Hacker News Reader

Comment by reitzensteinm | Hacker News Reader

Chips are in the pipeline for many years, so products being released today are probably on the tail end of being impacted by AMD cutting GPU budgets to the bone to focus on Zen. I wouldn't expect miracles.

Given AMD's market cap and financial success, I bet they're working on competitive designs now. There's no money in being an also ran in the space.

View on HN

They would have been putting tons of development money into the graphics for the PS5 and the XBOX, and I think a lot of what went in to that is going to show up in their new GPUS. The timing of this stuff coming out right alongside the next generation consoles is confirmation of that, I think.

Agreed. Mark Cerny has said that some features in RDNA2 are a direct result of collaboration between Sony/AMD.

Intel is vulnerable. Now is the time for AMD to strike!

The information available around Big Navi (The GPUs expected to launch next month) put them at a +50% performance jump from the last generation and likely able to compete with the Nvidia flagship 3080: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-big_navi-rdna2-all-we-...

I'd really urge anyone wanting to opine on these issues to watch the official analyst day videos and read through the releases AMD has put out so far in terms of architecture and other tech decisions they've made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMNwLVJQzGs&t=10064s

It is important to note that it is 50% performance improvement per watt, not absolute performance.

In at least datacenter settings, performance-per-watt is just as important as performance-per-dollar, since watts are continuous OpEx.

Even in the home, I like to consider performance-per-watt. More power draw means more heat and more heat means less comfort for much of the year.

I think you're overestimating the thermal pollution. A human is 100W-120W. The Zen 3 is about 180-220W. That pales to comparison to the cost of cooling a home where air conditioning systems have 36,000BTU or 10,000W.

Unless your AC is designed specifically with your PC in mind, and is adequately sized for your house (not a guarantee), a hot, noisy PC or laptop still makes its local area uncomfortable.

Most homes with central AC have adjustable vents, many have baffles or zones. It's trivial to tweak your airflow to boost cooling to the room with a gaming pc.

Ceiling fans are another great option for homogenizing the temperature of a room.

You don't need to build your climate control systems specifically with a PC in mind, they're designed to be adjusted.

Honestly I've never lived in a house or apartment that gave enough hot or cold air to the right rooms. Even with baffles open or closed, there are always super hot rooms and super cold rooms. This is exacerbated by having a high power PC (or, before 2020, a party with a lot of people).

Something running at 300W continuously (not that most home PC users would be in that position exactly) still uses about 220 kWh a month.

But nVidia was substantially ahead the last generation and are promising a greater performance delta than that.

AMD often has very high FLOPS but fails to translate that in to FPS in games, due to architecture inefficiency, drivers, or developers simply optimizing primarily for GeForce.

I would in turn urge you to take all of these figures with a large grain of salt until the third party benchmarks hit.

AMD’s one saving grace is that to optimize for consoles is to optimize for Radeon.

> The information available around Big Navi (The GPUs expected to launch next month) put them at a +50% performance jump from the last generation and likely able to compete with the Nvidia flagship 3080

I guess it depends on what benchmark you care about but for AMD to compete with a 3080, which is 70-100% faster than a 2080, which is 10-20% faster than AMD's current flagship, they need to do a lot better than +50%.

Some of the leaked benchmarks for the 3080 put it more in the range of 30-50% better than the 2080 series:

"30% Faster Than The RTX 2080 Ti & 50% Faster Than the RTX 2080 SUPER on Average"

https://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3080-graphics-card-b...

AND those early benchmarks were from Nvidia on very specific DLSS and RTX workloads that may not have been representative to many games people play.

Does it really matter for gaming?

Disclaimer: I'm personally hoping to complete my current build as a "Red Box" (AMD CPU, AMD GPU). However, facts are facts.

DLSS 1.9 was impressive, but has its problems and would understandably be avoided by most gamers. DLSS 2 is a whole different story[1], and is highly likely to be something that most gamers enable. 4K/60 or 1440p/240 are the golden standards for PC gamers (depending on whether you prefer high resolution, or high framerates) and DLSS 2 would help you achieve either.

