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Any articles on HBM memory, + why 4gb video mem is suddenly ok for 4k?

wunkley

wunkley

wunkley

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As title. Anyone got any good links? I'm a tad confused to be honest with the recent Fury X announcement. Is HBM totally shrouded in mystery as to how it works? Can 4gb of HBM somehow provide the same performance/ bandwidth/ whatever as 8gb ddr5 VRAM, for example?

For months (years?) we've had people banging on about VRAM and its lack of becoming an issue. You need at least 6gb for 4k yadda yadda.....

Does HBM memory turn this convention on its head?
 
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wunkley said:
As title. I'm a tad confused to honest with the recent Fury X announcement. Is HBM totally shrouded in mystery as to how it works? Can 4gb of HBM somehow provide the same performance/ bandwidth/ whatever as 8gb ddr5 VRAM, for example?
Click to expand...

If you look at the quotes, they seem to be talking about a single card not being able to utilise more than 4GB so anything more is pointless, which is correct, for a single card... however it does also fly in the face of all the "you need our 8GB cards" advertising they did a few months ago

Basically they are admitting their memory usage used to be rubbish and now they've improved it, but I can't see that they've magically fixed their past mistakes AS WELL AS massively improving over and above what nvidia were already doing with Maxwell

multi-card benchmarks will certainly be interesting in the coming weeks
 
@ snips - Have you seen how many pages that 390x thread was?! It's ridiculous and full of nonsense. Reading any of it just makes me feel ill
 
wunkley said:
As title. Anyone got any good links? I'm a tad confused to be honest with the recent Fury X announcement. Is HBM totally shrouded in mystery as to how it works? Can 4gb of HBM somehow provide the same performance/ bandwidth/ whatever as 8gb ddr5 VRAM, for example?

For months (years?) we've had people banging on about VRAM and its lack of becoming an issue. You need at least 6gb for 4k yadda yadda.....

Does HBM memory turn this convention on its head?
Click to expand...

Who knows, AMD say one thing then say another. Wait till genuine non-bias benchmarks are out with memory hungry games ( in other words, badly optimised) and only then will it tell you roughly how its going to be.
 
Are proper benchmarks still under nda? Surprised there hasn't been some more info, leaked or otherwise since the card was revealed yesterday, specifically about HBM and how it all works in games especially at 4k
 
Apparently benchmarks will be available soon.

Not that I game at 4k or will be doing so soon.

For me the performance is what matters, not the numbers of x or y component.
 
There are some simple facts about though. If a game with a large draw distance and high resolution textures and assets requires more than 4GB of VRAM then 4GB of HBM will be a stutter fest. Throw in a frame buffer for 4K, even if incredibly optimized, and you need a lot less assets to hit the 4GB limit.


GTA V is a good example, at 4K it can easily go over 4Gb.
Future games could make this a bigger problem.
 
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With the Fiji chip, i believe i read somewhere that it has improved texture compression. With the bare minimal impact on performance with its compression engine.

Another thing with DX12 is if Devs will finally cut DX9-10 hardware support and finally implement BC7 compression for textures which improves quality at lower file sizes. It was originally brought about with DX11 but is not usable on DX10 hardware and bellow so many devs don't use it.

TL;DR DX11 and 12 can use better texture compression methods so require less ram. But only if the developer uses the correct texture format.
 
Muz333 said:
Well, I understood some of the words on that forums thread...
Click to expand...

Yeeees, it's all a bit too geeky at the moment ain't it.

I watched the furyx release yesterday. They were really bigging up 4k usage and by definition 4k performance. AMD would have to be incredibly stupid to release a new flagship card with only 4gb vid mem and talk up 4k, if HBM didn't have some secret sauce going on. Wouldn't they?
 
flopper said:
3.5gb 970 seems to do fine.
Click to expand...

As does the 4gb 980, but apparently now since titans release the new AMD cards aren't capable. I guess that means the 980 and 970 are defunct too.

The GTX 980 is the worlds fastest GPU and the GTX 970 offers the most advanced performance in its class. Each delivers 2x the performance of previous-generation card, bringing new gaming experiences to virtual reality, and ultra resolution 4k displays.
Click to expand...

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-261-EA


Amusing how everyone is now bashing AMD for 4gb............
 
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I just read that anandtech article linked earlier. It's good and well written, but still leaves us in the dark as it's all conjecture.

No doubt though HBM is the future! I just can't help thinking that as AMD are first out the door with it, it's early days and the real world ie gaming performance isn't going to blow us away. Then nvidia will come along, having let AMD test the HBM waters out, and then totally trump it. Kind of feel sorry for AMD genuinely. It's a bit like the Betamax VHS wars years ago. They come up with the best ideas and innovations, then somehow lose the market.
 
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