Perhaps a good candidate for mining coins like LivePeer (one of 8-10 actual solid blockchain projects IMO).
AMD Radeon VII: High-End 7nm Vega Video Card
21–30 of 91 posts
Re: AMD Radeon VII: High-End 7nm Vega Video Card
#22> They are presumably not going to be able to match NVIDIA’s energy efficiency, and they won’t have feature parity since AMD doesn’t (yet) have its own DirectX Raytracing (DXR) implementation. I assume this means that it won't support raytracing at all? Or will it, but with some non-DXR implementation?
NVidia's raytracing is hardware accelerated. There's specific cores that can ONLY traverse a BVH tree built into the NVidia hardware. Furthermore, NVidia's raytracing features leverage FP16 matrix multiplication for denoising. The Radeon VII will certainly be slower at raytracing (if AMD ever decides to support the feature). It has FP16 support and huge RAM bandwidth (which will help traverse a BVH Tree), but I would…
Based on the pixel sparkling in the video I've seen if Battlefield, it looks like Nvidia's raytracing is being used for each pixel. I'm not sure if it has to be that way or if it's just underoptomozed at the moment.
I think you could get something 95% as good with far better performance by only tracing vertices and then raster rendering the resultant transform.
Would be a good approach for accurate shadows too where you don't really care about texture fragments.
Re: AMD Radeon VII: High-End 7nm Vega Video Card
#23Its an interesting design for sure. 4x Stacks of HBM2 means 1TBps memory bandwidth at 16GB. Only 60-compute units enabled (maybe 4-CUs are expected to break during manufacturing? Its a weird number for sure...). Since it shares dies with the MI50, the Radeon VII will have 1/2 speed double-precision, making this the cheapest high-performance double-precision card in existance. ------ FP16 compute is supported at doubl…
Perfect dies (64 CUs) get sold as a Radeon Instinct MI60 at a much higher price.
Do you have any estimate what that higher price will be?
Re: AMD Radeon VII: High-End 7nm Vega Video Card
#24Its an interesting design for sure. 4x Stacks of HBM2 means 1TBps memory bandwidth at 16GB. Only 60-compute units enabled (maybe 4-CUs are expected to break during manufacturing? Its a weird number for sure...). Since it shares dies with the MI50, the Radeon VII will have 1/2 speed double-precision, making this the cheapest high-performance double-precision card in existance. ------ FP16 compute is supported at doubl…
There's no guarantee this won't have gimped FP64, Hawaii for example had 1/2 rate FP64 but the consumer cards were 1/8 speed. But even 1/8 would leave the 1/32 NVIDIA cards in the dust. If they don't gimp FP64 it won't leave a whole lot of reason to buy the MI50 for probably 10x the price.
> If they don't gimp FP64 it won't leave a whole lot of reason to buy the MI50 for probably 10x the price.
MI50 has ECC RAM support. That's absolutely necessary for high-end scientific compute.
Re: AMD Radeon VII: High-End 7nm Vega Video Card
#25In July 2015 AMD released a 28nm chip with more GCN compute units than this card at a lower price - the Radeon R9 Fury X had the full 64 CUs / 4096 shaders enabled for $649. And it was considered a bit of a dud as a product. This Radeon VII is 2.5 process nodes better, but launches with 60 CUs / 3840 shaders enabled. All still on essentially the GCN architecture. And it launches at $699, more than three and a half ye…
I think it shows that GCN is reaching the end of its usable life. It's not been a bad microarchitecture - but hopefully Navi does something different so they aren't hamstrung in the same way.
NAVI is still GCN likely the same 15-25% uptick over Polaris as we’ve seen with this new Vega, 2020-2021 is when the next gen uArch is going to come.
GCN’s vector machine doesn’t scale as well as NVIDIA’s scalar architecture NVIDIA can add cores without caring about concurrency or ILP, since each core is an individually addressable scalar ALU, this is why “async” compute doesn’t benefit them as much as it does GCN cards that have a 4 wide SIMD array that is nearly as hard to feed as their old VILW arch and a massive external compute scheduler that sits idle when doing graphics.
