AMD VEGA confirmed for 2017 H1

[TheRealDeal]

Back in the day if I had been involved in benching GTX 680s and HD7970s and doing the threads it would have been obvious very quickly that the HD7970 was the faster card. This is because using max settings and high resolutions really exposes the 680s weaknesses.

This is the advantage of using max settings. For normal gameplay you turn the settings down to suit the game.

Yea i always thought the 7970 was the more powerful due to spec. I always thought the gtx680 was a very fast mid to high design where as the 7970 was a full on high end design which shows up pretty well these days.

 

[Rroff]

Back in the day if I had been involved in benching GTX 680s and HD7970s and doing the threads it would have been obvious very quickly that the HD7970 was the faster card. This is because using max settings and high resolutions really exposes the 680s weaknesses.

This is the advantage of using max settings. For normal gameplay you turn the settings down to suit the game.

Back in the day neither card gave particularly different performance when you turned things up the mid-range aspects like the memory bus became apparent on the 680 but other areas let the 7970 down like driver bottlenecks that were only sorted much more recently. It wasn't until the GHz edition 7970 and later driver updates that the 680 lost its position.

4K wasn't really a thing back then but if you look at the triple screen setups with ultra settings the 680 was almost always 10-12% faster than the 7970 GHz until around late 2014 drivers except for a couple of games like metro where the tables were turned.

Yea i always thought the 7970 was the more powerful due to spec. I always thought the gtx680 was a very fast mid to high design where as the 7970 was a full on high end design which shows up pretty well these days.

Yeah 680 was basically highly tuned for what it was, in reality a mid range card that has been shown up when things have moved into a broader perspective.

 

[Kaapstad]

Back in the day neither card gave particularly different performance when you turned things up the mid-range aspects like the memory bus became apparent on the 680 but other areas let the 7970 down like driver bottlenecks that were only sorted much more recently. It wasn't until the GHz edition 7970 and later driver updates that the 680 lost its position.

4K wasn't really a thing back then but if you look at the triple screen setups with ultra settings the 680 was almost always 10-12% faster than the 7970 GHz until around late 2014 drivers except for a couple of games like metro where the tables were turned.



Yeah 680 was basically highly tuned for what it was, in reality a mid range card that has been shown up when things have moved into a broader perspective.

The HD7970 was always the go to card for 5780x1080 as the 256bit bus and 2gb of VRAM let the 680 down quite bad in mGPU setups.

Worse still was the lack of PCI-E 3.0 support on X79 with the 6xx series cards even though NVidia brought out a hack to get around it.

I used a pair of GTX 690s from day one (still got them) and even at 1600p it was obvious that they were struggling against the HD7970s and this was before the ghz edition and better drivers.

This old Heaven 3 says it all really.

https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18386056

The Heaven bench is NVidia's home ground and yet the 6xx was getting thrashed from day one by the 7970s.

The bench is all about GPU grunt and really exposes the 6 series.

I remember my brand new GTX 690s in 4 way SLI struggling to get near Lockys 3 way HD7970s, how embarrassing.

It is a good job the maximum resolution used by the OP was 1080p or it would have been even worse for the green team.

 

[h4rm0ny]

That's the problem with reviews, they test something for 5 minutes and get it wrong.

They don't use maximum settings either.

What do you call "maximum settings"? I have this feeling we've talked on this before and you've used massive AA even on high resolutions and other things that don't actually make any meaningful difference to image quality.

 

[Kaapstad]

What do you call "maximum settings"? I have this feeling we've talked on this before and you've used massive AA even on high resolutions and other things that don't actually make any meaningful difference to image quality.

Nothing to talk about.

Maximum means maximum.

 

[Seanspeed]

Nothing to talk about.

Maximum means maximum.

It actually means different things to different people.

I would say that traditional AA methods constitute part of 'max settings'. But if a game has a supersampling option(SSAA) or slider, that doesn't count as it's effectively a change in resolution.

That said, there is merit in using more 'realistic' settings(not using MSAAx8) to judge normal gaming performance when comparing GPU's. Using max settings isn't 'invalid', though.

 

[Gerard]

Nothing to talk about.

Maximum means maximum.

