Root Access

2:02 PM

tomshardware.com/news/…

0_0

they should sell it with one of these amazon.com/BOSS-FARAD-Digital-Capacitor-Wiring/dp/B00YQJESAO/… caps, go big or go home :-)

Jet

2:17 PM

16GB double R390? that's crazy. two questions:
1)And people buy it?
2)Why do people buy it?

allquixotic

@JourneymanGeek why not dual Fury X?

Journeyman Geek

Beats me ;p

Probably cause those things arn't HBM and they can load it up with ludicious amounts of memory

allquixotic

true

that thing is almost identical to the R9 295X2 though

the R9 295X2 is two "Hawaii XT" chips with 8 GB of GDDR5

the Devil 13 Dual Core is two "Hawaii PRO" chips with 16 GB of GDDR5

double the framebuffer, but they're actually using a slower ASIC (slightly - though the same transistors, so it's been binned as a lower quality chip) than the 295X2

I'm not impressed, and I expect its performance to basically equal the 295X2, except on specific memory-intensive benchmarks

Jet

Seriously, what's the point of having R390x2 ?

Psycogeek

My biggest question about 2X cards, is if they will utalise the same xfire or sli things to get them to work together? because most times i would rather have one great card, and zero problems, and just start actually playing the games .

Journeyman Geek

2:26 PM

bragging rights? ;p

internal crossfire I think

allquixotic

@JourneymanGeek it's not CrossFire.

Jet

@JourneymanGeek that's probably the only reason

allquixotic

it doesn't even use any of the same code paths.

Journeyman Geek

ahh

My bad

(I don't think team green makes an equivilent)

allquixotic

with two cards, you have two render clocks, two framebuffers, two render "targets", that have to be synchronized by the CPU

with two GPUs on one card, you have one render clock, one unified framebuffer, one render target, and the GPUs do workload scheduling between them

effectively, for every game that's buggy as all fuck on Crossfire or SLI, it won't have any such bugs for a dual-GPU card

Jet

2:31 PM

+some SLI or CrossFire issues which don't let you play

allquixotic

but, in order to take advantage of dual GPU, your game needs to have multiple render threads. that's pretty much a given these days though

new Thread() { render(); } is a lot easier (and more universally done in all games without bugs) than frame sync

multi-threaded render also helps out with managing CPU overhead across multiple cores, so you don't get CPU bottlenecked in your renderer

so it's beneficial even for a single GPU

Jet

@allquixotic gamer or game-programmer?

Journeyman Geek

yes

allquixotic

@Jet both

dual 980 Ti would be awesome

Journeyman Geek

lol

and huge

Jet

2:36 PM

heh dual dual 980

Journeyman Geek

well not insanely so

Jet

~

Journeyman Geek

@Jet: a 980ti is pretty much the sweetspot for texture ram -> power -> cost.

Jet

I think 970 is good enough for playing all new games

Journeyman Geek

Well, the 970 is a good sensible card

the 980 turns it up to 10.

The 980ti turns it up to 11. Anything above that .... ;p

allquixotic

2:38 PM

@Jet if your requirement is to play all the latest games, you could settle with a Radeon HD7850 or something like that. If your intent is to play them at high/ultra detail and/or at 4K resolution, and at a framerate near 60fps, you need much more.

Jet

buying 970 and buying a new card after 2 years is more efficient than buying 980

allquixotic

@Jet not true -- I've had my HD7970 for 3 years and it's still a good card.

Journeyman Geek

@allquixotic: tho, the bottleneck there isn't texture ram I suspect. its processor power

allquixotic

@JourneymanGeek depends on how dynamic the content is. if it's a demoscene, you can throw everything in VRAM at load time and use next to no CPU for render.

if stuff is popping into existence and being downloaded over the network at runtime like in second life, you're in for a world of hurt.

