Report: AMD Radeon RX 6700/XT will arrive at end of March

[watercooled]

I don't really understand the massive impatience that seems rife at the moment. Sure, some people probably wanted GPUs as Christmas presents, but what harm is there in waiting? I see it as ridiculous that people would massively overpay simply so they can have the latest shiny thing *now*. And worse, it seems the scarcity is leading people to buy cards they wouldn't have purchased otherwise (people wanting what they can't have/panic buying mentality). It would be funny if it wasn't so silly, and fuelling the whole scalping situation.

Just pretend it hasn't 'launched' yet if there's little to no availability, keep using what you already have and wait for things to settle down. As others have said, I don't get why people act like their existing GPU stopped working overnight. It seems patience is a rarity in some elitist circles.

[lumireleon]

...........remember to take this date with a pinch of salt.

[DanceswithUnix]

Playing a DVD through my 'upscaling' Blu-Ray player doesn't make it a 1080p movie.

I'm not disagreeing, but I do think it is a bit more complex than that. What if your blu-ray player was programmed with the 4k version of that dvd, so if it saw a DVD frame it could match it to the corresponding 4k and display the 4k version of the frame. Are you now watching a 4k movie? It will look like you are, because the player has extra information to draw upon, its local 4k copy of the movie. Now what if you compress the 4k version to save space? That's a problem we already get, that lossy compression means we aren't actually watching 1080p or 4k content but more something that aspires to that resolution. DLSS uses deep learning to manage the frame mapping and compression, and to cope with games not showing fixed frames but a slightly different set of frames for each player. It is clearly lossy, but it is also clever enough that I don't think it can be simply dismissed.

Having said that, it isn't going to make me go out and buy an Nvidia card.

[DanceswithUnix]

I think Nvidia have pushed into diversifying, it really isn't just about the desktop GPU space now, that doesn't account for all of their business.

They have been trying to diversify for as along as I can remember.

Their Tegra business has ended up as a Nintendo product. The phones and tablets never took off (I've had both, and still use the tablet). Tesla switched to using their own silicon because they actually want a tpu, not a gpu.

The really high end computation stuff I'm sure sells nicely, but can't imagine it makes billions in profit.

But those Quadro boards? Wow, that's over priced junk that I have resented when buying a Dell workstation. My work laptop has one, it sits there idle as the Intel igp is all I actually needed but there wasn't a "no pointless Quadro gpu" option when I bought it.

The ARM purchase seems like yet another attempt at Nvidia diversifying. This one is an already successful business, so I wish them luck and they should succeed.

But AFAICS the existing company is making money from the unbelievable number of very high end GPUs they shift and the low end GPUs that they underclock and sell in Quadro format at something like 4x the price of the equivalent desktop part. That's just GPUs.

Edit: Having said that, I just turned up at the office to find a Mellanox (owned by Nvidia) 2 port 25GbE card to play with. They are supposed to be quite good, and apparently very popular. I can see us ending up with lots of these, that would be something like a £250 card in every PC and server.

[Diabo593]

AMD has shot themselves in the foot regarding GPUs with how they've handled the last few months.

[watercooled]

I'm not disagreeing, but I do think it is a bit more complex than that. What if your blu-ray player was programmed with the 4k version of that dvd, so if it saw a DVD frame it could match it to the corresponding 4k and display the 4k version of the frame. Are you now watching a 4k movie? It will look like you are, because the player has extra information to draw upon, its local 4k copy of the movie. Now what if you compress the 4k version to save space? That's a problem we already get, that lossy compression means we aren't actually watching 1080p or 4k content but more something that aspires to that resolution. DLSS uses deep learning to manage the frame mapping and compression, and to cope with games not showing fixed frames but a slightly different set of frames for each player. It is clearly lossy, but it is also clever enough that I don't think it can be simply dismissed.

Having said that, it isn't going to make me go out and buy an Nvidia card.

Yes, I am being somewhat obtuse. It just frustrates me how it is being marketed and perceived, and I do stand by what I said about it being unreasonable to consider it 4k. And regarding lossy compression, I've been making the same argument for a long time about woeful bitrate on some streaming services despite marketing as high resolution. Some streaming services are getting a bit smarter about how bitrate is used, but many are still drastically lower quality vs BD at equivalent resolution, to the point that decent bitrate 1080p can look objectively and subjectively better than severely bandwidth-starved 4k. As is often the case, marketing and overly-simplistic 'higher is better' number comparisons get too much attention over actual performance. And it's really quite sad, because better quality is easily achievable if only marketing would take a back seat.

Regarding DLSS, like you say it is clearly lossy and I find it quite straightforward to tell the images apart from what I've seen. It has uses in that a DLSS upscaled 1080p image may look better than a native 1080p image (depending on whether the game in question suffers from artifacting which I have seen in some) but it is wrong to consider it 4k equivalent either on a quality basis or when comparing performance against native rendering. Of course, it's bound to be better than the HORRID upscaling you get with lower-than-native signal input to many monitors, but a better comparison would be to on-GPU upscaling which seems to have gained more traction recently. I see the situation as similar to TVs in electronics stores having massively over-saturated colours and overly sharpened images to make them 'pop' - but that also takes them miles out of calibration. DLSS seemingly achieves something similar by overly-sharpening images to make them appear sharper at first glance, but it is not without its drawbacks.

