Features - Roy Taylor: AMD Radeon GPUs remain unsurpassed

[amd_roy]

hi thanks everyone for an interesting debate. I can tell you that a lot of us at AMD are reading the comments. I would just like to assure DemonHighwayMan that I have carried out a thorough examination and I most assuredly do have a soul.

In all seriousness if you would like to post direct questions to me then I will do my best to answer them.

I can also confirm that I did work 12 years at nvidia and so the above comments are absolutely fascinating.
thanks

[edzieba]

Hi Mr Taylor! I've got a couple of questions:

AMD's last roadmap announcement in September was very light on details on GPU development. Is there any updates you can provide?

Do AMD have any plans to develop a 'discrete APU' bus to link an external-to-the-chip GPU to a CPU and shared memory pool (like a souped-up HTX3), without the PCI-E bottleneck between the two memory pools? Or are AMD's target markets for APUs not limited in the sorts of workloads that benefit from shared memory access?

Adaptive Sync/Freesync currently presets the allows refresh timing range into several bins. What caused this to be chosen over a free selection of refresh timings with arbitrary globally set limits, and is it possible that in the future this will be amended (either through dynamic switching of bins, or an additional relaxed 'global' bin), or is it a limitation of working with a modification to Adaptive Sync?

Thanks!

[DanceswithUnix]

Hello Mr Taylor,

My biggest question is around Linux support.

The *only* reason my PC has an Nvidia card is because of the Linux drivers, and thanks to Steam for Linux I am really not using Windows much any more.
This is also the reason why at work the 150 Dell workstations each have one or two Nvidia Quadro cards in them.

There seem to be some good long term ideas here at AMD, but they always seem to be long term. Are there any improvements coming in the *short* term to get the existing drivers to "just work, no grief"?

Background: As a Fedora Linux user all I have to do to install proprietary Nvidia drivers is activate a non open source package repository at rpmfusion and then type "yum install kmod-nvidia" after which I get automatic updates and it all just works. For AMD I have to go dig out some instructions, download drivers from the AMD site, and go through a messy install process. I have to repeat this every time there is a driver update. Part of the problem for this is that the drivers are so bad that no-one will volunteer to package them up into a Fedora friendly rpm.

Thanks.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Hello Mr Taylor,

I would second the question from dances about Linux support especially for gaming. Now I can probably understand why AMD concentrates on Windows as it has greater market share, but I know a lot of people who do gravitate towards Nvidia(even maybe paying more on the process) due to Linux support.

A few other things - Nvidia DSR appears to have gained quite a bit of interest.Will AMD be exploring similar downsampling stuff too?
Will we see better time to market for amd apu products in the future too? Both kaveri and beema/Mullins took ages to appear in laptops(even the a8 7600 in retail) and I certainly know plenty of people who got fed up waiting months for them after launch. I really think it destroys any positive momentum after reviews if you cannot actually buy the products for ages?

The same goes for mini-ITX motherboard support on the DIY market.AMD could do with more(and maybe some cheaper ones based on the entry level chipsets) motherboards for their FM socket apus. Will we see some a5x or a7x based budget mini ITX motherboards anytime soon?

Finally why did AMD keep quiet about asynchronous timewarp support? Nvidia went out and got free browny points for the gtx970 and gtx980 for supporting it "first" when AMD already did and only after they were released was it confirmed.

Thanks.

[HalloweenJack]

Any news on a new AM3+ chipset? 1090 was rumoured to be ready - then binned with pcie 3 support.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I am more perplexed why we never saw any retail 970 based mATX motherboards especially when there were HP OEM ones found in some of their PCs. The lack of newer chipset AM3+ mATX motherboards with SATA3 support was a turnoff for a lot of enthusiasts IMHO.

[DanceswithUnix]

I am more perplexed why we never saw any retail 970 based mATX motherboards especially when there were HP OEM ones found in some of their PCs. The lack of newer chipset AM3+ mATX motherboards with SATA3 support was a turnoff for a lot of enthusiasts IMHO.

Agreed, I want a small motherboard with ECC memory support for my next home server. On modern filesystems ECC ram really isn't optional. Currently my only AMD option is a full ATX motherboard + FX4300, and my wife will certainly veto a full tower case in the living room which I think leaves me with a choice of a Xeon or divorce, and even at Xeon prices that is the cheaper option.

[ZaO]

Hi Roy. I would like to know when we will see some new high end desktop (gaming) Cpu's on a socket newer than Am3+, if you are able to comment on that? I've been waiting patiently for Amd to come out with something new so that I can build myself another gaming rig. I really don't want to buy an Intel Cpu for this. Thanks.

