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

[GoogalyMoogaly]

You can look at it the other way. What if AMD marketed the Fury X with 800MHz core clock but they all operated at 1050MHz? Then AMD would be providing "buyers a product that exceeds the specifications to give the user the best out of the box experience." So you can look at it both ways, nVidia under-advertise the clocks to make the results look better while AMD advertise accurately - or look at it your way that nVidia are giving away free performance while AMD are locking performance down. Depends which spin you want to put on things.

As I understand it though it's not a case of Nvidia stating a lower speed it's the fact that cards will boost to different levels based on whatever it is (ASIC?) so not all MSI Gaming cards will boost to the same speed. They'll boost to what they can, giving the user the best experience out of the box.
If AMD just change the specs on the box it's still not doing that. They'd actually need the FuryX to boost 1076MHz on one card while stating 1050Mhz, but then on another card boosting to 1084MHz while still stating 1050MHz.
Unless I've misunderstood the whole Nvidia boost mechanics?

175w Nano.
AMD is leading already and are extending their lead next year.
Backed by Dx12/Mantle their own developed software used world wide.
cant say nvidia done much for us PC gamers the last 20 years.

GSync? Which led to Freesync...
ShadowPlay? I'd compare it to Raptr, but more in concept than execution.
HDMI 2.0 connectors...
Voltage control on their top tier cards.
Release day drivers.
Sponsoring games.
GameWorks.

 

[Orangey]

AMD don't do vc themselves so you can't use that.

They also don't make HDMI 2.0 adapters.

Sponsoring games is a bad thing as is gw.

You don't need a driver just because a game is new.

 

[GoogalyMoogaly]

AMD don't do vc themselves so you can't use that.

They also don't make HDMI 2.0 adapters.

Sponsoring games is a bad thing as is gw.

You don't need a driver just because a game is new.

But it's up to AMD to put HDMI 2.0 on the cards, who else is gonna do it if they don't?
Voltage control can only be added if the card actually supports it. If they've designed the card in such a way that it's hard to do because of the HBM or something, then that's entirely on them.
I know AMD like to blame others for any issues they have, but these things are both part of the hard's design.

I don't see how sponsoring games is bad. Givign the studio money in order to get your name on an item. It's just advertising and marketing.

I put a after GameWorks as I know it splits opinion.

 

[humbug]

You guys do realise that AMD advertise their cards with the boost clock being the quoted figure, which is why when you look on their website it always lists the GPU clock as up to xxxxMHz. They don't even list the base clock at all.
Whereas NVidia list a base clock and a minimum boost clock.

Not saying that either method is right or wrong, it is just different ways of advertising their cards.

AMD cards have a lot of different power / thermal states, its not practical to list a minimum because really there isn't one.

With that AMD's biggest mistake in recent history was putting an inadequate cooler on the reference Hawaii cards, those things run at between 800 and 900Mhz to keep the temperatures down.
A lot of them are still floating around reviews making them look MUCH slower than they actually are with a normal cooler on them.
That is entirely AMD's fault, its one of many examples of AMD's bizarre and catastrophic lack of foresight.

Now the thing about AMD's cards is they do not boost over the maximum stated clocks, if its 1000Mhz its 1000Mhz no matter how cool the card is.

Nvidia's cards will run at not far off whatever speed it can, it will overclock its self if Boost 2 knows there is room for it, this is why the clock inconsistencies often from exactly the same make, model and revision cards.

Again this is AMD's own fault for employing the capped boost system that they do.

Now having said all of that often you get reviewers who will say in the description "this card boost to 1200Mhz" simply to repeat the manufactures specification, what they then don't tell you is its actually running at 1400Mhz on their open test bed.

So any reader looking at that will quite rightfully think "oh 1200Mhz and its as fast as this card and i still have a massive 30% overcloking headroom"

Well, no it isn't and no you don't, not even close....

I switch directly from a 290 to the 970, i ran the 290 at 1125Mhz 24/7 and i'll say this now since i haven't before, the 290 was faster at 1125Mhz than the 970 is at 1500Mhz, its not a lot but the performance difference is there and noticeable. I actually think in the real world the 290, especially the 390 having that bit more head room is more a match for the 980 than the 970.

Now i'm not knocking the 970, oh no... its-a-fantastic-GPU, so was the 290 they are both fantastic in different ways.

IMO the Hawaii GPU's are one of the finest GPU's ever made, an absolute power house and just an all round great, it deserves to be recognised as one of the finest in history. so does Maxwell.

 

[bru]

AMD cards have a lot of different power / thermal states, its not practical to list a minimum because really there isn't one.