What doesn't help, is that DLSS images are often compared to native images with TAA which itself tends to have a strong softening effect of an image. Yes, well done - the sharpened image looks sharper than the softened image! What a revelation!
Like what I said about some RT comparisons, apples are being compared to oranges, and people are just lapping it up.

The ARM purchase seems like yet another attempt at Nvidia diversifying. This one is an already successful business, so I wish them luck and they should succeed.

I'm not yet sure what to think about this but I'm trying to remain open-minded. On one hand, I share the obvious concerns about control of a strategically important UK-based company, and the neutrality of ARM into the future given how widely it is used, especially given the US sabre-rattling of late. However I also recall ARM talking positively about Softbank ownership - how it has shielded them from shareholder scrutiny into short-term gains, allowing them to invest in the future. And without knowing how much of this is related to the Softbank ownership, ARM have performed outstandingly over the past few years and have both maintained an impressive cadence with their CPU cores, and expanded into other markets with serious competitive offerings. Many companies have even ceased designing their own cores given what is now available from ARM directly, and the Neoverse N1 seemingly gives the best of x86 a run for its money in the server space! Almost overnight, ARM (and of course their partners) went from being a bit of a niche or curiosity in the server space to a seriously compelling option.

[Yoyoyo69]

From talking to people I hear it's much simpler than anybody thinks...
There are NO chips to go around because they are being made as fast as they can and still woefully short of fulfilling demand at 7nm. The sheer amount of chips being requested at 7nm is incredible. Shortages will last for years. About the only good reason to go with Samsung for NV

They are being made as fast as they can under current circumstances. The biggest issue has been restrictions due to Covid (social distancing, impact on production, distribution, etc. borders restrictions), this has been made worse by AMD releasing new CPU, GPU and both consoles practically alm together, during these restrictions.

It's not that demand is more than expected, it's just that supply his woefully short.

[Yoyoyo69]

The question is, is this going to be another paper launch? It should be, but the way things are, it can't be ruled out.

I feel AMD have done themselves much more harm than good these last few months. This was a golden opportunity, not only did they squander it, they've done themselves harm in the process.

They can't squander it there are no chips or spare capacity. They can't make enough chips yet according to some reports have more market share than Intel in the CPU market...
It's really a no win thing. All of their eggs came together to be launched in a timeframe that was never going to work with a global pandemic

By squander it, I was talking about hyping up the launch once again, stating publicly that their will be much more supply, at a time when they had an opportunity to outplay Nvidia, a rare opportunity for them.

Also exploiting the situation to impose a double price increase, I feel they could have used this opportunity, rather than attract negative press.

Granted they have limited supply, so they chose to make more profit on this small amount. I just feel as the supply is much smaller, why create negative press for increased profits on such a limited supply quantity?

I agree with your points though, all eggs and low supply. They couldn't win, but I just feeling they came out losing, have golden opportunities (with restrictions outim of their own control) and they chose to create negative press for profits on limited supplies. They need to reel in ANY staff, they need to educate / keep them informed and upto date, before they create more pr disasters. They can do without another Raja

[kalniel]

I just feel as the supply is much smaller, why create negative press for increased profits on such a limited supply quantity?

Because if they can sell everything they make it doesn't matter if they get a little negative press.

[DanceswithUnix]

Because if they can sell everything they make it doesn't matter if they get a little negative press.

As long as it doesn't put people off when things get back to normal.
That just means behaving better than Nvidia, which is a pretty low bar atm

[kalniel]

As long as it doesn't put people off when things get back to normal.
That just means behaving better than Nvidia, which is a pretty low bar atm

True

Plus if the negative press was caused by lack of availability and pricing, that will go when things are back to normal and so therefore should the negative press.

[Gentle Viking]

I do understand the guy with a old POS system that have been saving pennies for the past 4 years to build a new kick ass system are a bit annoyed, but the guy on a decent machine with a 2080TI that just want to upgrade cuz there are something better out there now, well i understand that too, but if he start whining he will immediately loose all respect from me.

I do hope by the time i am ready to upgrade again, things are back to normal.

[DanceswithUnix]

I do hope by the time i am ready to upgrade again, things are back to normal.

Indeed. I'm wondering if I should start buying bits and bobs for the next upgrade (wife's PC I suspect) when I see them cheap. For work I keep having to buy things in a hurry, and it is just painful atm.

[nobodyspecial]

This is why you don't make consoles AMD (the socs, you get it). For FAR better margins you could be putting out GPUS NOW. Instead you choose a soc for a consoles that is ~100 and makes you $10 (or mid teens as AMD said finally, so maybe $15 at best). What a waste of good silicon AND NET INCOME!

[watercooled]

The allocation may not come from AMD's TSMC allocation, and it's about more than just short-term profit margins. Having the console wins is a reliable source of income, promotes game development on AMD hardware and has significant marketing advantages amongst other things. Not to mention they sell in HUGE volumes. It's also a bit silly to claim it's a 'waste' when the consoles are a hugely important market, just because they don't appeal to you...

If they weren't AMD, they'd still be getting made, probably still at TSMC, and AMD wouldn't see any profit from them at all. Oh and the overall wafer allocation might even be larger because AMD are fairly uniquely placed to integrate high performance CPU and GPU at the moment. ARM having high-performance cores could change things but there would need to be a compelling reason beyond performance parity to switch given it would break compatibility again.