Features - Roy Taylor: AMD Radeon GPUs remain unsurpassed

[edzieba]

Except again peole are running these cards fine off 450W PSUs

Not 450w, 300w. The Silverstone 450w SFX PSU has an unusually nasty fan inside, to the point that people were replacing them with slimline Noiseblockkers and taking the hit in maximum draw before thermal shutdown.

Plus the uarch refresh -do you even get that Kepler was refined Fermi with things like sw scheduling and Maxwell is further refined Kepler with more refined voltage and power controll mechanisms and more effective TDP containment.

That was exactly my point. With Maxwell, Nvidia can keep pushing power and performance up further (people are overclocking 970s to sustained max TDP without overvolting) with little to no effort for another generation. AMD need a major architecture overhaul just to get down to a competing performance/watt. That puts them on the back foot when it comes to yeilds for new chip designs, and low yeilds = high costs, something AMD cannot afford at the moment.

The whole AMD is DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMED stuff is funny,since over the last 11 years of being an enthusiast I see these happen at several GPU launches.

Not doomed, but they're not in a good position. In the CPU market, AMD fell dramatically from way ahead to far behind, and the market as a whole has been worse for it with Intel uncontested in absolute performance and in performance/watt. To have the same happen in the graphics market would be bad for everyone.

Well DX12 could bring improvements to existing games, much like many other DX versions have done. There is a good chance DX12 could drop and you'll see higher FPS in past titles. Time will tell.

MS have said that DX12 is to be branched off from DX11 rather than supplanting it, and that the two will continue to exist in parallel. This makes sense; DX11 provides compatibility with existing games and allows for a traditional abstracting API, whereas DX12 gets more of a clean-slate approach for those who want to deal with the unpleasant world of architecture-specific optimisation.

[Agent]

MS have said that DX12 is to be branched off from DX11 rather than supplanting it, and that the two will continue to exist in parallel. This makes sense; DX11 provides compatibility with existing games and allows for a traditional abstracting API, whereas DX12 gets more of a clean-slate approach for those who want to deal with the unpleasant world of architecture-specific optimisation.

Ah yes, very good point. Originally this wasn't the case, but they decided to spin off DirectX 11.3 and Direct 12 for compatibility reasons. I totally forgot about that.

I suppose DirectX 11.3 could still have non CPU overhead based optimisations - it's something we've seen before in other DX versions, but the increases are normally pretty small.

[kalniel]

That was exactly my point. With Maxwell, Nvidia can keep pushing power and performance up further (people are overclocking 970s to sustained max TDP without overvolting) with little to no effort for another generation. AMD need a major architecture overhaul just to get down to a competing performance/watt.

I think you missed the point cat was making. Maxwell is only a few steps away from Fermi, which was a power hungry monster. AMDs pitcairn was considered very power efficient for the performance, so even if now nVidia's latest uArch is beating it for perf/watt, AMD should be able to do similar small step changes to compete.

Ie there's no inherent reason why small step changes won't work for AMD, given how much they did for nVidia.

[HalloweenJack]

and as DX 12 is a `clean slate` in the same way as Mantle is - it`ll be 2 years or more before we start getting AAA titles using it - name any game right now, which i can go and buy (on PC) which uses UE4 engine?

you cant

yet I can go and buy mantle games already - Theif (which uses UE3 ,) has mantle support ; and that IMO is the way forward , much as some people wont like it - UE 3 and 4 will support mantle as wella s DX11

[Agent]

name any game right now, which i can go and buy (on PC) which uses UE4 engine?

you cant

Daylight

yet I can go and buy mantle games already - Theif (which uses UE3 ,) has mantle support ; and that IMO is the way forward

But no one is arguing that Mantle isn't out....

The way forward is debateable - but the industry will decide that one.

much as some people wont like it - UE 3 and 4 will support mantle as wella s DX11

UE3 & UE4 do not support Mantle. Where are you getting this information from?

Epic have publicly stated that they have no plans to add Mantle support, and for very good reason.

Do not get confused with a later developer adding support in on their own - that's a vastly different thing.

[HalloweenJack]

Did you honestly just mention that horrendoius mess called `daylight`



and ok , whilst technically it is UE4 and windows - erm , yeah - I guess you`ve `played` it (meta review of like 40% I think isn't it?)


Well Thief supports Mantle and is UE3 which means it is more than doable ; Epic I think can see the future here , whats the point of DX12 , when only 1% of pc`s will use it , 18 months after launch? SX11 only games still haven't come out - pretty much all have a DX9 fall back mode , which can only hamper development

edit:

doh ofc they wont support mantle

http://hothardware.com/News/Unreal-E...hip-With-Epic/


NVidia threw a ****e ton of money at them not to.....

