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Comment by xvf22 | Hacker News Reader

Performance is better than I expected, especially for 300w and while not verified externally, it looks like AMD is finally competetive with the top end. If they can get the required share of TSMC volume, then Nvidia may feel a bit of pain since Samsung seems unable to meet the demand.

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Note that the 6900xt benchmark was running in "rage mode", and therefore was not inside 300W. Then again, the card they are comparing to is ~380W, so there is some room to play with while still being more power-efficient than the competition.

"Rage" mode, what a nice name choice coming from ex-ATi :)

Also important to note that it had Smart Memory Access on, which requires a Ryzen CPU (and furthermore, did they say specifically a Ryzen 5xxx CPU?)

I wonder if Smart Memory is even using PCIe 4? Remember AMD uses the PCIe lanes for interconnect between two EPYC CPUs. It's supposedly very similar to PCIe but a bit higher speed.

Smart Memory could then be as efficient as cross-CPU EPYC memory access. Which is pretty good.

Smart Memory Access is just marketing speak for resizable BARs (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/di...)

They said Ryzen 5xxx and x570 chipset.

500 series, that would cover B550.

Which is Intel level of dubious fake market segmentation considering those are no longer Chipsets, but rather southbridges sitting away from main PCIE lanes and memory buses.

A possible plausible explanation is that AMD's SAM is "just" that they fixed the BAR size limits so the entire vram can be mapped at once, instead of the still weirdly common & low 256MB limit. If so, that would actually involve the chipset (even if it's just the supporting BIOS & microcode) and not just the CPU.

But there is no chipset. PCIE controller is on CPU die.

The software that runs the PCIE controller isn't on the CPU, though. And at least at launch only the 500 series chipsets support the Ryzen 5000 CPUs. Maybe this will come to the 400 series chipsets later that get Ryzen 5000 support, or maybe this is something that was cut to squeeze in Ryzen 5000 support for the 400 series chipsets.

Where do you suppose its running then? Its pure market segmentation with AMD dictating what runs where

totally incompatible: https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/amd-zen-3-processors-w...

erm, we means totally compatible!!1: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-reverses-course-will-e...

"chipset" nowadays is just a pcie device providing legacy ports (USB 2.0, additional USB 3, SATA, HDA audio controller, PCIe bridge, I2C, SPI, LPC, bunch of GPIOs).

At this point SAM seems to be Ryzen 5xxx "exclusive".

Makes me wonder if that's related to the improved L3 cache access of Zen 3?

The performance numbers shown were cherry picked though, and conspicuously didn't include anything with raytracing enabled.

Leaked 3DMark raytracing benchmarks showed Big Navi lagging far behind Ampere so I wonder how that's going to bear out in real games.

The cherry picking happens pretty much with all of these kinds of presentations.

Nvidia did that by enabling DLSS and RTX in everything, that's how they ended up with "Up to 2 x 2080 performance" which in practice only seems to be the case with Mincecraft RTX running on 30 fps instead of 15 fps.

Why wouldn’t you enable RTX and DLSS in a 3070 or 3080?

I mean, I get that you can’t enable these on AMD 6000 series because the card doesn’t support these well.

> Why wouldn’t you enable RTX and DLSS in a 3070 or 3080?

Not every game supports RTX, those that fully rely on it are still performing so badly that a 15 fps increase can be marketed as "double 2080 performance", while saying absolutely nothing about the much more relevant rasterization performance.

Using DLSS can be misleading as picture quality is very difficult to objectively compare. But common sense makes the idea of "More performance with more details!" just sounds too good to be true, even with ML magic involved. Reminds me much more about something like Temporal Filtering: Giving more performance, but a slight cost of picture quality that might not be too noticeable with the extra raw pixels trough upscaling.

Very few games have implemented raytracing

But since both PS5 and Xbox Series X support ray tracing, there will be many upcoming PC games that support it too. You want a future proof GPU when you spend over 500 dollars to it.

Aren't both of those going to be using the same AMD ray tracing tech?

That's what I was thinking, seems a little odd that ray tracing can be significantly behind when both those consoles use AMD tech to implement their ray tracing capabilities.

I wouldn't expect ray tracing on the consoles to be better than Nvidia 2xxx ray tracing performance and that was only useful as a small gimmick just to put the "ray tracing" label on a game or a couple decent effects but at 30 FPS. I'm not even sure the 3xxx does ray tracing well enough to be worth it and it's ~2x the performance level.

I.e. just because games on the consoles can support ray tracing now doesn't mean they actually support it well. I still think it's a generation or 2 away from running well (as a current 2080 Ti owner)

imo "future proofing" doesn't really make from a price/perf perspective, especially for something so easily replaced as a desktop GPU. by the time the cool new feature goes mainstream, that high end GPU you bought probably needs to run everything on medium anyway. I expect the RTX 2000 series will age very poorly. a better approach is to aim for the price/perf sweetspot for a target resolution and upgrade often. I bought a 1080 TI more because I could than because it made sense.

As these consoles use AMD hardware, future-proof means AMD hardware. The hardware these console games are made for.

A low price and energy draw with ultra 4k gaming, meets the wants/needs for >90% of hobbyists. Assuming no issues with future testing/drivers, the 6000 line is forcing nvidia into a more niche market. Namely, Ml, ray tracing, and "flex" buyers.

I wouldn't be that worried if I were nvidia-- catering to the whales is good business, but I think we're looking at amd winning the lion share of the market

AMDs 3080 competitor is $50 less and 3070 competitor $70 more. The flagship is cheaper. In the end, most PC gamers balk at >$200-300 GPUs. These are all niche cards so far.

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