AMD Polaris architecture – GCN 4.0

[AlamoX]

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the NX will be both a console and a handheld that would effectively replace the Wii U and the 3DS. Much like the Wii U and its gamepad, the handheld could be used in conjunction with the NX. Unlike the gamepad, which could only be used in close proximity to the Wii U, the NX’s handheld device could be taken on the road and function independently.
Regarding the console itself, the report says that Nintendo has begun to deliver a software development kit for the NX. This goes with reports that Nintendo is reaching out to other developers. The console will be using “industry-leading chips” to run it, hopefully putting it on par with the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, though it was earlier reported that the console may run games at 900p resolution.

full article here

posting it here because there has been rumors that AMD might be the chip supplier, and if it is then it will probably be polaris

 

[Mauller]

If the controller will also act as a portable game console then it points to the hints that PowerVR chips will be used in the NX. if you consider that a PowerVR chip could be used on the portable side while AMD powers the Console base station with a far more grunty APU.

 

[flopper]

There will be uber chips waiting in the wings from both vendors.

They won't see the light of day until both vendors have milked the market for all it's worth with the mid range stuff first. This will also give them time to improve yields for later on when these chips are needed.

Die shrinks are getting harder to implement and take longer to bring to the market so 14/16nm is going to be with us for a very long time. This will make the need for uber chips an absolute must.

there are 3 segments, 1080p is the most used resolution.
a Polaris maybe a <75w without external cable then makes it low power 1080p gaming how is that milking???

80% or so are cards bought in the 380/390 priced segment.
How is that milking?

The entusiast, the people buying Titanx priced cards are people without life.
but the same happens with cars, some buy lamborghini instead of a toyota.
here is the kicker with cars, cant drive faster than the law anyhow.

do people really expect a entusiast high end card to sell for cheap?
When you understand the formula its really simple,
you have X fps
you buy a 380/960 and let say you have 40fps.
you then double the price and have 55fps
then you double the price again and have 68fps.

Now you pay a lot more money double the money would for me mean double the fps but that never happens.
so a 390/970 cost 300euro and then a furyx/980ti cost 700euro.
why anyone would buy a 980ti is beyond me as the ratio fps/price is crap there.
if the price doubles I expect twice the fps but that isnt what you pay for.
you pay for way less fps.
why would I wanna buy a card that cost twice or four times as much and I gain so little?

Milking?
12gb titanx last I checked is just that
you pay for memory that never get used in gaming.

 

[pmc25]

i dont see AMD holding back chips if they have them available!
taking the performance crown by a nice margin would help them a lot

thats if they first to market anyway, im sure nvidia would like to match them with midrange if they could lol - but i dont think so this time!

I absolutely do see them holding back. As I've posted elsewhere on this forum, I don't expect them to do a chip anywhere near as big as Fiji whatever NVIDIA do and whatever their market position for Polaris is. I think they'll be very happy to sit on selling huge volumes of <400mm2 chips, and only do something around ~450mm2 if NVIDIA manage greater volume and lower prices for their halo chips than is likely ... I seriously doubt there'll be more than a trickle of the Titan branded Tesla until next year. If they can wait until the successor generation to do bigger chips, likely due again in summer (of '17), then they have a gigantic advantage over NVIDIA, who will be waiting another year for Volta.

 

[Kaapstad]

there are 3 segments, 1080p is the most used resolution.
a Polaris maybe a <75w without external cable then makes it low power 1080p gaming how is that milking???

80% or so are cards bought in the 380/390 priced segment.
How is that milking?

The entusiast, the people buying Titanx priced cards are people without life.
but the same happens with cars, some buy lamborghini instead of a toyota.
here is the kicker with cars, cant drive faster than the law anyhow.

do people really expect a entusiast high end card to sell for cheap?
When you understand the formula its really simple,
you have X fps
you buy a 380/960 and let say you have 40fps.
you then double the price and have 55fps
then you double the price again and have 68fps.

Now you pay a lot more money double the money would for me mean double the fps but that never happens.
so a 390/970 cost 300euro and then a furyx/980ti cost 700euro.
why anyone would buy a 980ti is beyond me as the ratio fps/price is crap there.
if the price doubles I expect twice the fps but that isnt what you pay for.
you pay for way less fps.
why would I wanna buy a card that cost twice or four times as much and I gain so little?

Milking?
12gb titanx last I checked is just that
you pay for memory that never get used in gaming.

