AMD Polaris architecture – GCN 4.0

[h4rm0ny]

Haha. Me too

D.P. operates on another level to us. I see him as the green version of DM

One is calmer than the other, though. I think of DP as the Kasparov and DM as the Bobbi Fischer one. The latter has the deeper knowledge, but also sometimes explodes with rage.

 

[eddyr]

So, according to this image there are seven architectural improvements coming to Polaris. As already stated I fancy that the primitive discard accelerator will be a big deal due to the culling of unnecessary tesselation. Anybody have any idea or input into how any of these improvements will benefit the architecture?

Spoiler

http://cdn.videocardz.com/1/2016/01/AMD-Polaris-Architectur[/SPOILER][/QUOTE]

New multimedia cores, display engine and memory subsystem should hopefully bring their power usage down in media playback and multi monitor desktop. They have made improvements over the last few GCN iterations tonga and fiji. [url]https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_1080/24.html[/url]

 

[Lokken86]

If Polaris uses the new command processor this is they should see some nice dx11 increases,hopefully using the shaders to the potential that dx12 is.

What I'm wondering is what cards they are basing the performance to watt increases on. If it is the 390 it would be a massive step forward but I think its more likely to be the 380s.

 

[Mtom]

I think the best feature of the Polaris is the redesigned front end, because most of the AMD cards were front end limited.

 

[GFX-Kid]

One is calmer than the other, though. I think of DP as the Kasparov and DM as the Bobbi Fischer one. The latter has the deeper knowledge, but also sometimes explodes with rage.

Lol. You are probably right

 

[SiDeards73]

So basically "Primitive Discard Accelerator" is AMD's Gameworks Bleach? because its no secret Nvidia loves tessellation as it has a negative impact on AMD hardware and a not so negative impact on their own.

So what has AMD effectively done here? found a way at hardware level to just discount all this unnecessary Tessellation? If thats the case would we see any gains on Polaris Hardware running games that use a lot of Gameworks tessellation etc?

 

[humbug]

So basically "Primitive Discard Accelerator" is AMD's Gameworks Bleach? because its no secret Nvidia loves tessellation as it has a negative impact on AMD hardware and a not so negative impact on their own.

So what has AMD effectively done here? found a way at hardware level to just discount all this unnecessary Tessellation? If thats the case would we see any gains on Polaris Hardware running games that use a lot of Gameworks tessellation etc?

Rendering only the tessellation you can see, culling the rest.

 

[GFX-Kid]

So basically "Primitive Discard Accelerator" is AMD's Gameworks Bleach? because its no secret Nvidia loves tessellation as it has a negative impact on AMD hardware and a not so negative impact on their own.

So what has AMD effectively done here? found a way at hardware level to just discount all this unnecessary Tessellation? If thats the case would we see any gains on Polaris Hardware running games that use a lot of Gameworks tessellation etc?

Not to bothered about that myself, but would be a good thing for the uninformed. AMD have an option where you reduce tessellation.

Like what people did on Witcher 3. You reduce it and get the performance back and see no visual difference. Just nvidia playing dirty, no surprise there

 

[james.miller]

that die shot is GM204....

 

[beany_bot]

Does anyone actually know what the 490 and 490x will compete with? People keep saying polaris will be lower range but going by last year the 490 will compete with the 1070 and the 490x will compete with the 1080.

I saw this on a Rust PC configurator.

http://www.game-debate.com/games/in...adeon+R9+490X+8GB&laptop=0#systemRequirements

Surely is the 490x competes with the 1080 there is no way AMD would charge the silly money that Nvidia have.

 

[erazor51]

AMD Radeon R9 470 and R9 480 are based on Polaris architecture

Everyone (me included) was wondering if AMD is going to market Polaris 10 as R9 490 series. Should AMD decide to use Polaris 10 for 490 series, competitive performance to higher-end cards would be expected. Should AMD use P10 for 480 instead, we would expect good performance per dollar,competitive mid-range solution and R9 390 series replacement.

Well today I can finally tell you that we have confirmed through our independent sources that AMD is launching Radeon 470 series and 480 series in the next few weeks, and that Radeon 480 series are based on Polaris 10.

AMD has been very secret about Polaris GPUs to its partners. Company has only started sharing detailed information just few weeks ago.

AIBs won’t show Radeon R9 480 series at Computex

The lack of concrete information has definitely affected the production of custom Polaris boards. What’s interesting is that AMD has not even allowed its partners to show prototypes at Computex. It means that — at best — we can only expect presentations of new cooling solutions, but nothing that could be called officially named after Radeon 400 series, unless… AMD changes its mind.

 

[Ferrari100]

One thing is sure, AMD are super - secretive with this gen.
I actually wonder if Nvidia know what they are up against. If AIB's have no clue then Nvidia's spies might be struggling to get facts as I am sure thats where many leaks come from.

Its nice to see that AMD's engineers and employees are just getting there heads down, working hard and not hyping anything up (or allowing the media to hype them up).

 

[Steampunk]

So basically "Primitive Discard Accelerator" is AMD's Gameworks Bleach? because its no secret Nvidia loves tessellation as it has a negative impact on AMD hardware and a not so negative impact on their own.