That's a good point actually, AMD don't list a base clock as really as you say there isn't one, whereas NVidia give us a base clock number that it really meaningless, as my 970 is sitting at 135MHz as I type this, so just what is the base clock number actually suppose to signify.

 

[Ian Evey]

175w Nano.
AMD is leading already and are extending their lead next year.
Backed by Dx12/Mantle their own developed software used world wide.
cant say nvidia done much for us PC gamers the last 20 years.

Nvidia have given us you flopper, Always a joy reading your posts.

 

[Ash0787]

Whatever happened to Fury X2 ? , starting to think its actually just a myth

Also latest AMD driver with HDMI to DVI

 

[DarrenM343]

If you stop what you are doing and listen carefully.........you can hear the rattle of the AMD card improvement collection tin from here .
Joking aside, and nobody take that seriously, I think Nvidia have much deeper pockets. AMD may sometimes pull ahead but I doubt it will be for long. If AMD do and manage to stay there with equiv quality and performance and software support then good for them. We defo could do with some decent competition between them

 

[JediFragger]

If you stop what you are doing and listen carefully.........you can hear the rattle of the AMD card improvement collection tin from here .
Joking aside, and nobody take that seriously, I think Nvidia have much deeper pockets. AMD may sometimes pull ahead but I doubt it will be for long. If AMD do and manage to stay there with equiv quality and performance and software support then good for them. We defo could do with some decent competition between them

Thing is, money will only get you so far in terms of GPU R&D, talent matters the most I think

No doubt AMD have some *very* talented engineers, and they'll surely put out something special next year

Then all they have to do it battle nVidia's game 'tweaks'

 

[tommybhoy]

There are plenty of people on these forums that own a brand but can see through the BS and seem anti that brand. Martini, humbug, tommybhoy to name a few.

I'm one of Googaly's anti BS evil doppelgänger!!!

 

[humbug]

Really, Googlay? you would have me down as an Nvidia Fanboi?

 

[GoogalyMoogaly]

Really, Googlay? you would have me down as an Nvidia Fanboi?

Yeah, gets really old with you and tommybhoy waxing lyrical about GameWorks in every thread. It's just a piece of software guys, it's not love!

 

[humbug]

Yeah, gets really old with you and tommybhoy waxing lyrical about GameWorks in every thread. It's just a piece of software guys, it's not love!

You don't have to agree with me or even read anything i say

 

[LoadsaMoney]

AMDs getting smashed to bloody bits off Nvidia, all the big games are their Gameworks, and all run terrible on AMDs top cards, Nvidia have cards around the £250 mark smashing em, Fury X, Fury, £400£/500+ cards, their high end, walloped, even when they did their own games, the Gaming Evolveds, they were still getting beat of Nvidias cards, and wheres the Gaming Evolved now, had a slew of games, then nothing, Gameworks is doing em all now.

 

[Rroff]

IMO the Hawaii GPU's are one of the finest GPU's ever made, an absolute power house and just an all round great, it deserves to be recognised as one of the finest in history. so does Maxwell.

I'm not as big a fan of Maxwell as you are IMO its a bit of a one trick pony designed to get the best mixture of performance and efficiency (cost/yield, thermal/power, etc.) out of 28nm and in any other generation would look quite mundane it just happened to come along in a perfect storm of conditions.

I do think though that architectures building on the experience of Maxwell will be strong however.

Hawaii, etc. is a very strong architecture as well but I think it really struggles on 28nm - AMD are positioned to do very well with DX12 type APIs and sub 20nm planar but they really need to make sure their execution is bang on to capitalise on that.

 

[Twincam]

AMD cards have a lot of different power / thermal states, its not practical to list a minimum because really there isn't one.

With that AMD's biggest mistake in recent history was putting an inadequate cooler on the reference Hawaii cards, those things run at between 800 and 900Mhz to keep the temperatures down.
A lot of them are still floating around reviews making them look MUCH slower than they actually are with a normal cooler on them.
That is entirely AMD's fault, its one of many examples of AMD's bizarre and catastrophic lack of foresight.

Now the thing about AMD's cards is they do not boost over the maximum stated clocks, if its 1000Mhz its 1000Mhz no matter how cool the card is.

Nvidia's cards will run at not far off whatever speed it can, it will overclock its self if Boost 2 knows there is room for it, this is why the clock inconsistencies often from exactly the same make, model and revision cards.

Again this is AMD's own fault for employing the capped boost system that they do.

Now having said all of that often you get reviewers who will say in the description "this card boost to 1200Mhz" simply to repeat the manufactures specification, what they then don't tell you is its actually running at 1400Mhz on their open test bed.

So any reader looking at that will quite rightfully think "oh 1200Mhz and its as fast as this card and i still have a massive 30% overcloking headroom"

Well, no it isn't and no you don't, not even close....

