AMD at GDC 2013: FirePro, Radeon, and Gaming Unified

LtMatt · 31 Mar 2013 at 13:08

Great article written by Rage3D. Definitely worth a read. :cool:

Rage3D said:
This week at the Game Developers Conference 2013, AMD provided details of their leadership strategy known as Unified Gaming. The essence of this is described in the four C's: Content, Consoles, Cloud, and Client. Over the course of two days I had the opportunity to talk with various AMD personnel, including Senior Fellow and Chief Product Architect for Graphics, John Gustafson; Neal Robison, Senior Director, Consumer Developer Support; David Cummings, Senior Director & General Manager, Professional Graphics, and Mohamed Jivraj, Product Manager, all to find out what the four C's mean and how they affect you, the enthusiast gamer.

http://www.rage3d.com/articles/hardware/amd_gdc_2013/

shankly1985 · 31 Mar 2013 at 13:25

And this is why my next card will be AMD

Dom86 · 31 Mar 2013 at 13:31

I'm glad AMD are taking such a pro active approach.

Bacon? · 31 Mar 2013 at 13:35

Gaming unified?

Marine-RX179 · 31 Mar 2013 at 14:00

I certainly hope AMD can not just talk the talk, but walk the walk as well. I have pretty much decided on waiting for 8850 (particularly because of the silly reason of 78xx doesn't sound as awesome as 88xx

).

Orangey · 31 Mar 2013 at 14:10

"Bring GCN to the cloud"... what a load of buzzword rubbish. I can't stand marketing people, they can talk for hours and not say ANTHING!

pgi947 · 31 Mar 2013 at 14:31

2H13 new GPU's

wolvers · 31 Mar 2013 at 14:41

Well they are bringing GCN to the cloud so there's nothing rubbish about that. :rolleyes:

The two most interesting things I've discovered from reading that article is that the new 7990 appears to of come about from a super-computer project like Titan did, and that Titan actually has Opteron CPUs in it which I never knew.

ArchAndroid · 31 Mar 2013 at 15:34

Marine-RX179 said:
I certainly hope AMD can not just talk the talk, but walk the walk as well. I have pretty much decided on waiting for 8850 (particularly because of the silly reason of 78xx doesn't sound as awesome as 88xx ).

I had planned to do that as well. I was thinking all throughout 2011-12 that I was going to upgrade from a 5770 to a 7770 because it sounded the most cool. But the 7850 gave so much more performance so I ended up with one of those. :cool:

Rroff · 31 Mar 2013 at 16:21

Orangey said:
"Bring GCN to the cloud"... what a load of buzzword rubbish. I can't stand marketing people, they can talk for hours and not say ANTHING!

Typical AMD a lot of big words but I'm gonna wait til I see something come of it before I buy into it (figuratively their statements that is not their cards).

I mean they made a big noise about open standards and how everyone should be embracing Open CL... then their first major compute features uses... uh... DirectCompute...

wolvers said:
Well they are bringing GCN to the cloud so there's nothing rubbish about that.

The two most interesting things I've discovered from reading that article is that the new 7990 appears to of come about from a super-computer project like Titan did, and that Titan actually has Opteron CPUs in it which I never knew.

Just incase anyone gets confused thats the Oak Ridge Titan super computer tha uses Opteron (and nvidia K20 cores) and not the GTX Titan GPU.

wolvers · 31 Mar 2013 at 18:02

Rroff said:
Typical AMD a lot of big words but I'm gonna wait til I see something come of it before I buy into it (figuratively their statements that is not their cards).

I mean they made a big noise about open standards and how everyone should be embracing Open CL... then their first major compute features uses... uh... DirectCompute...

Your unwavering love of one brand really does know no bounds. It's a beautiful thing.

Rroff · 31 Mar 2013 at 18:09

Eh that only thing so far unwavering is my cynicism when it comes to AMD, feel a bit bad as they have made huge strides lately but still seeing them making big statements and failing to deliver so I'm not fully convinced yet they've entirely turned a new leaf.

As for nVidia while I've always been upfront that I prefer them to AMD they aren't exactly in my good books either, dropped the ball way too often over the last 6 months, driver/support quality on decline, selling what is essentially a mid-range GPU for top end prices (GTX680) with most of their line up even more over priced than usual and then while the GTX Titan is beyond what would have been the proper "GTX680" for this generation (tho not hugely) they've managed to introduce a top end card and charge 3x top end prices for it. Not to mention putting way too much effort into project SHIELD that should be devoted to other stuff.