For 2160p max settings and high fps the only serious option is TitanX SLI, there is no AMD counterpart to rival it.

@2160p I am seeing more and more games that breach 8gb this makes the TitanX's very relevant and they will still be when the first round of next gen cards arrives as I don't think any of them will have more than 8gb of VRAM.

As to milking both AMD and NVidia will milk their customers with the next gen by holding back the bigger cards till later.

While we are on the subject of milking how many of AMDs SKUs in the next round of cards will be rebrands ?

 

[Mei]

I absolutely do see them holding back. As I've posted elsewhere on this forum, I don't expect them to do a chip anywhere near as big as Fiji whatever NVIDIA do and whatever their market position for Polaris is. I think they'll be very happy to sit on selling huge volumes of <400mm2 chips, and only do something around ~450mm2 if NVIDIA manage greater volume and lower prices for their halo chips than is likely ... I seriously doubt there'll be more than a trickle of the Titan branded Tesla until next year. If they can wait until the successor generation to do bigger chips, likely due again in summer (of '17), then they have a gigantic advantage over NVIDIA, who will be waiting another year for Volta.

i duno thats getting a bit technical for me lol

if they are able to take a strong lead in performance i think they should take the chance
fastest chip = sales right?

but AMD are hard to guess

 

[looncraz]

For 2160p max settings and high fps the only serious option is TitanX SLI, there is no AMD counterpart to rival it.

@2160p I am seeing more and more games that breach 8gb this makes the TitanX's very relevant and they will still be when the first round of next gen cards arrives as I don't think any of them will have more than 8gb of VRAM.

As to milking both AMD and NVidia will milk their customers with the next gen by holding back the bigger cards till later.

While we are on the subject of milking how many of AMDs SKUs in the next round of cards will be rebrands ?

Wow, you are so full of it!

nVidia's advantage vanishes when crossfire/SLI comes into play. AMD's CF scales notably better. The 4GB of RAM on Fury has proven to not be an issue - even at 4k.

http://wccftech.com/amd-radeon-r9-f...ia-geforce-gtx-titan-quad-sli-uhd-benchmarks/

Notice that your statement would be "more true" at 1080p, but NOT at 4k (or even 1440p).

And that was before the updated drivers and their improved memory management on Fury.

 

[flopper]

Wow, you are so full of it!

nVidia's advantage vanishes when crossfire/SLI comes into play. AMD's CF scales notably better. The 4GB of RAM on Fury has proven to not be an issue - even at 4k.

http://wccftech.com/amd-radeon-r9-f...ia-geforce-gtx-titan-quad-sli-uhd-benchmarks/

Notice that your statement would be "more true" at 1080p, but NOT at 4k (or even 1440p).

And that was before the updated drivers and their improved memory management on Fury.

Yep, FuryX owns anything Nvidia has.

Polaris?
Its heaven on earth realized brightly.

 

[AlamoX]

For 2160p max settings and high fps the only serious option is TitanX SLI, there is no AMD counterpart to rival it.

@2160p I am seeing more and more games that breach 8gb this makes the TitanX's very relevant and they will still be when the first round of next gen cards arrives as I don't think any of them will have more than 8gb of VRAM.

As to milking both AMD and NVidia will milk their customers with the next gen by holding back the bigger cards till later.

While we are on the subject of milking how many of AMDs SKUs in the next round of cards will be rebrands ?

to be fair most review show AMD cards performing better as their competting card as resolution goes up, it's practicaly the opposite of 1080p.
the problem is that sometimes you get plagued by some bugs, that takes too long to get fixed with AMD drivers, now crossfire & sli both got better scalling than few years ago, but both still far away from being stress free to use,
hoping that this will change if VR puts a focus on multi-gpu setups

Edit : completely unrelated, but i wanted to make a poll, but dont seem to find how, is it possible to do it in this forum ?

 

[humbug]

to be fair most review show AMD cards performing better as their competting card as resolution goes up, it's practicaly the opposite of 1080p.
the problem is that sometimes you get plagued by some bugs, that takes too long to get fixed with AMD drivers, now crossfire & sli both got better scalling than few years ago, but both still far away from being stress free to use,
hoping that this will change if VR puts a focus on multi-gpu setups

Edit : completely unrelated, but i wanted to make a poll, but dont seem to find how, is it possible to do it in this forum ?

Make the thread and as report the post asking to make it a poll. only the mods can do it.

