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AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle

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Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle

#111

Post by SCdF »

hnuser123456 wrote: post #73
SCdF wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real time ray tracing hardware is in a funny place right now. Firstly, it's not really as impressive as it sounds. You aren't going to be playing a game where you explore a house of mirrors any time soon. Control is a really good implementation, and it's so good it makes it really clear how quickly it falls over. Better than not ray tracing, but nowhere near non-real time traditional ray tracing. Secondly, at least w…

>Secondly, at least with the current generation of RTX, the performance hit you take is criminal. We're talking 40%. I never really understood this argument. If you really need tons of frames for a competitive game, just turn it off. Otherwise, the games that implement it correctly show a marked visual improvement, that can't be computed any faster as far as we know. It's like saying 4k renders 4x slower than 1080p,…

> I never really understood this argument. If you really need tons of frames for a competitive game, just turn it off.

I think "if you need tons of frames" may be where your misunderstanding is coming from: most of us don't have tons of frames to give (especially in brand new AAA games that are the only ones implementing this technology).

For most people (and you can see this in sales data and hardware surveys), if they are looking to buy a new graphics card they are going to be buying one that they think will fit their needs for the next few years, not massively overshoot it. If you play games at lower than your monitors resolution, they look bad. If you play games at lower than your monitors refresh rates, you either get bad looking tearing, or lose a much larger proportion of frames than you need to.

To use myself as an example: I recently upgraded my computer that runs on a 3440x1440/60 monitor. My goal was to play games at 1440p60 for the next 3 years (ie until the new console generation settles and we know where things are going). I bought a 5700XT because it provided the best bang for buck, hit 1440p60 in most games benched, and it seemed reasonable that I could drop setting here or there and maintain good frame rates until I was done with it.

The nVidia option was a 2060S / 2070, which would have given me slightly more frames at 1440p, but for $50 more. If I wanted 1440p60 and RTX, I would have had to go all the way up to the 2080ti, which was roughly double the price.

Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle

#112

Post by smcl »

imtringued wrote: post #102
hellofunk wrote: post #101

> If the rumor mill is to be believed, AMD’s incoming high-end graphics card could be a monster board bristling with 80 CUs (compute units) I thought modern GPUs had hundreds of cores, or is a compute unit something different?

Imagine you have a fleet of 64 buses each filled with 64 passengers. Does that count as 64 individual vehicles or as 4096?

Well "vehicle" in this case is unambiguous - there's no confusion between a passenger and a vehicle in the scenario you described. For many there's not such a clear distinction between "cores" and "compute units" so I can see where the confusion arises.

Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle

#113

Post by dragontamer »

hellofunk wrote: post #101

> If the rumor mill is to be believed, AMD’s incoming high-end graphics card could be a monster board bristling with 80 CUs (compute units) I thought modern GPUs had hundreds of cores, or is a compute unit something different?

Each compute unit handles 2560 hardware threads (64 per clock tick per compute unit).

AMDs GCN architecture runs 4 threads over 4 clock ticks natively. I forget if it was vertical SIMD or horizontal SIMD or whatever the proper terminology was. But this 4 threads over 4 clock ticks avoids the register stall issue. (RDNA performs 1 thread per clock tick and schedules around the stalls)

The other threads come from an SMT-like / hyperthread-like feature, allowing 10 hardware threads per slot.

All together, a compute unit supports 16 way SIMD per vALU x 4 vALUs per CU x 4 threads over 4 clock ticks x 10 'hyperthread-like' = 2560 hardware threads (over 4 clock ticks)

16 SIMD x 4 clock ticks gives your 64 sized wavefronts / warps that the programmer works with. The majority of the 'threads' are for latency hiding: work the GPU can do while waiting for RAM to respond. (In contrast to a CPU, which will search ~200 instructions out of order for work while waiting on RAM)

Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle

#114

Post by tristor »

AmVess wrote: post #3

They aren't going to win anything until they fix their laughably bad drivers and keep them fixed. I have several Ryzens, but there's no way I'd go anywhere near their graphics cards.

Hard agree. I'm an "AMD fanboy" of sorts, and I abandoned their graphics cards for desktop use after a terrible experience with the drivers. Of course at the time I was using Crossfire. But even without Crossfire trying to use AMD on Linux or BSD is much harder than nVidia. Windows or Linux, simple or complex, the AMD drivers are just bad.

Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle

#115

Post by ksec »

missosoup wrote: post #45
jamesblonde wrote: post #30

The big problem right now is that ROCm, AMD's equivalent to Cuda for deep learning, is not supported for the consumer Radeon Navi cards. I had hoped it would be supported in ROCm 3.0 when that was released - but there has been no official word, which is worrying. If AMD are to compete in the GPU/DeepLearning space, it will be because they have hardware that is competitive (not even as good as Nvidia), low cost, and d…

AMD has no chance until there's broad support for Cuda. Cuda is so deeply entrenched at this point that trying to fragment the space and compete against it is a non-starter. The consumer/gaming market is nothing compared to the GPGPU market today.