Gregster · 31 Mar 2013 at 18:30

Rroff said:
As for nVidia while I've always been upfront that I prefer them to AMD they aren't exactly in my good books either, dropped the ball way too often over the last 6 months, driver/support quality on decline, selling what is essentially a mid-range GPU for top end prices (GTX680) with most of their line up even more over priced than usual and then while the GTX Titan is beyond what would have been the proper "GTX680" for this generation (tho not hugely) they've managed to introduce a top end card and charge 3x top end prices for it. Not to mention putting way too much effort into project SHIELD that should be devoted to other stuff.

All of this is spot on.

CAT-THE-FIFTH · 31 Mar 2013 at 18:42

Sorry,the first thing I thought when I saw that,was:

"thats a load of balls!!"

Gets coat\.

spoffle · 31 Mar 2013 at 19:44

Rroff said:
Eh that only thing so far unwavering is my cynicism when it comes to AMD, feel a bit bad as they have made huge strides lately but still seeing them making big statements and failing to deliver so I'm not fully convinced yet they've entirely turned a new leaf.

As for nVidia while I've always been upfront that I prefer them to AMD they aren't exactly in my good books either, dropped the ball way too often over the last 6 months, driver/support quality on decline, selling what is essentially a mid-range GPU for top end prices (GTX680) with most of their line up even more over priced than usual and then while the GTX Titan is beyond what would have been the proper "GTX680" for this generation (tho not hugely) they've managed to introduce a top end card and charge 3x top end prices for it. Not to mention putting way too much effort into project SHIELD that should be devoted to other stuff.

Oh lawd, not this again. The GK104 isn't a mid range GPU. The only thing you can really say is that nVidia cut production costs so much that the GTX680 costs roughly half to manufacture compared to the GTX580 yet they've kept the price high.

This is what publication really mean when they mention mid range, as GK104 costs are typical of nVidia's mid range costs of previous generations. They aren't talking performance.

Rroff · 31 Mar 2013 at 19:45

Gregster said:
All of this is spot on.

Theres a new driver release coming up which has some pretty large changes under the hood so hoping its a return to form, I suspect it will bring fairly reasonable gains for the GTX Titan as well. I'm not knocking the Titan its a good card and has comparatively way more VRAM and compute, etc. capability than you'd normally find in a GeForce card in any generation but using the GTX680 for perspective just makes the prices look way out of whack.

Back on topic tho I see a lot of fancy graphics but its going to need a lot more than that to convince me.

spoffle · 31 Mar 2013 at 19:47

Rroff said:
Theres a new driver release coming up which has some pretty large changes under the hood so hoping its a return to form, I suspect it will bring fairly reasonable gains for the GTX Titan as well. I'm not knocking the Titan its a good card and has comparatively way more VRAM and compute, etc. capability than you'd normally find in a GeForce card in any generation but using the GTX680 for perspective just makes the prices look way out of whack.

Back on topic tho I see a lot of fancy graphics but its going to need a lot more than that to convince me.

I don't think they could convince you that their logo is red.

Rroff · 31 Mar 2013 at 19:48

spoffle said:
This is what publication really mean when they mention mid range, as GK104 costs are typical of nVidia's mid range costs of previous generations. They aren't talking performance.

The performance step up from previous generation is fairly mundane compared to the past to as well as many other parts of the card having more in common with mid-range capabilities.

Duff-man's spreadsheet on the specifications/die sizes/densities and so on over the past few generations also is fairly indicative.

spoffle · 31 Mar 2013 at 19:52

Rroff said:
The performance step up from previous generation is fairly mundane compared to the past to as well as many other parts of the card having more in common with mid-range capabilities.

The performance step up is fairly typical.

Duff-man's spreadsheet on the specifications/die sizes/densities and so on over the past few generations also is fairly indicative.

All that means is that they made a smaller GPU because making 500mm2+ wasn't sustainable. You know this.

Rroff · 31 Mar 2013 at 20:01

spoffle said:
The performance step up is fairly typical.

All that means is that they made a smaller GPU because making 500mm2+ wasn't sustainable. You know this.

Performance step up is a fair way off typical, not to be snide about it but your past posts on the performance steps from generation to generation were somewhat (tho not entirely) inaccurate I don't think your the best judge of this particular aspect of it.

Its not conclusive but its a good indication that what they made isn't what was originally intended to be a high end GPU - theres a fair gap between it and a 500mm2+ design. Pretty much every aspect of it falls fair and square into the ball park most people would have guessed at for a mid-range kepler card coming from any previous generation.