AMD investing heavily to "win the graphics battle" next year

[Puppetmaster]

I can't remember the last time I had a serious issue on a single AMD card. Sure crossfire isn't perfect and sometimes they are slow with crossfire drivers but nVidia are not perfect in that respect either.

Be good to get a top end battle again. Might stop some of the £500+ cards.

 

[Gerard]

I don't even think that's true, it's largely just the perception of having poor driver and poor driver updates that AMD are battling against.

The problem is ati have had that reputation back when it was fact with the rage series of gpu's and it continued right up until the radeon 8500, on paper the 8500 was an amazing card but the software let it down. When artx came on board and the 9700 appeared the drivers improved a lot but the reputation of the older cards still stuck around.

Its simply something that won't go away and people still harp on about it like this is 2001 when the drivers were ropey.

 

[KelDG]

Lets hope they can do something special as if we are just left with nvidia and intel controlling the market then that is me (and I'm sure many others too) done with PC gaming, I'll be going back to console. PC gaming is already expensive enough and unfortunately, getting a game to run relatively well without having to faff about with it is rare these days so take away all the competition, we will only have more expensive parts i.e. skylake and even worse driver/patch support.

Shame that some people are not sharp enough to understand this. Not old enough to realise we were stuck on 386 processors with no major improvement for nearly 5 years.

Some quotes from an old news article from back in the day, lets hope they are not repeated in 2016 with nVidia on the headlines

"Profit margins are fat. Chips with manufacturing costs estimated at less than $50 are sold by Intel for $175 to $200."

''Somebody can have double Intel's manufacturing costs'' and sell the chip ''for less than Intel sells it for and still have a decent profit,'' said Michael Slater, publisher of the Microprocessor Report, an industry newsletter."

 

[Gregster]

Shame that some people are not sharp enough to understand this. Not old enough to realise we were stuck on 386 processors with no major improvement for nearly 5 years.

Some quotes from an old news article from back in the day, lets hope they are not repeated in 2016 with nVidia on the headlines

"Profit margins are fat. Chips with manufacturing costs estimated at less than $50 are sold by Intel for $175 to $200."

''Somebody can have double Intel's manufacturing costs'' and sell the chip ''for less than Intel sells it for and still have a decent profit,'' said Michael Slater, publisher of the Microprocessor Report, an industry newsletter."

Intel have only released marginal increases since the 2500 days and there is no competition to speak of, but nothing has changed there. Some people are so anti one side, they would rather pack up what they enjoy to save buying the competition? I find that very narrow minded.

 

[Insanties_birth]

Which is why Nvidia have said they are also using this new type of gddr5. I imagine they'll only have HBM in there most expensive cards and the other stuff for the mass produced models.



The problem is the inconsistency in how well the cards run.
Like someone said the thing is we was sat here expecting Fiji to be something it wasn't for AMD and they priced it like they did due to not wanting to be seen as the cheaper option while not delivering a higher quality product. Software is an important part of the package and we get let down the same as we did before, Poor crossfire support, lack of driver releases. Today's example is Fallout 4 with the 970 sitting pretty with the 390x. Yes the game runs fine (It does for me with my Fury) but it needs to be seen to do so while holding it's own against the competition.
There's always excuses why we don't have day one optimizations, I'm sure that now it'll be because there working on Crimson, last time it was because they was busy with the 300 series cards. Whatever the reason it is not good enough, especially if you are pricing yourself as not being a cheaper option. If it's not going to be a cheaper option it needs to have better support.

Didn't the latest wave of drivers give decent boosts to fury and basically make it just as good as a 980ti (at stock) while still having a competitive price considering the cooling of the fury x? There's only really one thing wrong with them and that's that they don't have voltage control. I imagine there was some silly or strange design error that's causing them to not get this unlocked but short of that we basically had titan performance with great cooling at a far better price? Was quite frankly a good show from AMD despite all the pity party people banging on that the 980ti is slightly better. Not a huge surprise that they wasn't number one when Nvidia have far more resources but when it was being released it was basically worth the hype, Nvidia cut it down with the 980ti fair enough but it was hardly expected of AMD to have mind reading and spies in Nvidia's offices.

