Another AMD PR own goal

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

At times I wonder whether AMD PR has a clue at times.

So here we have Rise of Tombraider which uses Purehair technology - this is based on TressFX which CD modified(so also chimes into AMD talking about more open standards),and also an example of a different approach to Gameworks which AMD have been negative about.

So you would think AMD would be talking about this win,and also the fact that the latest iteration of TressFX has a very low performance hit on AMD and Nvida GPUs compared to TressFX 1.0 and Hairworks.

The answer would be a resounding NO.

No mention at all on the AMD website:

http://www.amd.com/en-us/innovations...gaming/tressfx

Yet,look at Nvidia who posted a whole piece on Purehair yesterday including a performance guide on it:

http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/gui...aider-purehair

PureHair is Crystal Dynamics and Square Enix's hair rendering technology, which like our own HairWorks technology adds tens of thousands of hair strands to a character model. These hairs act realistically, swaying and moving in concert with character movement, and can be affected by water, wind and snow, and are lit and shaded in real-time by the scene.

In Rise of the Tomb Raider, up to 30,000 strands of hair are applied solely to Lara, with large groups of hairs controlled by master strands that dictate their movement and properties, preventing each individual hair strand from acting independently, and keeping physics calculation costs in check.

Notice something?? Nvidia just trolled AMD by not even mentioning it was based on AMD TressFX and probably one of the fruits of their new OpenGPU(or whatever it is called) initiative.

Then a day later we have a one line comment from AMD about it:

https://twitter.com/Thracks/status/693123852839182336

Seriously,for every little bit of Nvidia assistance in a game,its posted on their website and usually get some degree of news coverage.

Yet,AMD who should have been shouting from the roofs about this,CBA even to market it. It means plenty of people thinking in the latest TR game, AMD has no involvement in the game.

[deejayburnout]

Sounds like they need to fire the PR person. Big opertunity lost.

At least I know my 280x will make it look nice.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Sounds like they need to fire the PR person. Big opertunity lost.

At least I know my 280x will make it look nice.

Another case of AMD PR being clueless AGAIN.

They spend money and resources on hardware and software and then always seem to feck up at the last hurdle.

It really makes me wonder if they have any coherent strategy. I just hope they do not feck up the Polaris and Zen launches. They certainly managed to feck up the Hawaii,Tonga and Fiji launches.

[Zhaoman]

Another case of AMD PR being clueless AGAIN.

They spend money and resources on hardware and software and then always seem to feck up at the last hurdle.

It really makes me wonder if they have any coherent strategy. I just hope they do not feck up the Polaris and Zen launches. They certainly managed to feck up the Hawaii,Tonga and Fiji launches.

They most certainly will. Everytime I think AMD might get their act together they always feck it up. Just give up hope now and be at peace, it will benefit your health in the long term!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

They most certainly will. Everytime I think AMD might get their act together they always feck it up. Just give up hope now and be at peace, it will benefit your health in the long term!

Then we are left with an Nvidia monopoly for desktop cards and then having situations like this:



The GTX660 was within 10% of the HD7870. Look where the GTX660 is now.

I really don't understand how poor AMD is marketing its products and tech. Its almost like anti-marketing at times.

[Zhaoman]

They just don't seem able to market their own tech or even know what's going on at times. Seems like no communication within their organisation. Could this be down to lack of resources or just a very very poor marketing department or lacking leadership? It's hard to believe either way. But this has been going on for years. Obviously doesn't help that Intel and Nvidia try to strong arm them out of every deal but they're not helping themselves either.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Another example of AMD PR screwing up AGAIN:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10000/...roughly-tested

We had four Carrizo devices on hand to test for a week, along with a single Kaveri system. These devices were sourced by AMD, and I put in requests for a variety of price points, hardware configurations and styles, along with some specific testing equipment to which we don’t have access.

All the Carrizo laptops which were sent out were running in single channel and the Kaveri system in dual channel.

What a joke!!

Edit!!

It also appears some of the Carrizo laptops still run their RAM in single channel even if two DIMMs are used,if the OEM has skimped on the motherboard.

Second Edit!!

It appears that laptop is an early prototype so probably why it had issues:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost...&postcount=114

LMAO,so not only do they not configure the laptops they send probably,one of the models is not even a production equivalent example which probably lacks the issues AT encountered.

[chuckskull]

I've heard a few times that internally AMD is still very much green team vs red team. This all stinks of that.

Honestly I could write a whole post ranting about AMD's behaviour and performance, despite being a big fan not that long ago, but you beat me to it.

For example I recently had the opportunity to upgrade, seriously upgrade my PC(Haswell-e was within budget; yay xmas). What I wanted was more single thread performance for a couple of strategy games I play(the only performance issue I had), even with that budget I couldn't buy it. The most I could of gotten was 10% give or take over my 4 year old CPU and that was only if I got a well binned chip to OC. Barely worth scraping the TIM off my heatsink for, let alone spend a grand+. I'm sure everyone's familiar with the state of the CPU market and lots of people blame Intel for their lacklustre performance increases; I don't.

I blame AMD, Intel did not only the most sensible thing, but what they were legally required to do; achieve the best return for their shareholders in response to AMD's "we won't compete for high end" idiocy. So high end CPU's are an effective monopoly now and Intel has been doing what every monopoly does, the bare minimum and investing elsewhere. As you've pointed out even when AMD do get it right they manage to balls it up somehow.

