AMD Radeon R9 Nano cards reportedly shipping to retail

[vibe666]

what I really want to see from AMD is for them to apply their shrink ray to the R9 295X2, but instead of making the card smaller, they should keep it the same size and instead DOUBLE up on it, for a quad GPU R9 295X4!

The caveat there though, is that they will need to do *something* with the catalyst drivers as they are a mess when it comes to multi-gpu configurations.

I'd like to see AMD acknowledge that Catalyst is the titanic of the GPU driver world instead of patch after patch plugging leaks in that sinking ship, just rip it all out and start from scratch again, focusing on optimising the driver stack to make the most of multiple cores and multiple gpu's, and most importantly focus on working WITH the games industry instead of against it as they have lost a lot of ground to Nvidia in the last couple of years.

the CPU industry eventually figured out that there was a limit to how much raw speed they could squeeze out of a single core by pushing up the Mhz and made the decision to go multi-core, which has had a huge impact on performance, so i think it's about time that the gpu market looked in the same direction.

[kalniel]

Oh, I know it's part of the spec - but the Nano doesn't go above the backplate, so they'd look even better in a volume-based comparison. I'm going to retract my call for fps/cm³ though - in keeping with the fps/inch concept it should clearly be fps/fl. oz.!

EDIT:



AFAIK it's very hard to dissipate more than ~ 100W with a single slot cooler, and even then you're on the ragged edge of what's possible. AMD found that out when they tried a single slot 4850 and got hammered for it running hot and being very loud. And fo course, by the time we get current high end performance in a sub-100W thermal envelope, it won't be high performance any more!

The only way to effectively cool a high end card in a single slot is with a custom water block - but then you're looking for somewhere to house a pump, rad and fans too. So no, there won't be any high performance single slot cards suitable for small factor PCs released soon.

Just to come back to this, the Quadro M4000 has just been announced - roughly a 970 equivalent in single slot. Obviously you'd be a bit mad to buy a workstation product for gaming, but the option shows it's possible.