All in all though they did make a gaff with the voltage control and could have done with a teency bit more vram to halt the trolls but other than that it wasn't so bad really.

 

[D.P.]

The thing is Nvidia drop the balls just as much, such as the drivers in the recent years, but it doesn't stop people keep thinking they are doing better than AMD in that regard, and that's what the bias are...

The "overclocker's dream" we all know it was a slip of mouth by the AMD representative, but at least it was not listed as a feature on the box of the product. The 4GB of the 970 on the other hand...Nvidia claims the card was meant to be 3GB, and the extra 1GB is just their "genious gift" to their users due to how "they are always looking out for their users" (So should performance suffer with the card accessing the last part of the 1GB of vram, users shouldn't complain )

The only reason that AMD appears to drop the ball more than Nvidia is only due to Nvidia's better branding image, so even if both companies have the same amount of smudge stucked on their faces, the smudge would simply disappear from Nvidia's face at a much faster rate

The 970 does have 4GB VRAM.

 

[r7slayer]

The 970 does have 4GB VRAM.

And the xbox one does have 3x more performance than the ps4... But its in the xbox cloud servers. Still can make that claim though?

 

[thebennyboy]

The 970 does have 4GB VRAM.

This issue is that it can't all be accessed at its rated speed. It does have 4GB of VRAM, but only 3.5GB of it is full-speed.

 

[chroniclard]

I dont get where the AMD drivers being bad comes from. I have only recently swapped out a 280X and never had any issues. Also had crossfire 6850's before that and they worked mostly fine. Granted some crossfire issues but Nvidia also have that issue.

 

[D.P.]

This issue is that it can't all be accessed at its rated speed. It does have 4GB of VRAM, but only 3.5GB of it is full-speed.

And the end result is absolutely negligible because there is always a load of data that doesn't need to be accessed at such high speed, windows will happily eat a chunk of the 512MB.

It should have been made clearer in reviews but it makes absolutely no difference to gaming. when people found out their cards didn't suddenly run slower upon hearing the news!

 

[Gerard]

I dont get where the AMD drivers being bad comes from. I have only recently swapped out a 280X and never had any issues. Also had crossfire 6850's before that and they worked mostly fine. Granted some crossfire issues but Nvidia also have that issue.

Already answered that above, its literally from their early gpu days.

 

[Marine-RX179]

But the 970 DOES have 4GB VRAM...
Just like AMD CPUs have 8-cores.
We don't know that "overclocker's dream" was a slip, we just know it hasn't delivered. Believing it's a slip and that the 970 doesn't have 4GB VRAM, well now we're back on to 'bias'...

You are still clearly missing the point.

One is merely a quote from someone of the company said during an event and is not printed on the description of the product itself, whilst the other is printed on the box of the product clearly stating a "4GB of memory running at a specified speed" but doesn't, and is still marketed as such to this day (they only disclosed the last 512MB of memory is running at lower speed after been caught with their pants down by 3rd party). If you still think the latter is more guilty than the prior, you might need to check the term "bias" again...

And for the record, the 970 isn't even on 256-bit bus, it is 3.5GB on 225-bit bus, and 512MB on 32-bit bus.

It has to be the most shameful case of misadvertising for graphic cards in the years, yet it die down quickly after short initial complain of may be a couple of months. As I said earlier, anything negative press for Nvidia simply don't stick for long, people forget and move on quickly thanks to the brand image of the company- which is why I said AMD will find it difficult to fight Nvidia, as it will never be on even ground.

As for AMD's 8 cores, if I am not mistaken they have clearly disclosed their architecture design open for people to see since the beginning...unlike the 970 which was like 6 months down the line after they got caught with the pants down.

 

[Boomstick777]

2016 is gonna be good year to be a gamer.

 

[Gregster]

Marine constantly saying the 970 only has 3.5GB is getting tiresome reading now.

 

[r7slayer]

2016 is gonna be good year to be a gamer.