RTX is nice, Minecraft RTX has done a lot for marketing it. Probably still a coin-flip on whether a gamer would eat the performance hit for the quality improvement.

[1]: https://youtu.be/YWIKzRhYZm4

DLSS and RTX are still game specific, with very few games that have developed for them. It has been a generation, if there was going to be a big flood of DLSS and RTX titles, it would have happened already.

RT is here to stay, both next gen consoles have it.

> DLSS and RTX are still game specific

Note that DLSS 2.0's model is not game specific ( https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/nvidia-dlss-2-0-a-... )

DLSS support is still game specific as it needs additional data beyond just the color buffer to do the up-scaling, such as motion vectors, but it at least doesn't need the expensive part that put it out of reach of eg. indie games.

So it's now on the "if unity & unreal support it, you'll see everyone have it in a few years" trajectory. Probably, anyway, similar to things like TXAA & FXAA.

> 4K/60 or 1440p/240 are the golden standards

Those are $1200+ monitors at any decent resolution.

EDIT: by resolution I mean the horizontal dimension of the monitor, where pc enthusiasts typically go for 27+ inches in width which are more expensive as you scale in size, add a curve, etc.

And you're talking about $600-$1200 GPUs, plus similar or higher for CPU+MB+RAM. People who buy these things are willing to pay for maximum performance.

You can get a real good quality 4k60 for $400, or one with shitty color for much less. The LG 27gn950 is 4k144 + full DCI-P3 for $800, but unfortunately has been sold out everywhere since it was released a week or two ago.

I bought this 4k/60 monitor for $500 3 years ago:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00SHZSXVI/ref=asin_title?...

No gsync/freesync, but I wasn't intending to game on it anyway.

the resolution is specified, do you mean image quality? gamers tend to sacrifice that for refresh speed and low input latency.

There appears to be no FPS performance gain going from 144hz to 240hz though so you don't have to get crazy.

I meant the dimensions of the monitor i.e. 27in, 32in, etc. 27 inches seems to be one of the most popular dimensions.

Depends on price. Nvidia might have owned the tippity top with their 20xx series but the 5700xt was a very strong card for medium priced builds and as a pc building enthusiast would’ve been the card for my next build alongside an amdR5 3600 cpu. At launch it had driver issues but they were cleaned up and at $350 it was a total steal compared to a 2070 at $650 for similar performance.

I agree. They don't need to beat the 3080, they just need to match or beat the 3070 at a competitive price. I would say the majority of the market does not have $700 to blow on a GPU. Having compelling options under $500 would be enough of a win.

That's what AMD has been doing and it hasn't really worked out. While all the market sales are at the mid range price point, all the youtubers & lust worthy builds that drive mind-share are not. And marketing works, it's why you'll see basically nothing but Nvidia on the steam stats page despite how competitive the 5700 (xt) was.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

The chart toppers are the mid range cards (1060, 1050 Ti, 1050), exactly as you'd expect. But what you then might not expect is that the 1070 and 1080 are both still higher than any AMD offering. There's almost as many 2070 SUPER's ($600) as there are RX 580s ($230 @ launch, currently sub-$200), AMD's most popular GPU among Steam users.

Isn't the Nvidia flagship the RTX 3090? The overclockers uk website has the most expensive 3090 (Asus one) at ~1600gbp. On paper this should destroy everything else available atm.

It's also well over $1000. I imagine that's not the competition that AMD is going after this iteration. They probably want to compete with the graphics card people will actually buy.

In the kitchen keynote, their CEO positioned the 3080 as the flagship card and the 3090 as the Titan replacement(higher vram for things like large model runs)

Ah, apologies the linked stories and videos go into more detail. The “50 percent jump” is from Instructions per cycle alone with process node improvements and better cache architecture also contributing gains.

Final perf numbers are being speculated as being “close to 3080” in the chip forums, but I’d take that with a grain of salt since those are rumors alone.

+50% performance per watt efficiency. Unfortunately that only puts them at the same efficiency ballpark as nvidia's past two generations.

> There's no money in being an also ran in the space.

AMD has spent nearly its entirely life in second place as the resident "also ran". But they're still around...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com