Sure not every generation is going to be the next 939 but to not even try is shooting your whole company in the foot and the consumer in the face. Not beating Intel is one thing, not even chasing them means Intel don't even have to run. Meaning not only can I not buy the performance I want, but Intel is fresh and full of energy to crush AMD in the other market segments.

AMD is now so bad they're screwing me over when I don't even own one of their products. I should be angry about that, but I'm not; I'm just sad.

I've read recently that they've seen the stupidity of this policy so here's hoping, although the next day someone else from AMD contradicted the statement

[chuckskull]

Another poke in the eye for AMD PR 6+ months after announce their new APU isn't even the first result when you google it. No it's a NASDAQ listed company http://www.carrizo.com/ Also probably a good idea when naming your new product to check if the name is taken by a major commercial entity. F150 anyone?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I posted this on OcUK forums(well the last part) and some where having a go at me saying they were a billion dollar company and I was basically clueless and I am not employed by AMD.

Even in the article there is a sob story how AMD had to make a version of Carrizo which was only single channel,but ignore the fact there are a some dual channel laptops out there.

Plus they sent out a dual channel Kaveri one too when all the Carrizo systems were single channel too?? Really??

Even the Lenovo Y700 has a 1080P IPS FreeSync display so the sob story that AMD has no power over OEMs comes across as excuse making. They had close enough of a relationship to make a FreeSync capable laptop.

AMD is being outsold 4 to 1 in graphics now and that was worse than the HD2000/HD3000 series days when ATI were being stomped by the 8800 series and they have a decent product stack. Even if you take laptop and OEM sales out of it - most people will just buy a slower Nvidia dGPU even though it will have a shorter lifespan.

There is something going wrong with their PR in the last few years which is not helping shift solid products.

I want AMD to do well but they need to up their game.

Edit!!

It seems that the Y700 can run dual channel in the actual production versions,and after all it has the FX8800P too.

[chuckskull]

I'm with you Cat, I just want to grab them, shake them and scream; stop standing on rakes! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRq1Ksh-32g

Even when it should be an easy win they seem to fumble it. R9 Nano very interesting product I think; haven't read much about it yet, only just found out it existed. If it was a new nVidia release I'd of been sick of hearing about it for months already. Which is how it should be for someone like me who will actually spend stupid money on high end cards.

I am your target audience; I'm a gamer, I'm a nerd, I read about 5 tech sites/forums, even mod 1, I build a few PC's a year(including one's that could make great use of such a card). How did your PR allow me to miss it for that long? Your £400 card should of been getting shoved down my throat for the last 3 months, but apparently I wasn't on the internet the day the embargo lifted and it went straight over my head.

I only found out because someone with a competent PR department(Scan) was advertising it as a part of one of their products and I went "an R9 what?".

Y'know AMD reminds me of these days? EA. That same constant stream of "How did you screw this up? This was an easy win".

You're absolutely right about people buying slower nVidia/Intel too. I built a little HTPC for a few months back, for what he wanted to pay/do AMD was objectively the better choice. He point blank refused to use anything AMD, based on reputation alone and he's not the only one. Before that; different person, a boggo £800 gaming PC, again point blank refused AMD even though it cost them having a faster GPU and better all round performance. Both described AMD in language I can't quote here. Both of these people trust my opinion and used my builds before, even my(the guy who does all their 'pc stuff') defence and recommendation of AMD wasn't enough to overcome that stigma.

Reputation matters. Even among people frightened to unscrew their side panel AMD's reputation is now amounts to 'avoid'. It's the constant stream of nonsense like this with the laptops that's done it. All that negative publicity filters out to the general public. Whereas the only thing that filters out from their competitors is 'fastest'. If it weren't for that I think AMD's market share would be double what it is today with the exact same hardware. Which not only perfectly good, but objectively the best at some of the most common price points.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It gets better!!

According to the AT article AMD had to make a 15W TDP version run in single channel due to OEM presure.

Yet,we see this review from NBC:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/HP-Pavi....152289.0.html

The working memory has a decisive influence on the resulting performance, especially for integrated graphic chips; only faster dual-channel RAMs can more or less satisfy the bandwidth requirements of modern GPUs. This principle, however, has apparently not reached all manufacturers since HP has installed only one 8 GB module in our current review sample. Thanks to the replacement memory from AMD, we could perform the following benchmarks with the ideal configuration of 2x 4 GB DDR3L-1600. Buyers of a Pavilion 15 or 17 should take note if their RAM configurations.

Seriously,WTF?

That A10 8700P is running RAM in dual channel with a 15W TDP and is a £400 to £450 laptop.

Plus AMD supplied the SODIMM too so the laptop could run in dual channel.

[DanceswithUnix]

Well it sounds like with Zen they won't even have the small cat cores any more, so hopefully having everything move to AM4 will move everything to dual channel ram again.

Blimey that Anandtech article was a long one.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Well it sounds like with Zen they won't even have the small cat cores any more, so hopefully having everything move to AM4 will move everything to dual channel ram again.

Blimey that Anandtech article was a long one.

The review was done at AMD HQ and the even bought a laptop at a local retailer for the review but then couldn't be arsed to check if any of the laptops were actually working properly. At least two of them could run dual channel memory!

[chuckskull]

At their HQ? How much easier does it need to be for them. Ugh.

[shaithis]

The RoTTR issue is accentuated in-game as well...on the main menu screen and in the pause menu, you are constantly greeted with messages about how they worked closely with nvidia to push the boundaries of what's possible.....