Yep, its lookin up lol. Some good games and some new tech by looks of it. How that tech will perform we dont know but it still gets me all excited and warm and fuzzy.

 

[r7slayer]

Marine constantly saying the 970 only has 3.5GB is getting tiresome reading now.

He's not. Marine has admitted that it has 4gb but not in the way people and Nvidia claim. Its 3.5 of the proper stuff and 512 of really slow stuff which isnt fit for proper use only memory buffer caching or Windows use. So actual game utilisation only has 3.5 and this is something Nvidia had to fix in drivers. They did get caugjt with thier pants down and despite certain ppls brand loyalty cant deny this.

 

[Boomstick777]

Marine constantly saying the 970 only has 3.5GB is getting tiresome reading now.

The GTX 970 has 4GB's of VRAM is a fact, it's 3.5GB fast VRAM plus 0.5GB not so fast VRAM. Total of 4GB's.

It was the non disclosure of the slower part and lesser amount of ROPS that annoyed people at the time. Most of us are over it now, especially as AMD have let down consumers just as much with dodgy Fury coolers at launch etc, major re-branding and so on..

Neither AMD or Nvidia are perfect, wish people would stop fanboying for either side lol.

Back on topic, think 2016 is going to a great year for gamers, sure fanboys will find something to moan about but I'll enjoy trying the hardware from both camps lol.

 

[Marine-RX179]

Marine constantly saying the 970 only has 3.5GB is getting tiresome reading now.

Guess what? That's not what I said here in this thread, it was people that not bother to properly read what I said assumed so. I was merely quoting what AMD's representive said vs Nvidia's representative said, to illustrate my point of people are far more forgive (or forgetful) toward Nvidia comparing to AMD when it comes to negative press.

And you and some other's attitude toward the 970 situation is exactly my point with Nvidia get away with things far easier than AMD, regardless of the significant of the negative press.

I got no beef other Nvidia's products, and I keep going back to the 970 is not because it is Nvidia's product, but because the particular product is worst misadvertised graphic card product in years. Being a negative Nvidia press I wasn't surprise that it didn't stick for long, but I simply find it truly ridiculous that people would still defend or justify it, after their memory of significant of the extent of the misadvertising start to fade.

It's not so much about the performance/fuctions, but more about something that are being sold not as advertised (and still are), regardless of it is a graphic card or something else.

So will AMD win the graphic battle? May be, may be not. But will AMD will the "business battle"? Nope, nade nada. They'd lucky to even come close to a draw.

 

[Rofflay]

They need some serious investment in software and features to get near Nvidia. VSR supporting everything Nvidia can up to x4 the native res with no fps caps. FRTC from 0-200 due to 200hz monitors. And i actually really like HBAO+.

I doubt AMD will ever bother to have the above. We shall see soon with Crimson.

 

[GoogalyMoogaly]

You are still clearly missing the point.

One is merely a quote from someone of the company said during an event and is not printed on the description of the product itself, whilst the other is printed on the box of the product clearly stating a "4GB of memory running at a specified speed" but doesn't, and is still marketed as such to this day (they only disclosed the last 512MB of memory is running at lower speed after been caught with their pants down by 3rd party). If you still think the latter is more guilty than the prior, you might need to check the term "bias" again...

And for the record, the 970 isn't even on 256-bit bus, it is 3.5GB on 225-bit bus, and 512MB on 32-bit bus.

It has to be the most shameful case of misadvertising for graphic cards in the years, yet it die down quickly after short initial complain of may be a couple of months. As I said earlier, anything negative press for Nvidia simply don't stick for long, people forget and move on quickly thanks to the brand image of the company- which is why I said AMD will find it difficult to fight Nvidia, as it will never be on even ground.

As for AMD's 8 cores, if I am not mistaken they have clearly disclosed their architecture design open for people to see since the beginning...unlike the 970 which was like 6 months down the line after they got caught with the pants down.

Where does it state on the 970 box that it has 4GB VRAM all running at X speed?
I've checked my 980 box and it doesn't say that.