[amd_roy]

hi everyone, busy today but will try to get back over the weekend. I cannot answer all questions, and definitely not on unannounced products, obviously but will try and respond directly and openly, honestly where possible, thanks.

[HalloweenJack]

thank you roy! I have another question - how soon will we see a DDR4 APU ? the gpu part is in need of a performance uplift from the increased bandwidth (in my opinion) , so its needed much sooner than later - a surprise Christmas present would be awesome , as its `guessed` the silicon is ready for the new ram already

[KeyboardDemon]

I have mixed emotions on the interview.

Yes, Roy is definitely pushing an AMD line here, I work in sales and do exactly the same thing, I take one minor difference that makes a product stand out over the competitor's product and sell it like buying a product that doesn't have that feature will bring about almost certain disaster.

But I feel that it's not just the answers that are flawed, but some of the questions too.

In answer to Q1, Roy states:

In North America our competitor seems to have huge component supply issues with 970 and 980.

So Roy is saying that in a territory of around 300 million people there is not enough to go around, but I read that as:
The GTX 970 and GTX 980 have been so successful they are selling out all over North America.

Q2 comes across as an accusation that AMD are using existing architectures and drawing on current platforms in order to push newer lines forward so, the question suggests that it's a bad thing, but how can it be? Development is an iterative process, each new step forward present a number of opportunities to move in a number of directions so why not explore those before moving on to a new architecture? I feel Roy answered the question well.

Q3. I agree with the comments made about this statement:

It’s great to see good products from the other side finally

If he had said that to me while I was in a shop looking to pick between an AMD and an nVidia card, that answer would simply smell of desperation and would have been enough to put me off buying from that salesperson, it would have also been enough for me to stop trusting any information he had given me up until that point. If the word 'finally' wasn't in there then I would have been far more comfortable with reading beyond that point, but I stopped there and moved to the next Q.

Q5. Of course nVidia are bringing in new features with their line of GPUs, that's what development is for, introduce new features that offer more benefits, and of course AMD will be doing the same, who would buy a new platform that only offered the same feature set as the old platform with the only difference being a higher price?

Q6. Roy introduces Forward+ but then doesn't play on this enough to really sell the benefits. I would have liked to see more information instead of links to AMD's web pages for a tech demo and an article that uses graphs to show performance differences between two rival cards. In the second link we see how a card that doesn't offer an AMD solution doesn't do as well as a card that does when executing code that has been designed to run using that AMD specific feature, who'd have known?

Q7. Here Roy is suggesting they dropped prices in response to customers requesting more affordable top end graphics cards:

Recently in talking to our customers and end users one of the requests that had the most resonance was for AMD to bring the exceptional performance offered by the AMD Radeon R9 Series, including the R9 290 series down to new price points.

Does that mean that up until then their customers had been asking to spend more? Reading this just made me feel like I was ripped off when I bought my HD6970 and then my HD6990 after that, I should have sent AMD an email and asked them to reduce the price first.

Q8 + 10. I think AMDs Never settle bundle is great in that it is possible to choose which games you opt for, with nVidia offerings it has always been a set offering, so when I bought my GTX780Ti for my main rig I got a specific games bundle, this was exactly the same bundle when I bought the same card for my second rig, at least with the Never Settle bundle I would have been able to pick different games. That said, there aren't games in the bundle to really offer the variety of choice and even before I can claim any games I already have all of the titles from the list that I want.

I would have liked to see more information or at least some teasers on upcoming AMD tech, something to look forward to really, I don't think the interview achieves that, for me, it has made me start to distrust AMD a little and all because of one word, 'finally'. When that comes across in a sales pitch it's almost impossible to turn things back again.

[Saracen]

Firstly, Roy, I'd like to thank you for taking the time to contribute here.

Next, I read the first page or so of comments before reading the "interview", and then went to the interview expecting to find overblown hyperbole that a third-rate politician on the stump for an imminent election would be proud of.

If I had found that, it would have put me off Radeon on principle .... despite currently having one.

But I didn't find that. What I found was, yes, a company representative talking up their product. What company representative doesn't? If I want a balanced, unbiased, neutral product review, I don't ask the person selling it.

What I found was comments putting the market as AMD see it.

