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fatslob-:O on 10 August 2017
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Pemalite said:

Ageia Physics is covered under patent #20050075849.

https://www.google.com/patents/US7895411

I thought we we're talking about software patents ?

Pemalite said:

It's the low-end GPU's with DDR3 memory or GDDR5 memory on a 64-bit bus that are the most desperate for bandwidth, they can even struggle with 720P gaming.

Playing around with a Radeon R7 240... Increasing the DDR3 Ram from 800Mhz to 1Ghz (25%) was a sizable increase in performance, it was the difference between Overwatch being unplayable... And Overwatch being playable.
That is the kind of gains Delta Colour Compression can bring. Not something to be shoved aside.

Rebadges suck.

The lowest end discrete AMD GPU (Radeon 520) offers 48 GB/s of bandwidth. That gives you a peak 13.75 Flops/Byte ratio which is very comparable to PS4's 10.45 Flops/Byte ratio. The X1 on the other hand has a 19.26 Flops/Byte ratio while the X1X will sport a 18.40 Flops/Byte ratio so I do not believe for one second that low end GPUs desparately need this DCC feature when low end GPUs have a relatively healthy Flops/Byte ratio in comparison to the consoles of which I'd argue that PS4 had a slightly overengineerd memory system ... 

The RX Vega 64 liquid cooled will have a whopping 28.38 Flops/Byte ratio ... (It's pretty clear who needs this DCC feature and who doesn't and I bet AMD could've turned off DCC for Polaris 12 chips without ANY decrease in game performance.) 

Growth in ALU has outstripped BW and it affects the high end the most since they'll arguably be the first one's to experience the distortion in bottlenecks and HBM isn't going save them either ... 

Pemalite said:


I am referring to colour depth.  The amount of distinct colours that can be portrayed on screen.


HDR or High-Dynamic Range is a technology meant to capture details in the darkest and lightest parts of an image simultaneously.

You can have 10-bit colour and no HDR, you can have HDR and only 8-bit colour.
HDR10 is in reference to HDR AND 10-bit colour.

And nor am I talking about the GPU's actual output anyway. I was referring to the video engine specifically, which doesn't support the necessary credentials for HEVC, Main 10, Rec 2020 etc'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rec._2020

That's exactly what HDR10 aims to provide, more colour depth. With HDR10 the colour bit depth per channel increases from 8-bits to 10-bits (1024 colours in total) which consequently increases the colour space, contrast and peak luminance ... (You need not worry about whether or not GPUs can support a higher colour depth since practically any GPUs that support D3D FL 10_0 feature set can output 16-bits per channel for render targets. As for video engines that may be true but that only matters when we're doing playback of compressed video formats and by then AMD will have a permanent solution in place with Vega 12 and Raven Ridge giving 10-bit HEVC for their full stack long before the consumption of HDR10 content and displays will take off.) 

Pemalite said:


That is a messy way of doing things. It's much cleaner having such controls in a single unified place rather than spotty support between games.


Virtual Super Resolution is also done differently on AMD and nVidia's hardware.

nVidia for example implemented it as a shader program with a gaussion blurr filter on top for good measure.

AMD's implementation is superior. They have implemented it directly in hardware on the display controllers, resulting in no performance penalty.
The downside to AMD's approach however is hardware support. If the hardware doesn't support it, then you aren't getting it.

Actually I'd prefer it if the feature was supported in the app layer rather than the driver layer for reasons such as compatibility and content handling plus driver interfering with app logic such as VSR defeats the spirit of explicit APIs such as DX12 and Vulkan in the process ... (specialization is the way to go for high end) 

I'd doubt AMD would waste silicon for a feature that could be done easily in software and is just another form of dynamic resolution technology. Face it, there's absolutely no good reason why VSR couldn't be supported on original GCN architecture. AMD's just being negligent since they don't think it's worth adding support for 5 families of chips of which the strongest one (Tahiti) was falling behind in newer games ...

Pemalite said:


The RX 550 is a shit HTPC card.


It has no low-profile, single slot variants in wide availability here. Let alone passively cooled ones.

The HTPC crowd does tend to be attracted to a very specific set of GPU's you know.

If that specific set happens to be obsessing over the 'smallest possible' form factor then they might as well forgo buying discrete GPUs altogether and just straight up buy Kaby Lake based NUCs instead or whatever AMD will be rolling out with Raven Ridge since customers will get the most amount of features for a given space in these systems ... (the only good thing that the GT 1030 offers is a low cost solution for old system users who don't want to buy a new system altogether but there's nothing that's stopping single slot RX 550's from being any less valid solutions even if they have a fan)

HTPC crowd only cares about the features and the form factor, not the cooling solution ... 

Pemalite said:


I have already gone into great depth of the extensive negative impacts FP16 has on image quality and the advantages it brings with it in regards to performance and power consumption before. So I would rather not go over it here again.

Well sure but that doesn't mean that it's automatically implicated like you would insinuate ... 

Pemalite said:


The API is irrellevant.

Mac has always had a sizable amount of developers willing to throw them their support, but the majority of games just don't end up on the platform.

Their market size in AAA gaming does make them irrellevant. That's never going to change. Just like fetch, it's just never going to happen.

Not really, it's very relevant since API can affect game engine design too and I believe the stars are aligning for Apple too ever since they rightfully ditched OpenGL for Metal ... (I think Metal is an incentive to port AAA games to Mac since OpenGL sucks so badly and that's one reason devs didn't want to deal with Mac in the first place when DirectX ended up being better by design.)