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Paper launches, I guess AMD needs something to get the taste of bulldozer out of their mouths?
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Dec 22, 2011 15:37
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Well, definitely doesn't look like a worthwhile upgrade from my GTX 580. The 580 still works great in a lot of situations, so I guess I'll be waiting and watching for whatever the next new thing is to see if that's any better.
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Dec 22, 2011 16:20
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So basically AMD gets a full node process shrink and over a year to make a card that's <25% faster than the GTX 580, which itself was just a re-spin of the GF100/GTX 480. And the 7970 is priced higher. Maybe I'm just spoiled by the previous generation of GPUs from AMD (or Intel's ability to get 25-300% performance increases between CPU generations on the same process), but it's hard not to feel a little disappointed. Maybe I'm being unreasonable because there's very good business reasons to do what AMD did (they're probably supply constrained, so why not price their product at the upper end of what the market will carry?) but I was hoping for either a larger gap in performance or a price more in line with the price:performance ratio I'd gotten used to with their 69xx series of cards. The good news, though, is that Southern Islands and GCN are solid and certainly not a Bulldozer sized failure, and that's what matters most. Here's to hoping that Kepler is a hit and can bring down the price of the 28nm GPUs to more appealing levels because my 4890 is getting a bit long in its loud, power hungry tooth.
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Dec 22, 2011 16:23
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Yeah, this is the part where everyone gets bummed out except for dudes who have been hanging on grimly with a 280 or a 4870x2 and now get to leap ahead by an even larger performance margin. And I get to rock back and forth, hoping that Kepler brings dramatic performance improvements, maybe unsegments CUDA a teensy bit more (HAHAHA), and justifies an upgrade over the 580. 'Cause it's that or two 580s and jesus I'll need a 1000W supply for that nonsense 
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Dec 22, 2011 17:03
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They seem to be good overclockers, though. I'm guessing that AMD's saving a release with higher clocks for the Kepler release since they don't need to beat Nvidia by that much to at the moment to have performance crown; for people who care about that stuff.
L-O-N fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Dec 22, 2011 |
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Dec 22, 2011 19:15
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L-O-N posted:They seem to be good overclockers, though. I'm guessing that AMD's saving a release with higher clocks for the Kepler release since they don't need to beat Nvidia by that much to at the moment to have performance crown; for people who care about that stuff. ~25% is, really, pretty damned good. That's a hefty jump in performance. But... nVidia's had a long time to work on their new architecture too, and now they know what ATI's got. And both companies have the advantage of having had plenty of time to get to know DX11, since that's been the performance killer for a lot of games despite the fact that theoretically it should be more, not less efficient. DX9 is still used in a lot of "holy poo poo this looks good" AAA titles, and not just because they're cross-platform, it's only recently that devs are making substantial use of DX11. I'm more impressed with a mod that implements really good parallax occlusion mapping in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. SoC in its SM3.0 DX9 rendering path than I have been with most DX11 tessellation implementations so far. Now hopefully we'll see some more cool DX11 stuff really happen in games.
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Dec 22, 2011 19:41
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Beelzebubba9 posted:So basically AMD gets a full node process shrink and over a year to make a card that's <25% faster than the GTX 580, which itself was just a re-spin of the GF100/GTX 480. And the 7970 is priced higher. Maybe I'm just spoiled by the previous generation of GPUs from AMD (or Intel's ability to get 25-300% performance increases between CPU generations on the same process), but it's hard not to feel a little disappointed. The 580 is about 15-25% faster than a 6970, and plenty of people purchased the 580 instead of the 6970, at a very large premium in price. Those same KIND of people who are the market for a high end video card right now would certainly be willing to pay $50 more for a 7970 for 15-30% more performance than a 580 today. I'm not one of those people, but I never expect the 'top end' videocard to be one that I will be interested in buying. I also expect that over the next few months there will be improvements in the driver to increase that margin slightly. I'm pretty sure when the 560ti launched compared to the 6950 1GB, the 6950 was the same or marginally slower, and now its the same or marginally faster. GCN being a new graphics arch, I think we'll see similar modest gains just from the driver. Will be interesting to see what nvidia is able to do, a few months from now. I wouldn't be surprised if nvidia's midrange is almost as fast as the 79xx series at launch. We'll have to see if nvidia has figured out how to do a new process without falling on its face. If we compare the 5870 to the 7970, the 7970 looks like a very nice healthy jump, and considering that the 6970 was only born out of a TSMC node cancelation, the 7970 is probably what we could have expected if the node hadn't be canceled. In that respect the 7970 is pretty respectable. the 7990 will probably be able to be almost as fast as 7970CF, without going over the PCI-E spec. Unless nvidia has more performance per watt, I think AMD will still have the better SINGLE UBER CARD. When you are power constrained, it pays to be the best perf/watt.
