Carzy Zarx’s PC Gaming Emporium - Catch Up on All the Latest PC Gaming Related News

[JEMC]

fatslob-:O said:

JEMC said:

You accuse me of overthinking? You, that write a whole post making Microsoft's DX12 look like some kind of AMD propietary tech? Yeah, right...

I mean no ill intention with it and apologize if that was the case ... 

Oh, don't worry about that because I didn't take that in a bad way, I was just surprised of you telling me that I was overthinking only to follow suit by mixing propietary hardware, propietary software and DX 12. My answer was more like "you should look yourself in a mirror before saying that to someone".

No biggie.

fatslob-:O said:

And my point was not about DX12, it's that AMD has proprietary technology whether people like it or not ... (DX12 is just simply an interface to expose that proprietary hardware extension) 

A 40 CU part doesn't change the fundamentals (still has the perf/area issue), it's that AMD needs to follow through with ISV support for current games and games in the near future so that these they can capitalize on those proprietary technology to give AMD the upper advantage ... (Doom is an example of this and I imagine even more so for Wolfenstein 2 with the addition of FP16) 

What's arguably dumb is AMD designing their hardware and never making use of it since that's wasted silicon and different SKUs exist to serve different segments ... (If AMD can't win in benchmarks today what they should do is build games in mind with future hardware features and that way get their new hardware releases to take advantage of current software by then! Nobody wants this 'FineWine' a year later, they want to see it on launch day and I bet most people would here too!) 

Again, DX 12 is MSoft's API, not a propietary software rom AMD. Did they just happen to have better hardware for it? Absolutely, but that doesn't make it their own software.

Also, I'm sure MSoft is pushing devs to move on from DX 11 to DX 12, mostly because of the X1, so there's little else AMD can do there as well. Devs simply seem to not care that much for DX 12.

Pemalite said:

 

JEMC said:

And what AMD needed to do was make 480/Polaris 10 a 40 CU part to give it a proper edge over the 1060 and the 470. They focused so much on the "mainstream" market that all their products overlapped with each other, and launching 4 and 8GB versions was an even dumber move.

Polaris uses oddball counts of functional units. It is clearly a design that was compromised in order to reduce costs and price.

AMD probably needed more than 40 CU's though.
It would have brought the hardware from:
* 2304 Shaders - 144 Texture Mapping Units - 32 Rops.
To
* 2560 Shaders - 160 Texture Mapping Units - 32 Rops.

Or roughly an 11% increase in compute, 11% increase in fillrate.

I think a 48 CU design would have been better. It would have meant:
* 3072 shaders - 192 Texture Mapping Units - 32 Rops would have been more ideal.

Would have meant a good 35% increase in compute and fillrate, which would have made it far more attractive against the Geforce 1060.

The caveat to this is... Everyone would have fapped twice as hard over it's mining potential.

Well, my comment of 40CUs was more in line with the performance of the 480 compared to both Nvidia's 1060 but also their own R9 390 cards.

When the new Polaris cards launched, there were a lot of games that performed better on the older Hawaii/Grenada GPUs, that happened to have 40 CUs. Now, I know that one is a x90 parts and the other is a x80 part, but we all expect newer cards to perform better than the last ones, and move the performance bar one step further. That the new 480 couldn't beat the older 390 parts put the 480 in a bad spot and disappointed a lot of people, specially considering what Nvidia had managed to do with Pascal and that Nvidia's third tier card, the 1060, was faster than it in DX 11 games.

A 40 CU Polaris, while not setting the world on fire, would have been able to avoid all of that, making the 480 clearly faster than the cards it was replacing while on par or faster than the 1060 in DX 11 games and much, much faster than it in DX 12/Vulkan games, putting AMD in a better position in front of us, the consumers.