Nvidia's new graphics cards are a big deal
theverge.com
theverge.com
The 1080 is the only card with GDDR5X, which from what I've read has twice the bandwidth of GDDR5. The 1080 and 1070 both have 256-bit buses, meaning if the clock rates are equal, the 1070 will have half the memory bandwidth of the 1080.
In contrast, the current gen AMD R9-290, R9-390 and higher have 512-bit GDDR5 buses, and the leaked Polaris cards have 256-bit GDDR5X buses (eqivalent).
AMD cards tend to be priced lower than NVidia cards, so we're very much in a wait-and-see mode right now.
(We do datacenter level cryptographic compute and our workloads are very memory bandwidth constrained.)
This might vary with the prices in different markets. But that AMD is the better choice in the 200€/$ price region, which for pure price performance is currently the high point, almost has tradition.
It should also be noted that the projected performance gains are qualified as for VR. Those will still be strong cards for normal graphics, but if they were as an enormous leap there as well Nvidia would have said so.
For games the performance difference is not marginal. The R9 380 and especially the R9 380X is a lot faster than the GTX 960. The R9 390 is on par with the GTX 970, as long as the Vram of the latter does not become an issue or one plays on higher resolutions. For all of them there is DX12 on the horizon, which so far gives a big boost to all AMD cards and none to Nvidia.
Software just is no issue. You find that everywhere on the net, but AMDs drivers in practice just are not worse. I used both, I had problems with both and stable systems with both, there is no meaningful difference there. And professional reviews back that up (note: I'm not talking on how they are to program for. That I don't know). AMD driver for windows are not bad since many many years now, and the Crimson driver update also overhauled the UI in a good way. On linux the situation is more complicated: While Nvidia has absolutely the faster driver, it is closed source. The free AMD driver is capable of playing games now, it made enormous progress in the last year and it is a pleasure to see that. Having a free driver is a big advantage.
There is a big difference in heat coming from power usage, Nvidia cards are just better there. Noise should be the same, but since both shut their fans down on idle and since the heating systems from Sapphire & Co are quite good, that is not something where AMD cards are really bad.
I do not want to sound too pro-AMD – Nvidia makes great cards and they definitely have their place – but I do not get the negative attitude against AMD.
Is AMD tackling this issue in the next generation or are they continuing to be competitive with cheap but hot chips?
Aren't the higher power requirements creating higher costs in datacenters (power, cooling) that make the AMD cards less attractive? The 390 vs 970 is at nearly a 2-to-1 power advantage for nvidia!
:-)
The multiple projections feature is cool. Aside from saving the double geometry/draw call overhead, they're probably also clipping/transforming/rendering each stereoscopic pair of fragments at the same time to encourage cache coherency and reduce bandwidth requirements on the GPU.
Overall, the overhead of rendering the same thing twice from slightly different projections shouldn't cut your rendering capabilities in half, it's mostly the same stuff. So this feature should make a big difference for VR.
I was waiting for something like this from the Sony PS3 when they started introducing 3DTV compatible games but I guess the market wasn't there at the time for that driver development effort considering most of the games released in 3D were PS2 ports. Seems like they missed an opportunity to have a killer app for 3DTV, nearly every PS3/PS4 game could have had built-in 3D with only a 25% or so performance hit that can be compensated for with downsampling/upscaling.
* Pascal will arrive with GTX 1080 end of this month, this is covered in OPs article
* Polaris is scheduled for summer/autumn, but as with Pascal the flagship models will come later
* Zen will be at the beginning 2017
* Mobile Fiji – no idea, have read nothing about
Edit: Just realizing that maybe you meant to prepend mobile to all of those?
However VR has forced their hand to release a significant upgrade. So if VR turns out to be nothing more than a trend that we forget about for another 20 years, at least it results in some amazing graphics cards.
Just not sure there's any PC focused games developers left to push these cards...
This is back in the day of 3DFX, PowerGL, you know when there was actual competition in the market. The nVidia card blew them all away, they destroyed the competition. So how do you continue to grow revenue after you've destroyed the competition? Invitation, but not too much (what Apple does now, and very well).
Basically, Intel was ahead of AMD(ATI), but not anymore...
I welcome more competition in the market either way.
They would really need to do something groundbreaking for me to even consider them.
Meanwhile im on Nvidia 460GT playing Witcher 3 on high settings (yes, sometimes cutscenes(of all the things, huh) stutter at the beginning, but otherwise for a 2010 GPU is runs ~60fps) , still getting updates, linux "Just Werks(TM)" In a year I'll prolly upgrade...
I don't know nearly enough to say exactly where the problem is, but one of the more frustrating aspects is that there is next to no documentation on troubleshooting such issues. It might be a problem on my end for all I know, but all that I can tell is that before updating to Ubuntu 16, fglrx worked okay, and after updating, playing games is extremely aggravating.
I would like to say that the drivers are a hell of a lot better than they were in 2011, though - last time I had to deal with the open-source drivers, it was "Display minimum functionality so that you have the ability to install the proprietary drivers," and HDMI support was horrifyingly bad. These days, it's "Works for everything except gaming," which is completely serviceable for me.
What you could try is to set the vblank_mode=3 environment variable to force V-Sync. If that helps, it means there's either a stale bad config file or a bug somewhere in the client API implementation...
Make sure you have no ~/.drirc, and you really shouldn't need an xorg.conf either.
AMD is still having trouble beating out nVidia, and Intel. The Zen architecture could in theory have HBM for the system CPU/APU, but I'm guessing they won't.
Finally A lot of Intel performance comes from compiler optimization and design, and last time with Athlon it took years for that to roll out. Unless Zen is years ahead of Intel, I don't know if they will be able to edge that far ahead. Intel has been doing CPU-GPU pairs now for more than 5 years, and they are getting better.
I think for AMD to win this round, they would need to have a power ratio that allowed them to dominate the laptop space, with APUs and eliminate the GPU as a component, and right now AMD and Intel are both on 14nm, so I think it would be hard to win there, but we will see.
nVidia is on the 16nm process, so if AMDs chips are equal in performance, they might draw less power. However, for VR, nVidia has been working very closely on the software with the various companies and I think they will have a strong software advantage for a while.
Sorry, but AMD is not coming back in the foreseeable future. It's all about economies of scale, and Intel has them, AMD has not.
Often it's the other way, they can make a few 'super ultra' cards but nowhere near enough to meet demand. So they price them as 'Halo' items and more or less instantly sell out for months. But, in theory if you can get that card it is the 'fastest' for a little while.
* It would make all the cards more expensive with better cooling and better VRMs need.
* It would lock them out of much needed laptop wins where they face real pressure to prove they're even needed, as well as Intel with Iris Pro.
* It would harm them in their GPGPU ambitions that is very perf/W sensitive.
There is no benefit to them holding back on die area/perf because that just directly hurts them in their own margins and makes chip fabrication more risky.
The only performance I could see them leaving on the table is to make a bigger chip, and in the previous generation they covered that with the move from the GTX 980 to the GTX 980 Ti. And that was 9 months later (not 5 years) to put out pretty much the biggest 28nm die they could.
When AMD dropped off in the CPU market, no one was interested in their architecture at all because it was just inferior from top to bottom of the performance range. Versus the GPU market where they had some value still in their low to midrange products.
That said, AMD are behind in the GPU game too. It's not like things are improving. http://www.fudzilla.com/images/amd_versus.JPG