There is a negative impact on Nvidia hardware too. Anything that isn't top end gets thrown under the bus in order to make Nvidia's top products look better against AMD's products.

Ironically, Nvidia owners of mid/low-range products get hurt more, because AMD users can at least set limits to the "let's hurt the competition with over-tesselation" in their drivers, where Nvidia users can't.

 

[SiDeards73]

There is a negative impact on Nvidia hardware too. Anything that isn't top end gets thrown under the bus in order to make Nvidia's top products look better against AMD's products.

Ironically, Nvidia owners of mid/low-range products get hurt more, because AMD users can at least set limits to the "let's hurt the competition with over-tesselation" in their drivers, where Nvidia users can't.

Yeah but Nvidia do that to ironically sell more of their higher end products and just blame the Game developers or blame the ever increasing min spec's on games etc.

Its win win for them lol

 

[AthlonXP1800]

http://videocardz.com/60232/amd-radeon-r9-480-based-on-polaris-10

It confirmed R9 480 series will based on Polaris 10 while either R7 or R9 470 series will based on Polaris 11.

The bad news is there will be no Polaris cards at Computex as AMD told AIB partners it not allowed to show Polaris prototype cards at Computex as AIB still not have any custom Polaris cards build yet.

Not surprised Polaris 10 is still in prototype stage, not the production version so hard launch probably months away. All AMD did is trying to keep you waiting as long as it can get your hands off Nvidia and Intel just like they did with Bulldozer and Streamroller then 1 year long waiting game over and AMD finally decided to tell us there will be no Streamroller FX on AM3 socket.

 

[Ferrari100]

http://videocardz.com/60232/amd-radeon-r9-480-based-on-polaris-10

It confirmed R9 480 series will based on Polaris 10 while either R7 or R9 470 series will based on Polaris 11.

The bad news is there will be no Polaris cards at Computex as AMD told AIB partners it not allowed to show Polaris prototype cards at Computex as AIB still not have any custom Polaris cards build yet.

Not surprised Polaris 10 is still in prototype stage, not the production version so hard launch probably months away. All AMD did is trying to keep you waiting as long as it can get your hands off Nvidia and Intel just like they did with Bulldozer and Streamroller then 1 year long waiting game over and AMD finally decided to tell us there will be no Streamroller FX on AM3 socket.

But this is hearsay until the event and VideoCardz like to stir things up so there is no need to get excited just yet.
Look at the authors (WhyCry) comments to see proof of this - he is offering to show Polaris 10 3D mark scores for a poster to get more than 30 upvotes. That target has now been achieved.

 

[Lokken86]

Lets all hope for a 5870 style trump card.

 

[SiDeards73]

We could see a "Mic Drop" from AMD this year haha, they could potentially shake the entire PC market up with a decent CPU and GPU. I have been really down on them for the past 6 months or more, but i am hoping they come back with a vengeance and deliver some good stuff with Sen and Polaris and Vega.

Just to think, many of us could be running competitive high end PC's next year powered by AMD CPU's and GPU's.

I know people can buy an existing AMD GPU and CPU combo and they are half decent but they always seem to lack in some area or another, this could well change i feel.

 

[Ferrari100]

We could see a "Mic Drop" from AMD this year haha, they could potentially shake the entire PC market up with a decent CPU and GPU. I have been really down on them for the past 6 months or more, but i am hoping they come back with a vengeance and deliver some good stuff with Sen and Polaris and Vega.

Just to think, many of us could be running competitive high end PC's next year powered by AMD CPU's and GPU's.

I know people can buy an existing AMD GPU and CPU combo and they are half decent but they always seem to lack in some area or another, this could well change i feel.

Haha
That would be epic if Lisa Su actually dropped the Mic at the end of a launch she new was would have people gasping.

 

[Rroff]

So, according to this image there are seven architectural improvements coming to Polaris. As already stated I fancy that the primitive discard accelerator will be a big deal due to the culling of unnecessary tesselation. Anybody have any idea or input into how any of these improvements will benefit the architecture?

Changes to the compute engines/command stuff will likely improve how balanced the performance of the card is better able to deal with a mixture of serial and broad workloads with less under-utilisation of the GPU.

Changes to stuff like how geometry primitives are handled are harder to pin down as the realworld benefits could range from zero to quite a lot depending on the implementation and a specific application.

The new for next gen CUs pretty much encompasses that and other smaller tweaks and L2 cache improvements would have some minor benefits for overall throughput in a number of areas including compute work - all in all broadly speaking that stuff in total will likely result in somewhere in the region of around 15% improvement in actual ingame performance like for like over current GCN cards but might see some bigger jumps in some scenarios (that isn't to say it is the expected performance jump in its entirety as its likely there will be a fair jump in clockspeeds, etc. as well).

While in isolation the changes to how geometry is handled might result in a huge boost in performance in that sub-system that work only makes up a percentage of the overall workload when rendering a game so won't directly translate into similarly huge boosts in the resulting FPS.

Multimedia/display engine stuff will be things like 4K decoding and HDR type stuff pretty much an expected incremental step forward with regard to those kind of features obviously with the memory controller that is in relation to GDDR5X or HBM(2), etc.