I switch directly from a 290 to the 970, i ran the 290 at 1125Mhz 24/7 and i'll say this now since i haven't before, the 290 was faster at 1125Mhz than the 970 is at 1500Mhz, its not a lot but the performance difference is there and noticeable. I actually think in the real world the 290, especially the 390 having that bit more head room is more a match for the 980 than the 970.

Now i'm not knocking the 970, oh no... its-a-fantastic-GPU, so was the 290 they are both fantastic in different ways.

IMO the Hawaii GPU's are one of the finest GPU's ever made, an absolute power house and just an all round great, it deserves to be recognised as one of the finest in history. so does Maxwell.

Sorry but disagree big time on your statement about the 290 being faster than the gtx 970. I went from a 290 that I Overclocked to a gtx 970 and the 970 at 1500 does easily beat the 290 in every game and benchmark I tried it with. Also in every proper benchmark I've seen an Overclocked 970 wins. My heaven score for my Overclocked 290 was 1447 and for my gtx 970 was 1601 my gtx 980 does 1915. Not to mention the amd hardware is seriously slower due to drivers in many games.

The Hawaii chip is a terrible design, it's hot and very power hungry and has all this supposed power but yet doesn't really use it.

im not an amd hater and will buy any brand but they can't be recommended at the min as you can't use the actual power of them and often the drivers are rubbish. There hot and power hungry, don't overclock well. Many games now use nvidia gameworks so if you try turn on the effects the performance is bad not amd' fault but still. And basing the 300 on a slightly improved 200 series which is an improved 7000 series or whatever is a bit lazy

I do hope there next cards are much improved

 

[Boomstick777]

AMDs getting smashed to bloody bits off Nvidia, all the big games are their Gameworks, and all run terrible on AMDs top cards, Nvidia have cards around the £250 mark smashing em, Fury X, Fury, £400£/500+ cards, their high end, walloped, even when they did their own games, the Gaming Evolveds, they were still getting beat of Nvidias cards, and wheres the Gaming Evolved now, had a slew of games, then nothing, Gameworks is doing em all now.

Ya Nvidia are dominant right now. AMD just need a few decent products though and can still re gain market share, even a better pricing structure on current cards would generate more interest. Anyways with the new hardware hopefully they come sooner rather than later else we will see a repeat of what's happened in the CPU space with AMD slipping further and further behind.

I have faith that AMD's Zen and upcoming GPU architecture will be decent and get a good amount of sales, not sure it will be enough to turn the tide but it will be a good start.

 

[humbug]

I'm not as big a fan of Maxwell as you are IMO its a bit of a one trick pony designed to get the best mixture of performance and efficiency (cost/yield, thermal/power, etc.) out of 28nm and in any other generation would look quite mundane it just happened to come along in a perfect storm of conditions.

I do think though that architectures building on the experience of Maxwell will be strong however.

Hawaii, etc. is a very strong architecture as well but I think it really struggles on 28nm - AMD are positioned to do very well with DX12 type APIs and sub 20nm planar but they really need to make sure their execution is bang on to capitalise on that.

I have a lot of respect for Maxwell, there is a lot of power in it while at the same time using little of it.

Hawaii with its ASynchronous architecture is not just powerful but also ahead of its time, and altho its no where near as efficient as Maxwell for Gaming in workstation workloads the Compute per watt is far ahead of anything today let alone back in 2012.

And all that on 28nm, no doubt 16nm will make them look inefficient and old-hat, but thats how it goes in GPU evolution.

Yeah i think i would like to put forward the 290X / 390X and the GTX 980 for a place in the top 10 GPU's of all time chart.

 

[Orangey]

AMDs getting smashed to bloody bits off Nvidia, all the big games are their Gameworks, and all run terrible on AMDs top cards, Nvidia have cards around the £250 mark smashing em, Fury X, Fury, £400£/500+ cards, their high end, walloped, even when they did their own games, the Gaming Evolveds, they were still getting beat of Nvidias cards, and wheres the Gaming Evolved now, had a slew of games, then nothing, Gameworks is doing em all now.

How are AMD supposed to fight NV offering money to publisher bosses?

It's no big mystery why GW is in every game. The only way the industry is saved from itself is regulation. Ban NV from bribing their way into every hot AAA, ban the bosses from taking it.

 

[Scania]

175w Nano.
AMD is leading already and are extending their lead next year.
Backed by Dx12/Mantle their own developed software used world wide.
cant say nvidia done much for us PC gamers the last 20 years.

I'm unsure which is the dafter statement, yours or the view in the OP that AMD are suddenly going to turn it all around next year!