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Dec 22, 2011 19:42
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Ok, this is pretty impressive. An overclocked 7970 can match or even beat the 590 at times. Needs more tests though. http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1805/15/
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Dec 22, 2011 19:43
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L-O-N posted:Ok, this is pretty impressive. An overclocked 7970 can match or even beat the 590 at times. Needs more tests though. That isn't especially telling, though. With my 580, I can turn in some pretty loving impressive numbers with an unsafe overclock using an unlocked BIOS and a card "pushed to the edge of stability" too. Reasonable overclocks are way more interesting (and the GTX 590 is seriously a turd of a card, holy crap is it bad, look at it fail to do better than 560 Ti in SLI).
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Dec 22, 2011 19:49
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Agreed posted:That isn't especially telling, though. With my 580, I can turn in some pretty loving impressive numbers with an unsafe overclock using an unlocked BIOS and a card "pushed to the edge of stability" too. Reasonable overclocks are way more interesting (and the GTX 590 is seriously a turd of a card, holy crap is it bad, look at it fail to do better than 560 Ti in SLI). If you look at the previous page, this was at stock voltage.
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Dec 22, 2011 19:51
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Yup. This is seriously, seriously impressive.Legit Reviews posted:With the new BIOS installed we were able to reach 1165MHz on the core and 1625MHz on the memory with full stability. If we went up to 1170MHz on the core we would see artifacts in the benchmark, so without increasing the core voltage this is the best that we are able to get today. Remember, the Radeon HD 7970 started out with a 925MHz core clock, so this is an increase of 240MHz or 26%. Seems like it scales like crazy. Seems like going straight for a 79xx nomenclature is almost jumping the gun. Seems like they have headroom to play with on one GPU. Now if only the ATI guys could teach the AMD guys a thing about chip design; the irony being that every available AMD CPU, no matter how overclocked, is going to bottleneck the ever-loving poo poo out of this card. HalloKitty fucked around with this message at 20:19 on Dec 22, 2011 |
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Dec 22, 2011 20:11
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Keep in mind that reviewers typically get cherry-picked samples that are known to perform well. it's still a very impressive overclocking result though. It'll be interesting to see if partners go crazy with it and ship $650 factory overclocked versions if the architecture really has that much headroom. Star War Sex Parrot fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Dec 22, 2011 |
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Dec 22, 2011 20:16
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tijag posted:The 580 is about 15-25% faster than a 6970, and plenty of people purchased the 580 instead of the 6970, at a very large premium in price. Those same KIND of people who are the market for a high end video card right now would certainly be willing to pay $50 more for a 7970 for 15-30% more performance than a 580 today. There's always a market for high end hardware, and I'm sure AMD will have no problem selling all the eighty seven Radeon 7970s they'll make between now and January 9th (kidding!). Tahiti XT is a good GPU, especially considering it's idle power draw, I just had higher expectations for its performance relative to the more-than-a-year-old, 40nm, respin of the GF100. If <25% is the best AMD can do relative to Fermi at the same process node in a high end card, I suspect Kepler will have no problem capturing the top of the performance charts. Maybe AMD will launch a higher clocked 7970 XT with awesome performance and we can party like it's the 4890's time to shine all over again, but who knows. It's all just conjecture for fun anyway. Regardless, the first 28nm GPU is a solid product and I can't wait to see what kind of mid range cards we'll have come March.
