disolitude said:
It looks like he is hitting both the VRAM limit and the PCIe 2.0 limit....if you look at the video at around 5:10 mark he talks about the PCIe 2.0 limit... then if you look at his second vide, where he switches to PCIe 3.0, you can see the quad SLI really fly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkZzssm-kWs
As far as steamroller, you may be right. I was reading the specs on the FM2+ boards Asus just announced and maybe AMD will be utilizing only APUs moving forward on the consumer market. But if they do release FX based Steamrollers, I dont see them changing the socket. Everyone knows whatto expect from Steamroller and I dont think they can warrant a brand new platform, unless they can provide a brand new architecture that Excavator can ustilize as well.
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As I said, because he is hitting the video memory limit, the video card has to resort to hitting the PCI-E bus to get information from system memory.
If he had a GPU with more memory, the PCI-E bus wouldn't be an issue, I've seen it in the past running things like a Radeon 2400pro on the PCI bus (Not PCI-E).
Where if a game heavily streams information from system memory to the GPU, performance tanks, yet if a game can load up all the information it needs into the GPU's memory, the performance impact is minimal.
For example, on the PCI 2400pro if you run Oblivion, every time you enter a new Cell the game engine loads the GPU up with assets, this wouldn't have been a problem with AGP or PCI-E as they are fast enough to keep up with a Radeon 2400, but on the PCI bus, you have to wait for all the games assets to be loaded into memory before continuing on playing.
Then if you jump onto another game like Unreal Tournament 3 or Bioshock, it's perfectly fine as it can fit everthing it needs to in the GPU's memory.
However, this is an extreme case, the PCI bus is only 133MB/s, but it goes to show even in the most extreme cases, it's not going to make gaming impossible.
As for Steamroller, it will come, just not sure on the sockets.
AMD builds server processors, which are incredibly high-margin pieces of silicon, the chips that don't make the cut need to go somewhere and the high-end Desktop is the place to send it to.
Whether it will require a new socket depends on whether AMD will be following Intel and integrating the voltage systems into the processor die or integrating a GPU. (Which would be a boon for servers that can use GPU compute!) both/either of which would require a new socket.
It's all in AMD's court at this stage.