 

[mahius]

However for the average Joe we will have a priced 390/970 peformance card at a 380/960 price point and it be a small die.

Back when I thought that Polaris/Pascal would be twice as fast as current gen, I would have thought the same. But now I'm thinking that 390/970 performance at the nice 380/960 price point sounds a bit too good to be true. Though looking at the numbers and reported user benchmarks, the 970 is 60% better performing than a 960. Would 60% performance increase at the low(ish) end be possible and more importantly, what's there to stop AMD/Nvidia to price it a bit higher than the current lot of 380/960?

full article here

posting it here because there has been rumors that AMD might be the chip supplier, and if it is then it will probably be polaris

Of all the things that would break my tolerance for rumours it had to be this. Moreso it was the fact that Nintendo fanboys on Youtube were spouting this nonsense as fact. As of yet it remains unproven and it's a mere rumour. Considering even the current WiiU is capable of running games at 1080p 60fps (Smash Bros) and a few other games run at 1080p 30fps, which is usual fair for current gen console games, I very much doubt that the NX will be limit to rendering only up to 900p native gameplay. I'm also a bit cynical about the 4k content, HMDI can only just about support it and only on the latest version. They'd have to include HDMI 2.0 with every system.

Considering how there were rumours that the NX would release this year, I'm a bit doubtful that they would use Polaris. Thing is, that is what I was hoping for (that the NX would use die shrink GPU), since it would give it a boost over the other consoles and it would hopefully mean that there'd be mre console games runing at 1080p60 instead of compromising. I do hold onto the belief that there will be a handheld, considering the 3DS is disgustingly weak and ancient hardware (resolution slightly worse than an original PSP). Here's to hoping that it's at least 720p display, heck even smartphones are pointless sporting UHD and 4K displays these days and power to boot.

Apologies for going off topic. Pax South happened the other day and AMD were there, did they show anything off worth talking about? If not, GTC is in April, how much are we expecting to hear and or see from AMD/Nvidia about these upcoming chips? Considering AMD had small Polaris in January, I think they might have something better to show us. Not sure how well things will go with Nvidia though. Probably just a few slides or perhaps a suprise of them springing the Titan Pascal or something silly like that.

 

[Orangey]

GTC is an Nvidia show.

AMD do Computex in June. It's May 31st - June 4th this year. Then in August there is an industry-focused event Hot Chips where they do engineer talks and release papers.

 

[AlamoX]

Back when I thought that Polaris/Pascal would be twice as fast as current gen, I would have thought the same. But now I'm thinking that 390/970 performance at the nice 380/960 price point sounds a bit too good to be true. Though looking at the numbers and reported user benchmarks, the 970 is 60% better performing than a 960. Would 60% performance increase at the low(ish) end be possible and more importantly, what's there to stop AMD/Nvidia to price it a bit higher than the current lot of 380/960?



Of all the things that would break my tolerance for rumours it had to be this. Moreso it was the fact that Nintendo fanboys on Youtube were spouting this nonsense as fact. As of yet it remains unproven and it's a mere rumour. Considering even the current WiiU is capable of running games at 1080p 60fps (Smash Bros) and a few other games run at 1080p 30fps, which is usual fair for current gen console games, I very much doubt that the NX will be limit to rendering only up to 900p native gameplay. I'm also a bit cynical about the 4k content, HMDI can only just about support it and only on the latest version. They'd have to include HDMI 2.0 with every system.

Considering how there were rumours that the NX would release this year, I'm a bit doubtful that they would use Polaris. Thing is, that is what I was hoping for (that the NX would use die shrink GPU), since it would give it a boost over the other consoles and it would hopefully mean that there'd be mre console games runing at 1080p60 instead of compromising. I do hold onto the belief that there will be a handheld, considering the 3DS is disgustingly weak and ancient hardware (resolution slightly worse than an original PSP). Here's to hoping that it's at least 720p display, heck even smartphones are pointless sporting UHD and 4K displays these days and power to boot.

Apologies for going off topic. Pax South happened the other day and AMD were there, did they show anything off worth talking about? If not, GTC is in April, how much are we expecting to hear and or see from AMD/Nvidia about these upcoming chips? Considering AMD had small Polaris in January, I think they might have something better to show us. Not sure how well things will go with Nvidia though. Probably just a few slides or perhaps a suprise of them springing the Titan Pascal or something silly like that.

well the article is from The Wall Street Journal i doubt they would just make up stuff without a source, thats not a small journal

 

[N19h7m4r3]

Yep, FuryX owns anything Nvidia has.

