AMD Polaris GPU: detailed slides leaked

[DanceswithUnix]

Yea i didn't think lucky dip would make sense but stranger things have happened.
It should be interesting to see where they draw the line, i wounder if they'll use one for HBM cards and the other for GDDR cards.

Sounds like only the top end will be HBM2 with most being GDDR5, so they may well just choose one vendor for the HBM cards.

[Michael H]

The power consumption comparison versus a 950 is apples to oranges.

Game is frame-capped so saying you get 60fps with both does not equate to equivilently powerful GPU's - a 980Ti would have got the same frame rate and consumed far more.

950 is tested at stock clocks versus a lower clocked engineering sample from AMD. You could lower the 950's clocks until you just manage to hit the 60fps cap and reduce it's power consumption.

Can't wait to see what the actual performance/watt is like when tested properly.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The power consumption comparison versus a 950 is apples to oranges.

Game is frame-capped so saying you get 60fps with both does not equate to equivilently powerful GPU's - a 980Ti would have got the same frame rate and consumed far more.

950 is tested at stock clocks versus a lower clocked engineering sample from AMD. You could lower the 950's clocks until you just manage to hit the 60fps cap and reduce it's power consumption.

Can't wait to see what the actual performance/watt is like when tested properly.

The AMD chip is running at 850MHZ which is not far off from around the 900MHZ to 1GHZ mark the current AMD chips run at,and the GCN chips are not known to run at very high clockspeeds. Maxwell in comparison is tuned for much higher clockspeeds than GCN it appears.

Plus the Nvidia chips are running at very high clockspeeds - my GTX960 frequently hits around 1.3GHZ. But if the chip is under less load,it will be running at lower clockspeeds anyway,reducing power consumption. The Boost on Maxwell V2 is application dependent IIRC.

Edit!!

Plus we could say the same thing about the AMD chip,it could also be running at a lower clockspeed too if its not being taxed.

[Biscuit]

Why do people keep mentioning GTX950s? :/

[lon3wolf2002]

Will keep an eye on these AMD appear to be getting back on track with their GPU's/drivers.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Why do people keep mentioning GTX950s? :/

AMD compared a 120MM2 Polaris prototype chip with GDDR5 running at 850MHZ and 0.8V to a GTX950 in Star Wars:Battlefront and measured power consumption.
The total system with the Polaris chip used around 80W to 90W and with the GTX950,140W to 150W and both were locked at 60FPS to make sure they were doing the same amount of pixel pushing.

[keithwalton]

AMD - Next generation in paper launches...

smells of a company desperately trying to keep their head above the waterline

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

AMD - Next generation in paper launches...

smells of a company desperately trying to keep their head above the waterline

You mean like Nvidia releasing tidbits about Pascal a few months ago and its nowhere to be seen??

In fact it was March LAST YEAR:

http://hexus.net/tech/news/graphics/...en-pascal-gpu/

Another one 8 months later:

http://hexus.net/tech/news/graphics/...-japanese-gtc/

So nearly 9 months later,where is Pascal then and where is your whining in the comments of those articles??

Using your extremely warped logic,that would make Nvidia two generations ahead of AMD in paper launches.

Not even a demonstration of chip running.

You sound like some person who is desperately trying to justify their own purchases in some incredibly childish way.

Plus we all remember Rollo,so don't think you are trying to sound cool here.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

This is quite interesting and is referred to in both the Anandtech article and the one from Hardware.fr:

As a result a lot of the disclosed GCN 4 key features point to improving throughput of GCN. Improved shader efficiency is somewhat self-explanatory in that regard. At the same time RTG is also disclosing that we will be seeing some kind of hardware scheduler in GCN 4 along with instruction pre-fetch capabilities, which again should help them improve throughput in ways to be determined. Meanwhile in an improvement for the GPU front-end, GCN 4 will be adding a primitive discard accelerator – and again we don’t have any further details than this – but it should help the architecture clamp down on getting rid of unseen geometry. Finally, GCN 4 will also include a newer generation of RTG’s memory compression technology, this coming just one generation after it was most recently (and significantly) improved for the third generation GCN architecture (GCN 1.2).

Finally, AMD mentions a Primitive Discard Accelerator or an ejection system triangles masked the rendering pipeline. Remember, statistically, about half of the triangles of an object turning their backs to the camera and may be ejected from the rendering soon as this state is confirmed. Able to quickly make geometry can boost performance in real situations. Currently, the Radeon geometry engines are not able to perform this task faster than rendering a triangle, unlike GeForce who benefit to stand out in some scenes, especially when tessellation generates many hidden triangles. With Polaris, AMD should finally fill the gap, probably doubling the number of ejection motor engines primitive rasterization (Nvidia opted for a different approach by decentralizing some of the geometry processing but we do not expect that AMD follows this route).

So realworld tesellation performance should see a decent uplift too.

[Xlucine]

What're the odds of seeing any rebranded parts? 16nm for the whole range would be nice, but I'd be amazed if they did it. At the same time, with such a big claimed gulf in performance any 28nm parts would stick out a bit

[lumireleon]

GTX950 is 'AFFORDABLE' am sure very few people can afford the GTX980ti or even the Fury X. What AMD have to do is to launch a better low end card this year.

[Defiant]

So meh right now to AMD, Wattage on the Fury cards was a joke so they have a massive hill to climb in my book after that.

[HalloweenJack]

Nv GP206 card shown by Nv today comes with GDDR5 - so NO HBM for nv this time around??

[Corky34]

So meh right now to AMD, Wattage on the Fury cards was a joke so they have a massive hill to climb in my book after that.

So the power draw comparison didn't convince you they've addressed that "problem" then?
It was after all the main reason they demonstrated the power draw (IMO).

Nv GP206 card shown by Nv today comes with GDDR5 - so NO HBM for nv this time around??

My guess is that we'll still have cards with GDDR on them for years to come, HBM is going to be reserved for high end cards at first and slowly trickle down when there's a need for it.

[kalniel]

Nv GP206 card shown by Nv today comes with GDDR5 - so NO HBM for nv this time around??

The card AMD were showing here was likely GDDR5 as well. Remember 206 is quite low-end in nVidia's number scheme.

[Biscuit]

AMD compared a 120MM2 Polaris prototype chip with GDDR5 running at 850MHZ and 0.8V to a GTX950 in Star Wars:Battlefront and measured power consumption.
The total system with the Polaris chip used around 80W to 90W and with the GTX950,140W to 150W and both were locked at 60FPS to make sure they were doing the same amount of pixel pushing.

I should probably read the article next time!

AMD - Next generation in paper launches...

smells of a company desperately trying to keep their head above the waterline

Have you seen the reports on how much difference DX12 is going to make? So far it looks like AMD is streets ahead once games start utilizing it. We may well see a significant switch in the performance crown, even with older generation cards (as long as its GCN based), unless Nvidia releases something special (which they probably will in fairness).