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Dec 22, 2011 23:17
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Star War Sex Parrot posted:It'll be interesting to see if partners go crazy with it and ship $650 factory overclocked versions if the architecture really has that much headroom. Yeah, this is my thought. It's going to be worth waiting a little while to see the cards with massive coolers and beefy overclocks from the factory that will basically push it into a much higher performance class.
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Dec 22, 2011 23:19
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Star War Sex Parrot posted:Keep in mind that reviewers typically get cherry-picked samples that are known to perform well. This is my take on it as well. Given how much of a crapshoot TSMC is in the first place with EVERYBODY's new stuff, I wouldn't be surprised at all if that's a... limited percentile result. But it does seem to bode well for the card, 'cause plenty of people will be happy to overvolt them to just bash through limitations in order to start upping the clocks, and if upping the clocks gives performance scaling that impressive, well - that's going to turn out really well. Show me 25% better than my current card and I'm impressed, but not shocked; show me 40% better and you might end up with me getting my wallet out. 
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Dec 22, 2011 23:46
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rscott posted:Paper launches, I guess AMD needs something to get the taste of bulldozer out of their mouths? You don't do paper launches if you know your product sucks...Although I not all that impressed by a new card that is slightly faster and with a slightly reduced power draw compared to a 580, plus these things are overkill for 99% of us. freeforumuser fucked around with this message at 06:02 on Dec 23, 2011 |
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Dec 23, 2011 05:59
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"It's out", shelves empty = Paper launch "Here's our new product, it'll be in stores in a month, reviews are out now", stores get it in a month = Paper launch "We'll have it on the shelves on the ninth", shelves have it on the ninth = Paper launch 
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Dec 23, 2011 06:44
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freeforumuser posted:plus these things are overkill for 99% of us.
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Dec 23, 2011 06:46
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freeforumuser posted:You don't do paper launches if you know your product sucks...Although I not all that impressed by a new card that is slightly faster and with a slightly reduced power draw compared to a 580, plus these things are overkill for 99% of us. I agree about the speed, but 20-30% lower power consumption on load and 63% lower power consumption on idle compared to a 580 is nothing to sneeze at. http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_7970/26.html
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Dec 23, 2011 06:58
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ZeroCore is seriously awesome. Almost no power consumption when the screen is blanked, and the fan goes off. Anyone who leaves their machine on to do torrenting or anything like that will massively benefit from this.
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Dec 23, 2011 12:14
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Looks like my crossfire 5870s will still be okay for a little while longer.
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Dec 23, 2011 13:49
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Any idea when nVidia is likely going to respond this? They had big trouble with 28nm, didn't they?
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Dec 23, 2011 19:04
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Fruit Smoothies posted:Any idea when nVidia is likely going to respond this? They had big trouble with 28nm, didn't they? Contracting with TSMC for continually next-level fabbing seems to go like this: 1. Engineers design product. Cool! 2. TSMC creates nonworking disaster, company freaks out because holy loving poo poo the market will move without us, we're doomed 3. Spindowns until something works, because when life hands you lemons... 4. Release product eventually with fewer features than originally designed, or in small quantities because process issues are just that bad. I don't think it's that nVidia or ATI are bad at what they do, it's more that working with the fab is pretty much a crapshoot.
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Dec 23, 2011 19:13
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Both AMD and nVidia were working with the same troubled TSMC 40nm process. AMD responded by modifying their GPU design to get better yields, nVidia responded with press release ultimatums telling TSMC to have better yields. It's easy to blame TSMC for overpromising, but there are always going to be problems with process transitions and the designers need to take that into account and not just take TSMC at their word.
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Dec 23, 2011 20:12
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I dunno, when the best you can say is "TSMC is just going to gently caress it up a little, try to engineer your whole trajectory around that fact" I think we're pretty far past "... with faint praise" and into just damning. I do agree, nobody has a monopoly on process fuckups, and we'll get to meet exciting new ones with future lithography I'm sure, but with a track record like TSMC has it's expected for them to get at least a little poo poo. Overpromising is the nicest way you can say it, really. Underdelivering is another, less nice way.
