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AMDs Polaris architecture is also much more power hungry than NVIDIAs Pascal architecture, at least on the desktop variants we've seen so far. The RX480 (Polar

by jsheard 10y ago

AMDs Polaris architecture is also much more power hungry than NVIDIAs Pascal architecture, at least on the desktop variants we've seen so far. The RX480 (Polaris) trades blows with the GTX1060 (Pascal) performance-wise, but the 1060 uses about 30% less power at load: https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_1060/24.html https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_1060/...

bryanlarsen 10y ago
The RX480 Polaris is about 30% faster than the GTX1060 running DOOM4/Vulkan. Apple's Metal is very similar to Vulkan, so it's quite possible that nVidia Pascal and AMD Polaris have similar power usage while using Metal.
- jsheard 10y ago
  Doom 4 is an outlier, the RX480 doesn't consistently gain that much from Vulkan or DX12. You could just as easily point to Tomb Raider DX12, where the 1060 beats the 480 by about 20%. According to Guru3D the two cards perform almost identically in Ashes of the Singularity and Total War: Warhammer, both AMD-sponsored DX12 games.
  - bryanlarsen 10y ago
    Tomb Raider doesn't use async compute. And whether Doom 4 is an outlier or just an example of the difference between Vulkan and DX12 is yet to be determined. My conjecture is that the big difference between Vulkan and DX12 is that nVidia has put more of it's driver engineering magic into DX12 than it has into Vulkan. Metal won't have that nVidia driver engineering magic, so I believe that DOOM4 is the best benchmark we have of performance and power consumption for Metal. But one benchmark can be misleading for a wide variety of reasons.
    - jsheard 10y ago
      Tomb Raider had async compute implemented for GCN and Pascal in a post-release patch, and benchmarks on that patch still pegged the 1060 as ~20% faster than the 480: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-nvidia-geforce-gtx-1060-review http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-nvidia... And conversely, the developers of Doom said their async path is currently only tuned for GCN and will be enabled on Pascal in a future patch. We've seen from 3DMark Time Spy that Pascal does benefit from async compute, so there's performance being left on the table there.
- intoverflow2 10y ago
  Honestly doesn't matter when one can't run CUDA and almost all the pro applications for a GPU are CUDA based.
lorenzhs 10y ago
Well the OP's quote continues with "because the design offers the power efficiency and thinness necessary to fit inside the slimmer Apple notebook". It's not like Apple would just ignore power efficiency.

by jsheard 10y ago

bryanlarsen 10y ago

The RX480 Polaris is about 30% faster than the GTX1060 running DOOM4/Vulkan. Apple's Metal is very similar to Vulkan, so it's quite possible that nVidia Pascal and AMD Polaris have similar power usage while using Metal.

jsheard 10y ago
Doom 4 is an outlier, the RX480 doesn't consistently gain that much from Vulkan or DX12. You could just as easily point to Tomb Raider DX12, where the 1060 beats the 480 by about 20%. According to Guru3D the two cards perform almost identically in Ashes of the Singularity and Total War: Warhammer, both AMD-sponsored DX12 games.
- bryanlarsen 10y ago
  Tomb Raider doesn't use async compute. And whether Doom 4 is an outlier or just an example of the difference between Vulkan and DX12 is yet to be determined. My conjecture is that the big difference between Vulkan and DX12 is that nVidia has put more of it's driver engineering magic into DX12 than it has into Vulkan. Metal won't have that nVidia driver engineering magic, so I believe that DOOM4 is the best benchmark we have of performance and power consumption for Metal. But one benchmark can be misleading for a wide variety of reasons.
  - jsheard 10y ago
    Tomb Raider had async compute implemented for GCN and Pascal in a post-release patch, and benchmarks on that patch still pegged the 1060 as ~20% faster than the 480: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-nvidia-geforce-gtx-1060-review http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-nvidia... And conversely, the developers of Doom said their async path is currently only tuned for GCN and will be enabled on Pascal in a future patch. We've seen from 3DMark Time Spy that Pascal does benefit from async compute, so there's performance being left on the table there.
intoverflow2 10y ago
Honestly doesn't matter when one can't run CUDA and almost all the pro applications for a GPU are CUDA based.

lorenzhs 10y ago

Well the OP's quote continues with "because the design offers the power efficiency and thinness necessary to fit inside the slimmer Apple notebook". It's not like Apple would just ignore power efficiency.