Do you also put up scaling options like in Bf1\Bf4 so its essentially rendering at 8k, seeing as thats also an option, then slap 8xaa onto it?

 

[elmuzzy66.]

All the in game sliders to their highest value I would call maximum settings. Whether its playable or needed I think that's a different subject.

 

[beany_bot]

All the in game sliders to their highest value I would call maximum settings. Whether its playable or needed I think that's a different subject.

It's a difficult one to call though. No one in their right mind would slide AA to 16x MSAA gaming in 4K. Just no point.

I think that max out textures and stuff but things like AA, for 1080p 4x MSAA and 4k 2xMSAA or even less is perfectly understandable.

 

[Gerard]

All the in game sliders to their highest value I would call maximum settings. Whether its playable or needed I think that's a different subject.

The joke about max settings in a lot of games is the difference visually between high and max is negligible, all that seems to happen in a lot of cases is it tanks your fps while you run around searching for something that looks remotely better.

The upcoming gears of war is meant to have an "insane" setting that a 1080 struggles with, whether there's an appreciable difference over high i doubt it very much.

 

[Kaapstad]

All the in game sliders to their highest value I would call maximum settings. Whether its playable or needed I think that's a different subject.

Exactly.

 

[Rroff]

It's a difficult one to call though. No one in their right mind would slide AA to 16x MSAA gaming in 4K. Just no point.

I think that max out textures and stuff but things like AA, for 1080p 4x MSAA and 4k 2xMSAA or even less is perfectly understandable.

You'll also get silly situations where a card is optimised for its intended area potentially at the expense of situations where no one would use it i.e. card A does 10fps with high levels of SSAA while card B does 20fps but using MSAA at the kind of levels envisaged for the cards card A could be running 75fps while card B is only at 65fps or something.

 

[Gerard]

On the subject of games and settings, heres a hands on of gears 4, the graphics options are extensive to say the least.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/...ine-lan-free-matchmaking-dlc-smooth-4k-on-pc/

 

[bru]

Nothing to talk about.

Maximum means maximum.

Quite agree that maximum means maximum and not maximum but a little bit less.

Unfortunately there is still things to talk about, what about GPU control panel options, turning things off of application controlled and putting everything up to the max. It is something I have argued extensively about before, maximum should indeed mean maximum.
The best way to say it is maximum in game settings.

 

[flopper]

Do you also put up scaling options like in Bf1\Bf4 so its essentially rendering at 8k, seeing as thats also an option, then slap 8xaa onto it?

He does.
He need Vega to run it though.

 

[JediFragger]

He does.
He need Vega to run it though.

Let's just hope that AMD don't need the actual Star to power it

 

[LoadsaMoney]

Hinkley Point being built for a reason

 

[mahius]

It's a difficult one to call though. No one in their right mind would slide AA to 16x MSAA gaming in 4K. Just no point.

I think that max out textures and stuff but things like AA, for 1080p 4x MSAA and 4k 2xMSAA or even less is perfectly understandable.

Yeah, I don't regard AA to include in max settings, partially because it's not always necessary or similar (i.e. different games have different types and levels of AA, if the AA box was a choice between different types, which one would be the 'max'?).

I'd certainly not use AA at all in 4k. Considering MSAA is just increasing the resolution, then down-sampling for an AA effect, higher resolutions should have less noticeable jaggies due to pixel density.

 

[David Bisset]

Given the numerous AA methods have differing performance hits and give better results in different scenarios the concept of 'maximum' is silly - do you mean best picture, or most performance penalty? Do extra blurr effects that ruin the picture add or detract? I know Kaap normally means the biggest performance hit unfortunately as he focuses on benching - I'm more interested in games for enjoyment so my desired 'max' differs.

 

[bru]

Don't forget highest DSR, setting with the highest smoothness, highest Transparency AA, most pre-rendered frames etc etc.

Didn't there used to be a setting to have 64x AA in the NVidia control panel?

Does a setting that make things more difficult to render or just gives no visual benefit, even then everyones eyes are different, who is to say someone cannot tell the difference between with 8x AA at DSR of 8x with 100% smoothness rather than 8x AA with DSR at 8X with only 99% smoothness.

That is the problem, where does it end. That is why I think people should state maximum in game settings,, rather than just maximum settings.