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Dec 23, 2011 22:07
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Wedesdo posted:Looks like my crossfire 5870s will still be okay for a little while longer. Yep, I think I can hold out another generation with CF 5850s. What an incredible, venerable design. I can't remember the last time 2.5 year old graphics cards were still capable of running the latest games.
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Dec 23, 2011 23:03
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Wedesdo posted:Looks like my crossfire 5870s will still be okay for a little while longer. I too have crossfire 5870s. The only thing that seems worthwhile for upgrading from them to the 7970 is the additional video memory. To gain significant performance as well, it seems like I'd need to crossfire the 7970s, but then we're getting in over a thousand dollars of video cards.
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Dec 23, 2011 23:18
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Nostrum posted:Yep, I think I can hold out another generation with CF 5850s. What an incredible, venerable design. I can't remember the last time 2.5 year old graphics cards were still capable of running the latest games. DX11 performance is pretty crap with them, isn't it? But apart from that, and some edge case AF flaws, fundamentally really good, efficient design + not a lot of games REALLY pushing the envelope means yeah, you can hang in there for quite some time unless you want to turn shiny stuff up. (I spend more time than I'm comfortable admitting loving with shader settings and overclock settings and all that ancillary crap to try to squeeze the most out of my boondoggle of a card, the GTX 580 - pretty alright prosumer CUDA GPGPU acceleration, but overpriced big time for games). If ATI's top end beats the 580 by about 25% while drawing power like a 6970, nVidia's next-gen can hopefully beat it by 35-40% with less power efficiency (they're trying, bless them, but I will be surprised if they can manage 7900 power budget), and the ensuing price war ought to bring the 7900s down. If nVidia just says gently caress it, how's $650 for launch? then I'm going to tell 'em gently caress it right back, but they've got a lot of stuff to worry about. CUDA and the success of their workstation cards has some consequences to their general lineup, artificial market segmentation preventing the same processors from running higher precision GPGPU, reserving more advanced memory configurations for Quadro/Tesla (and I don't mean ECC, even entry-level Quadro cards have 3GB despite having about half the SMs and CUDA cores of a 580 - and they perform about twice as well for CUDA as a 570, iirc). Complicated stuff but in any case it's certain I'll be picking up a card in the next generation, just depends on what kind of activity we see competitively.
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Dec 23, 2011 23:35
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One upside to going back to a single card from Crossfire, aside from much lower power usage, is that you no longer have to live with the micro-stutter caused by multi-GPU configs that makes motion seem less fluid than the measured framerate would imply. I also wouldn't be TOO excited about how well the 5000-series has held up, AMD basically had to skip a generation with the 6000-series since they didn't get the die-shrink they'd been planning, and games haven't really evolved much due to the fact that consoles are still stuck on DX9 hardware. The Radeon 2900 introduced DX10 in 2007, but it's only been recently that games treated it as integral, not just an afterthought like DX11 currently is.
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Dec 23, 2011 23:39
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Nostrum posted:Yep, I think I can hold out another generation with CF 5850s. What an incredible, venerable design. I can't remember the last time 2.5 year old graphics cards were still capable of running the latest games. That's what I've got too: only games I have problem with are ones where Crossfire is broken (SR3 lately). With my two year old Phenom II I think I'd be CPU limited on a newer card anyway, but it's nice to know that when I get a core system upgrade again the GPU selection is marching along.
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Dec 24, 2011 00:04
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Yeah, the unfortunate reality of Crossfire gaming is that AMD's driver and profile release schedule is loving abysmal. I guess it's gotten better, but from what I've read they don't even have half the resources that nVidia does dedicated to making sure upcoming releases run well on their hardware and keeping up with SLI/Crossfire profiles.