Jet

@allquixotic it's because new R9 series was a partial copy of 79xx series :)
Anyway, if its still good after 3 years, that's only better

Journeyman Geek

2:40 PM

;p

@Jet: the interesting thing that's going on is that AMD's working a lot better on DX 12 than earlier versions

allquixotic

@Jet well the R9 280X IS the same chip as the HD7970. The R9 290X is a new ASIC, it's GCN 1.1. And the R9 Fury etc. are GCN 1.2.

Journeyman Geek

and that cut down the performance gap hugely

allquixotic

@JourneymanGeek of course it is; DX12 is an API heavily influenced by Vulkan and Mantle and AMD's input... a much lower level graphics API that cuts out the enormous cruft of the Catalyst driver that was required for support the DX11/10/9 legacy with all of its nasty state tracking and such

Jet

But I think there will be new GTX 1K or another gen soon.
(men, where's the ddr4-based GDDRn graphics? )

Journeyman Geek

(and as I mentioned, now's probably a terrible time to upgrade but meh ;p)

allquixotic

2:43 PM

Catalyst on OpenGL 4.1+, Mantle, DX12 and (presumably) Vulkan is great because it just shoves whatever data you give it to the GPU, with very little processing (except as necessary to prevent GPU hangs)... Catalyst on DX9-10-11 has so much state tracking as to be unwieldy

@Jet you won't be seeing "DDR4-based" VRAM. you'll be seeing HBM. stacked memory.

@JourneymanGeek but yeah, Nvidia's Pascal will have HBM, and probably 8 GB dies of it unlike HBM1 from AMD, so the next Titan card is going to be absolutely frightening

but that's late 2016 at the earliest

it's also going to be a 14nm fab size

Journeyman Geek

@allquixotic: or the XX80TI ;p

I was also thinking of how we're in a bit of a transition ramwise

allquixotic

@JourneymanGeek true, but I think the 980 Ti is a bit of an aberration in its proximity to the Titan X's performance -- in the future they will probably have a larger gap between the Titan and the Ti for sales reasons

Journeyman Geek

Yeah

allquixotic

yeah, currently we're in the very last generation of a VERY VERY VERY old node (28nm) and the last generation of a VERY VERY VERY old VRAM process (GDDR5)

Journeyman Geek

oh, and the supposed ability to mix and match cards

allquixotic

2:45 PM

they're scraping the bottom of the barrel for performance right now

also, won't PCIe 4.0 be out by then?

Journeyman Geek

I'm guessing PCIe 4.0, DDR4 being mainstream etc etc

Jet

@allquixotic I think HBM based graphics will come after 3-4 years, because it's still not polished
But DDR4 is ready already, and year passed after DDR4, so probably there will be e.g. GDDR6 on DDR4 then e.g. GDDR7 on HBM

Journeyman Geek

(and my core i7 is holding up awesome after 2 years)

allquixotic

I imagine the next upgrade (Cannonlake motherboards, or Broadwell-E/Skylake-E) will have PCIe 4.0, and the GPUs will have 8 GB or more of HBM on a 14nm process... couple that with the next architecture and holy mackerel

Journeyman Geek

On the bright side

allquixotic

2:47 PM

@Jet HBM is here -- AMD's current flagship has it, and their next flagship will have HBM2. Nvidia's next flagship will have HBM.

Journeyman Geek

Unless I switch jobs, I'm unlikely to need a proper laptop

(which saves money for desktop hardware in future ;p)

allquixotic

I need to stop spending so much, so I can save up for a biiiig purchase and get a really high-end rig once all the pending stuff is released

Journeyman Geek

lol

I need to stop spending till december ;p

and my next phone might be 2 months of spending money

Jet

recomendation: once all the pending stuff is related + 6 month ) for not getting faulty soft/hard

Journeyman Geek

lol

Basically I started getting paid a LOT more than I was

so I'm replacing the things I made huge compromises on in my original build

(1600x900 -> 4K (and I stole a 1080p from the underloved shared pc for a second screen)

better video card

etc etc

and well

they were pretty good purchases IMO.

(but most regulars know that ;p)

Jet

2:55 PM

What if I practically don't see pixels of a 20' 1600x900, because they are too small?
What gives you 4K?) Does it really change the game? or just... bragging rights?)

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