Which, it seems to me, is that they're positioning product slightly differently from NV. And that seems entirely reasonable. For example, how do you position a product? Do you pitch as the "very best", perhaps as Rolls Royce, Ferrari or Aston Martin might, or do you pitch high-end, high performance but much larger market segment, as perhaps Mercedes AMG or BMW M-series might?

So, if positioning a graphics card, precisely who is your buyer? Are you seeking the Patek Phillipe buyer, or the Rolex buyer? Or the Seiko buyer? I've no doubt a PP watch is high-margin, low-volume, world-class product, aimed at a no-holds-barred money no object buyer. But how many watches do they sell, compared to Seiko? A thousandth? A millionth?

What I took from those replies is, yes, a view distinctly from the AMD perspective, but a pitch aimed at people wanting a high-end graphics card that's a very substantial part of the best performance, but where value for money, both of card and bundle, is a higher priority than either performance/watt, or being 1%, or even 5%, faster than something else.

And that's a perfectly rational view.

Personally, I'm not a hard-core gamer. Well, not any more, anyway. So anything I buy at or near the top end is going to be good enough, and 1% either way doesn't matter to me enough to be high up the set of criteria I'd use to decide what to buy. And I don't decide on one factor. I decide on a blend of factors. Is it powerful enough? If not, cross it off the list. From the list of cards that are, what are the cost differences, what's the price? what's the value not just of card but perhaps of bundle? If I have a card selected that's powerful enough, would I pay £5 more for the best performer? Probably. £100 more? No. £40? Maybe, but probably not. If two suitable cards were on offer, and one saved a bit on energy bills and the other offered a 'free' game I definitely wanted, I'd probably opt for the latter. If one card offered a 3w power saving, I'd ignore it but if it was 300w, the difference in gaming experience would have to be one hell of an impressive leap forward to justify the higher consumption.

Would I buy Ferrari or Rolls? Not unless I win a stupendous amount on the lottery. Would I buy AMG or M-series? Already have. Why? Far better bang for buck, yet good enough in the quality, performance and luxury stakes.

So, I see that interview as really pitching the concept that while competing for fundamentally the same buyers, or at least with a very large overlap, AMD are approaching that market with a slightly different view of who their customer is, and it's definitely (at the R9 end anyway) those who want a blend of very good performance and value. And that pretty much describes me.

[kalniel]

Forza Horizon 2, recently released on console, is also using a descendant of AMD’s Forward+ rendering technology.

Are you hinting that Forza Horizon 2 might come out on the PC, given this answer was given in response to a question about opportunities for the PC gamer?

[amd_roy]

hi everyone, first off thanks for the continued comments and feedback.

First let me address linux. Without question when I was at nvidia and now at AMD the linux community is the most vocal and demanding of updates. And thats OK. But like any business we (and nvidia) have to balance the needs. We just updated our linux drivers here and I have had positive feedback on them; http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/desktop?os=Linux+x86

Second, OK I admit it the responses above are a little too party line. But the fact is this. Radeon is a very very good buy right now. The price / performance of the 290/280 and 270 models v nvidia is tremendous. This is why we keep winning the Toms Performance Per $ chart (as judged by most positions) here; http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107-8.html

We respect and love all gamers and to me anyone using geforce today is thoroughly great person (they love PC gaming and graphics) we just need to persuade them to give Radeon a chance.

Third, apologies for the North American slant on a UK website. I am a Brit, born in London, grew up in Kent and now I live in Hollywood (it's a long story) but I will be making sure to stay local centric to websites that interview me.

Lastly there were some comments above about my switch from sales to content back to sales. Well I love both as I am a gamer myself. Anyway effective immediately I have taken on a new role at AMD as the Corporate Vice President of ISV/IHV Partner Group (IPG) and I will now be directly responsible for working with the games developers and publishers making sure that users help to get the best possible experience.

Cheers
Roy

PS you guys know I cannot talk about unannounced products. Just know that we have a lot of REALLY talented people at AMD who know how to make winning products and they are very hard at work!

[KeyboardDemon]

Thanks Roy, congrats on the new role, is that a sideways move or a promotion?

Will we still be able to count on getting some more contributions from you moving forward?

I'm sure some of those (as yet unannounced) products will inevitably include a new line of Radeon 3xx series cards, I guess the main point we're all holding out for has more to do with the when as opposed to the what, but of course it would be wrong of you to answer either of those questions right now, at least until NDAs are lifted.

[amd_roy]

hi I will be pleased to continue to contribute. We love engaging with the community. It's a pleasure.

One new tech that everyone will love is Freesync, it is coming soon!
best regards
Roy