Re: AMD Radeon VII: High-End 7nm Vega Video Card
#26Re: AMD Radeon VII: High-End 7nm Vega Video Card
#27Perhaps a good candidate for mining coins like LivePeer (one of 8-10 actual solid blockchain projects IMO).
Proof-of-work coin mining is a scourge on the environment and the PC component market.
Re: AMD Radeon VII: High-End 7nm Vega Video Card
#28Its an interesting design for sure. 4x Stacks of HBM2 means 1TBps memory bandwidth at 16GB. Only 60-compute units enabled (maybe 4-CUs are expected to break during manufacturing? Its a weird number for sure...). Since it shares dies with the MI50, the Radeon VII will have 1/2 speed double-precision, making this the cheapest high-performance double-precision card in existance. ------ FP16 compute is supported at doubl…
If it could somehow actually sell for the MSRP (which of course it won't), it is a better gaming card than the RTX 2080. The 2080 costs more, and it's flagship feature is something you'll almost certainly want to turn off for gaming since it kills your frame rate and doesn't provide anything most people will notice while playing a game. Screen space reflections and cubemaps are convincing enough when you're zipping a…
$699 matches the MSRP for the RTX 2080: https://pcpartpicker.com/products/video-card/#c=427&sort=pri...
Re: AMD Radeon VII: High-End 7nm Vega Video Card
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
NVidia's raytracing is hardware accelerated. There's specific cores that can ONLY traverse a BVH tree built into the NVidia hardware. Furthermore, NVidia's raytracing features leverage FP16 matrix multiplication for denoising. The Radeon VII will certainly be slower at raytracing (if AMD ever decides to support the feature). It has FP16 support and huge RAM bandwidth (which will help traverse a BVH Tree), but I would…
Based on the pixel sparkling in the video I've seen if Battlefield, it looks like Nvidia's raytracing is being used for each pixel. I'm not sure if it has to be that way or if it's just underoptomozed at the moment. I think you could get something 95% as good with far better performance by only tracing vertices and then raster rendering the resultant transform. Would be a good approach for accurate shadows too where…
> Based on the pixel sparkling in the video I've seen if Battlefield, it looks like Nvidia's raytracing is being used for each pixel. I'm not sure if it has to be that way or if it's just underoptomozed at the moment.
1-sample per pixel is already incredibly low for raytracing. A raw 1 spp raytraced image looks HORRIBLE.
The reason why it looks anywhere close to usable is because NVidia post-processes all of that noise through their tensor-cores FP16. It is some kind of spacial / temporal-filter effect (averaging pixels across time, and space... where "space" is mapped to geometry framebuffers to keep object boundaries correct).
Re: AMD Radeon VII: High-End 7nm Vega Video Card
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Based on the pixel sparkling in the video I've seen if Battlefield, it looks like Nvidia's raytracing is being used for each pixel. I'm not sure if it has to be that way or if it's just underoptomozed at the moment. I think you could get something 95% as good with far better performance by only tracing vertices and then raster rendering the resultant transform. Would be a good approach for accurate shadows too where…
> Based on the pixel sparkling in the video I've seen if Battlefield, it looks like Nvidia's raytracing is being used for each pixel. I'm not sure if it has to be that way or if it's just underoptomozed at the moment. 1-sample per pixel is already incredibly low for raytracing. A raw 1 spp raytraced image looks HORRIBLE. The reason why it looks anywhere close to usable is because NVidia post-processes all of that noi…
Ya that's kind of what I'm getting at.
If your physically accurate rendering is pushing the hardware limits so far that you need extensive post processing to maintain the framerate then it stops being so physically accurate.
At that point, it seems like there are more interesting things you can do with the hardware than a naive raytrace that would look and perform better while, admittedly, not being 100% physically accurate.