Polaris?
Its heaven on earth realized brightly.

Biggest issue is AMD drivers, if only they could get quality ones out faster. I'm hoping now that their GPU division is somewhat separate from AMD we'll see them slowly getting better and better.

I want Big Polaris to arrive soon, and be amazingly good.

 

[EXxx]

Back when I thought that Polaris/Pascal would be twice as fast as current gen, I would have thought the same. But now I'm thinking that 390/970 performance at the nice 380/960 price point sounds a bit too good to be true. Though looking at the numbers and reported user benchmarks, the 970 is 60% better performing than a 960. Would 60% performance increase at the low(ish) end be possible and more importantly, what's there to stop AMD/Nvidia to price it a bit higher than the current lot of 380/960?

I'd say we'll get a 980 performance at 970ish price(15-20%)

 

[Baboonanza]

i duno thats getting a bit technical for me lol

if they are able to take a strong lead in performance i think they should take the chance
fastest chip = sales right?

but AMD are hard to guess

On a new process making a massive chips straight off might not even be practical, it can take time for the process to improve and the engineers to work around the quirks before large chips have a good enough yield (as far as I understand it anyway).

 

[opethdisciple]

For 2160p max settings and high fps the only serious option is TitanX SLI, there is no AMD counterpart to rival it.

@2160p I am seeing more and more games that breach 8gb this makes the TitanX's very relevant and they will still be when the first round of next gen cards arrives as I don't think any of them will have more than 8gb of VRAM.

As to milking both AMD and NVidia will milk their customers with the next gen by holding back the bigger cards till later.

While we are on the subject of milking how many of AMDs SKUs in the next round of cards will be rebrands ?

I agree with both flopper and your self.

It's not about milking. It's about buying the right card for the job. (and your own expectations)

 

[flopper]

Biggest issue is AMD drivers, if only they could get quality ones out faster.

I want Big Polaris to arrive soon, and be amazingly good.

Have no issues with drivers normally and havent had for a couple of years. I use single card. Met a guy who crashed all the time in the game I play with a 970 Nvidia card and he wasnt happy.

On a new process making a massive chips straight off might not even be practical, it can take time for the process to improve and the engineers to work around the quirks before large chips have a good enough yield (as far as I understand it anyway).

Its risky to do a big die on a new process node.
just ask nvidia.

What I can conclude is, AMD has chips up and running with finished early drivers and Polaris shines bightly...

Nvidia has not and Pascal is late.....

That is the risk with any node depending on the design of the card, etc...and AMD has been really good with new nodes.

 

[flopper]

I agree with both flopper and your self.

It's not about milking. It's about buying the right card for the job. (and your own expectations)

The main issue is the same, a company needs some profit to invest in research.
True they also need some for the shareholders.
Intel for example are milking it the big way, each new cpu add a few procents and no real progress is made for the last 3 generations.

Next issue is this, you be hard pressed to notice any difference when you game between a few fps, so a benchmark is a bad way to say, my card is better and faster when you game.

What AMD did in their demo was to show stable 60fps and while the new Polaris use 70w less than a 750 we can understand that old node and design use 70w more than next generation cards but still you had 60fps.
If they had shown 120fps on a new node and 60fps on old node then I be amazed.

However thats not how it works with games and fps as many who upgraded from a decent card to a new card finds out their new card is better but they complain that it isnt massively better as they are hardpressed to notice the difference.

If I bought a card this generation I buy the Nano due to the small size and power envelope of the card. Recent price cuts makes it a excellent deal.
However with 6 months or so with the next generation cards with a whole new design and power well then for me I would wait for them.

To argue about a few fps that dont make any difference whatsoever in your gaming is beyond me. I however did notice massive difference with Mantle in BF4 with latency and main reason for dx12 is going to be good. Running the game with a 290 and 100+fps in 5040x1050 eyefinity was a blast.

 

[N19h7m4r3]

Have no issues with drivers normally and havent had for a couple of years. I use single card. Met a guy who crashed all the time in the game I play with a 970 Nvidia card and he wasnt happy.

Issue there is it's been a long time since a single card could push the numbers and settings I want

Maybe big Polaris will be that card, but they haven't shown anything indicating that. Just that demo of Polaris using less power to push 60fps than the equivalent NV card.

It's cool and all, but showing it doing much better at about the same power usage would have been better.