[kompukare]

Actually the reason that UE3/4 will probably have Mantle support is that

1) coding for consoles and Mantles will be very similar and all the main engine providers have to support the consoles first and PCs second; just look at Ryse where CryEngine seems to have been very much optimised for AMD's GCN in terms of the kind of compute and lighting effects used.

2) a different, more threaded rendering path is coming as both Mantle and DX12 demonstrate and Mantle gives developers a way to gain some experience of this way of working.

What would be very disruptive would be Mantle on Linux. SteamOS with Mantle with an easy way to port from console could see a rapid expansion of Linux gaming and prevent Microsoft from trying to force Windows sales with DX12 like they did with Windows Vista and DX10.

As for 970 and 300W supplies: well while it might just about fit, I would be worried about those spikes which Tom's Hardware observed in their review. A lot of the efficient gain of GM204 Maxwell is to do with very aggressive turbe, voltage control and so on. Which is all very well, but from that Tom's review it seems that the cards should really have had better capacitors and power delivery rather than expecting the PSU to be able to supply sudden spikes.

[Corky34]

a question , why didn't NV do the same thing with its own api? nvapi has been out for a long time!

They have been, it's just they don't talk about it at every possible opportunity.
Frostbite 2 and 3 games use it, so does BF3 and BF4.

[tribaljet]

DX11-only games are available for sure. Crysis 3, Watch Dogs, Alien: Isolation, Daylight, Strider, Tropico 5, War of the Vikings are what, french toast? Then for upcoming games we have Assassin's Creed Unity, Call of Duty Advanced Warfare, The Witcher 3, Trainz, and that's excluding indie stuff that has DX11-only renderers.

[HalloweenJack]

crisis 3 is DX9 / DX11 as it runs on xbox 360, whether they want to tell you that or not cryengine 3 has to be DX9 compatable to run on the older console , change the render in the ini file to use the old renderer which is still part of the game

ergo , its not a ground up DX 11 game

neither is tropic 5 , since it can run on both an amd hd 4850 or an intel hd 4000 gfx - neither are `DX11` gfx cards.

strider? game only `needs` DX11 for the opening screen - you can force a bypass and the game itself runs on a GT220 (albeit as well as anything can run on a GT220) - so its a DX10 maybe a DX9 game... and , it seems double helix have bailed on support for all the bugs which are being reported (no patch at all) since they sold out to amazon...

watch dogs runs on vista

it only needs a 64bit OS (haven't read about it being started on XP-64 though) , but it can and does run on vista 64bit with DX10 with a little fiddling , but it does run.

daylight - being a slenderman type game , and not a good one - well yeah for that title (and why is it UE4 anyway??) - so yes ok that's a DX11 title.
any game that can run on PS3 or xbox 360 has to have a DX9 (or equivalent in ogl) renderpath , so it cannot be called a DX11 only game

[tribaljet]

Clearly missing the point. You said there were no DX11-only games, and that statement is incorrect, regardless of the clear workarounds needed to force select games to run on older DX versions.

But please, carry on, just came here to read comments. *eats popcorn*

[HalloweenJack]

not missing the point at all - your merely trying for a strawman and failing very badly.

[tribaljet]

Ah, so you're clueless, you could've said so earlier. Better go praise Mantle some more, DX might be hiding in the bushes lol.

[anselhelm]

"Not only that, but top games of the holiday season, like Civilization: Beyond Earth and Dragon Age: Inquisition are games that everyone is looking forward to – and as I already mentioned they’re also Mantle titles, so you’ll want a Radeon to play them on for maximum performance. That performance advantage pretty much puts R9 parts on top of their respective NV counterparts."

Incorrect. An initial assessment of this has shown quite categorically that Mantle doesn't really help that much with average frame rate (5-15%) compared to DX11, though it can help more with minimum frame rates. Furthermore, the Nvidia parts still really outperform the AMD parts for a lower power budget (so generally cooler and quieter).

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8640/benchmarked-civilization-beyond-earth

For the record, I'm running an AMD system, so I'm far from an Nvidia zealot. In fact, I'm quite impartial when it comes to assessing tech fairly and accurately, which is why I hate marketing lies and propaganda.

[Spreadie]

I am sure when he was doing EXACTLY the same thing for Nvidia,there was less criticism,right?

Speak for yourself. Did I hit a nerve or something?

[HalloweenJack]

Ah, so you're clueless, you could've said so earlier. Better go praise Mantle some more, DX might be hiding in the bushes lol.

so im replying to an NVidiot then? fangirls are in the stalls on the left.....