it in recent years as a gamer. What has affected me, though, is having to turn down features due to VRAM limitations.

I need a 6GB card for 1440p now. Nothing else, not even speed of light VRAM, will make me upgrade.

 

[Vanillalite]

Treat me like I'm stupid. I need a new video card. I can buy it anywhere from now until ~September or so. I want to buy a little bit above the price sweetspot, probably around $250-350 for a video card. Not a titan. I want a single card, I don't want to SLI.

I was going to be waiting for the summer announcements in case they were cheaper, more powerful, or had more DX12 features.

Wait until the summer for price drops if nothing else. If you were to go out and grab a card now, the GTX970 is an absolute no brainer at the higher end of your budget.

This! Wait for Summer and we should (in theory) see cheaper prices on stuff.

 

[Zoned]

Treat me like I'm stupid. I need a new video card. I can buy it anywhere from now until ~September or so. I want to buy a little bit above the price sweetspot, probably around $250-350 for a video card. Not a titan. I want a single card, I don't want to SLI.

I was going to be waiting for the summer announcements in case they were cheaper, more powerful, or had more DX12 features.

Most likely wait for GTX 970 price drop. It's definitely gonna be around $250 in next month or so.

Although you could possibly get $300 970 with 2 free games right now, pretty good deal imo.

 

[Tripolygon]

How does HBM benefit gaming? Why would I want a gpu with HBM rather than a gpu with more vram?

It is all about Bandwidth, technology limitation with HBM 1 is preventing AMD to go with 4+ GB vram. Lots of either overreacting uninformed people or just simply facetious people in this thread. AMD is introducing a new memory tech into their GPU with limitations, but they have to start somewhere in order to test how it performs in real world application.