>The consumer/gaming market is nothing compared to the GPGPU market today.

Even at the peak of Bitcoin mining, Gaming GPU is still by far the largest source of revenue for GPU market.

Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle

#116

Post by ksec »

jamesblonde wrote: post #30

The big problem right now is that ROCm, AMD's equivalent to Cuda for deep learning, is not supported for the consumer Radeon Navi cards. I had hoped it would be supported in ROCm 3.0 when that was released - but there has been no official word, which is worrying. If AMD are to compete in the GPU/DeepLearning space, it will be because they have hardware that is competitive (not even as good as Nvidia), low cost, and d…

Did they mention it will ever be supported on Navi?

It seems to be AMD is on its way to have specialise Architecture for each segment. Navi and Navi Refresh and Gaming GPU without Ray Tracing, so basically low end to middle segment. Navi 2 support Ray Tracing and aiming at higher quality possible.

Arcturus; the uArch name for Vega successor ( also known as Vega 30 ), was suppose to be double the size of VEAG VII, with all the power optimisation they learned from Zen 2. ( As in the current variant shown in Ryzen Mobile ). It seems AMD want to separate the GPGPU market from the rest. Which makes sense because 90% of the gamers dont do anything GPGPU based.

Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle

#117

Post by zepearl »

nl wrote: post #109
winter_blue wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you really saying that AMD is worse than Nvidia on Linux ??? I have a Nvidia GPU (on my laptop), and I've had a truly horrible experience on Linux with Nvidia proprietary drivers. I was actually considering ditching my laptop, and buying a new one with AMD chipsets, due to the issues I've had on Linux due to the presence of the Nvidia graphics card. I occasionally play games on my Linux laptop, using Proton (a St…

The NVidia Optimus switchable cards are not well supported on Linux. On desktop NVidia is good. On laptops I like Intel graphics. because I don't want to muck around with getting working drivers.

I agree. On laptops I usually have an nVidia hybrid GPU but I always switch it off as I don't need it and use only the embedded Intel GPU.

Actually getting the nVidia GPU "really" switched off has often been a bit of a challenge.

Currently on a Lenovo P71 what I do is to have the nVidia-module not loaded (blacklisted or not even installed), load the "bbswitch" module and then execute "tee /proc/acpi/bbswitch <<<OFF" (and check with "cat /proc/acpi/bbswitch" if it returns "OFF"). Without doing this I noticed that the internal temperature when idle was a bit higher than what I thought it should be, so I must assume that otherwise the nVidia kind-of-GPU still consumes some watts even if the module is not even loaded/present.

Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle

#118

Post by aspenmayer »

amerine wrote: post #33
nyjah wrote: post #32

AMD cards also work with hackintosh builds. Some of the cards work seamlessly, others take minor config, but much better than the nVidia support these days.

Any recent hackintosh build guide recommendations?

Clover guide https://midi1996.github.io/hackintosh-internet-install-gitbo...

r/hackintosh guide https://hackintosh.gitbook.io/-r-hackintosh-vanilla-desktop-...

OpenCore (most recent) https://khronokernel-2.gitbook.io/opencore-vanilla-desktop-g...

Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle

#119

Post by [deleted] »

jamesblonde wrote: post #51
atq2119 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that the lack of (official) Navi support is just bad strategy on AMD's part, but I disagree with your numbers. Their goal needs to be performance parity or dominance, and then perhaps offer a slight discount. That's how they're succeeding with Zen on CPUs. Offering the kind of steep discount you write about is just bad business.

At the high-end (V100), Nvidia are price gouging, so there is room for a profitable strategy here where AMD significantly undercut Nvidia. My reasoning comes from my belief that AMD will not reach performance parity in the next generation - for deep learning, at least. If the new Arcturus GPU is competitive with Nvidia's new Ampere chip, that would be great. But they won't sell if they are not significantly cheaper.…

[deleted]

Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle

#120

Post by missosoup »

ksec wrote: post #115
missosoup wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD has no chance until there's broad support for Cuda. Cuda is so deeply entrenched at this point that trying to fragment the space and compete against it is a non-starter. The consumer/gaming market is nothing compared to the GPGPU market today.

>The consumer/gaming market is nothing compared to the GPGPU market today. Even at the peak of Bitcoin mining, Gaming GPU is still by far the largest source of revenue for GPU market.

We're not at the peak of gpu bitcoin mining.

We're in the age of serverside GPGPU on the cloud.

"Looking at the GPU segment, the revenues have almost doubled over the past two years. This can primarily be attributed to Nvidia’s foray into data centers, expanding in both High Performance Computing and the cloud. The data center revenues were up a solid 133% in 2017, led by continued growth in its CUDA platform, and increased acceptance of its Volta architecture. "

https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2018/06/27/wh...

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