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Dec 24, 2011 02:43
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Eh they release a WHQL driver every month and profiles several times per month, that's more often than nVidia. It's true that nVidia tends to have better driver support when a game launches, but AMD has gotten better about releasing profiles for upcoming games before they come out. There will unfortunately probably always be cases like Skyrim where the game developer refuses to let AMD see the game prior to launch, thus they can't prepare for it.
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Dec 24, 2011 03:08
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Agreed posted:CUDA and the success of their workstation cards has some consequences to their general lineup, artificial market segmentation preventing the same processors from running higher precision GPGPU, reserving more advanced memory configurations for Quadro/Tesla (and I don't mean ECC, even entry-level Quadro cards have 3GB despite having about half the SMs and CUDA cores of a 580 - and they perform about twice as well for CUDA as a 570, iirc). It depends on the CUDA application, I know with DaVinci Resolve, people are getting better results out of GTX 470s and 480s than they do out of Quadro 4000 and 4800s especially doing noise reduction, though that is admittedly an edge case.
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Dec 24, 2011 04:14
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Gunjin posted:It depends on the CUDA application, I know with DaVinci Resolve, people are getting better results out of GTX 470s and 480s than they do out of Quadro 4000 and 4800s especially doing noise reduction, though that is admittedly an edge case. Yeah, Adobe sees better results with a GTX 570 than it does with a Quadro 4000 for most things too, by a bit. Market segmentation sucks for the end user, but even within the Quadro line there are CUDA capability differences that don't make sense from a technical perspective relative to the price. Most open source projects use ATI hardware rather than nVidia hardware (and not just because it's cheaper, because a soon-to-be-two-generations-old card can put in substantially better calculation than highest end nVidia stuff or Tesla-based clusters even, when scaled), but most professional products go the CUDA route. I have plenty of hopes for OpenCL, but nVidia has a lot of money to throw at GPGPU and they got there first with approaching the market cash in hand. Big advantage.
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Dec 24, 2011 04:44
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What's the best program out there these days for adjusting flip queue size and other "advanced settings"? Also (and not to be antagonistic, but genuinely curious if anyone knows) why doesn't AMD put the option in their drivers like nvidia does?
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Dec 27, 2011 15:47
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Killer robot posted:That's what I've got too: only games I have problem with are ones where Crossfire is broken (SR3 lately). With my two year old Phenom II I think I'd be CPU limited on a newer card anyway, but it's nice to know that when I get a core system upgrade again the GPU selection is marching along. My single 5850 has ~50% of the speed of a 7970 but only 25% the cost when I bought it ($140). If history repeats itself and the midrange part is ~2/3 of 7970 for $200-250, it won't even be worth a glance.
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Dec 27, 2011 16:57
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This stuff hasn't been confirmed but lately details about AMD's new cards have been leaking all over and they don't seem totally unreasonable either. They're from the B3D thread.  You may need to spend closer to $300-350 if that chart is correct to get around 2/3 performance of the 7970. PC LOAD LETTER fucked around with this message at 23:40 on Dec 27, 2011 |
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Dec 27, 2011 23:38
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TheQat posted:What's the best program out there these days for adjusting flip queue size and other "advanced settings"? Also (and not to be antagonistic, but genuinely curious if anyone knows) why doesn't AMD put the option in their drivers like nvidia does? ATI Tray Tools, which is still being developed. It's completely replaced CCC for me  If it complains about not being able to install the low-level driver, DSEO will take care of that
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Dec 28, 2011 08:39
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Setzer Gabbiani posted:ATI Tray Tools, which is still being developed. It's completely replaced CCC for me
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Dec 28, 2011 08:50
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The unlocked 3870K and 3670K is now available in Newegg at $145 and $130 respectively. I would say with the 3670K AMD now has an unquestionably better chip than the similarily priced SB i3s, albeit getting the former is doomed to a dead-end upgrade path (not a big deal IMO). Right now there aren't any realistic indication yet on how well they overclock, but 4GHz seems easy enough. Though it makes one wonder why BD exists when they can make these gems.
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Jan 3, 2012 10:59
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