7 ms·

it is ridiculous to call a $750 GPU "midrange".

by throwaway2048 8y ago

dogma1138 8y ago
It’s still a mid range die - TU104, the high end die is the TU102, it’s all relative. We’re about 1 month away from NVIDIA’s next quarterly report it will be really interesting to see how much revenue they got so far from Turing especially considering the 2060 was released only 1 month prior to the date their revenue will be reported on.
- dragontamer 8y ago
  The 2080 is 545mm^2. Intel's "HCC" 18-core Skylake Xeon is 485mm^2. There's nothing "mid-range" about a die at 545mm^2. Yeah, there are higher-end XCC Intel chips or higher end NVidia chips. But by any practical measurement, things pushing 500mm^2 or bigger is downright massive. Radeon VII is ~350mm^2, but on a very expensive 7nm process. Hard to tell what "high end" or "mid range" will be at 7nm right now, since there aren't too many chips being made to compare against.
  - dogma1138 8y ago
    Again it’s all relative, NVIDIA always used big dies to win and they are making money hand over fist. It doesn’t change the fact that the TU104 is a mid range die as far as the Turing lineup goes doesn’t matter if it’s 500mm^2 or 5M^2. Radeon 7 is a fairly large die for its processes on a very expensive node using the fastest memory around which barely beats the 1080ti and brings next to nothing new to the table over Vega, heck i doesn’t bring that many new things over Fiji but at least they finally have dot product support. The simple reality is that for gaming the 2080 is still a better pick if only because of the RTX features. For compute the 2080 might edge it depending on the workload and especially for DL/ML due to the craptastic state of AMDs ecosystem even today. For HPC as in FP64 then the Rad 7 is worse perf/$ than the Titan V you can buy a Titan V 24GB for £2400 today and get 7 tflops of FP64. The only case where the Radeon 7 would be better than the 2080 is likely in a small subset of GPU accelerated software that properly supports AMD GPUs e.g. blender.
    - dragontamer 8y ago
      > The simple reality is that for gaming the 2080 is still a better pick if only because of the RTX features. I think there's a strong argument to future-proofing 4k gaming experiences. I think the 1080 Ti is a better pick, but the 1080 Ti is sold out in the US Market. The 2080's 8GB of VRAM is usable today, but I'm not entirely sure how long it will be before 4k games blow through that. 1080 Ti had 11GB of VRAM, Radeon 7 is a bit overkill at 16. But 8GB is solidly a mid-range VRAM size. > The only case where the Radeon 7 would be better than the 2080 is likely in a small subset of GPU accelerated software that properly supports AMD GPUs e.g. blender. FP32 performance is also used in Adobe Premier (video editors). But yo man, 3d renders (like Blender) can take hours under normal circumstances. Its a solid market to try to accelerate.
      - dogma1138 8y ago
        Adobe Premiere doesn't care about the GPU much, even with pretty heavy effects and 8K you wouldn't notice the difference between a 1060 and a 2080ti, but one thing you usually don't want to do is to pair it with an AMD GPU due Adobe's craptastic support. https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Premiere-Pro-CC-2018-NVIDIA-GeForce-vs-AMD-Radeon-Vega-1206/ https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Premiere-Pro-CC-2... And 8GB is more than enough, heck if AMD memory management worked as in dev's would've used it then 4GB is enough for 4K even today, there are plenty of GDC talks about it and how some games on average only accessed 3GB of memory for a given level the biggest ones were from Doom and Witcher 3 iirc. This is how the Xbox One X can do 4K even if it's at 30fps with only 12GB of RAM shared between the GPU and CPU and how even the PS4 pro can do 4K with 8GB and in all cases when they can't it's not a memory limitation but rather a fill rate / horsepower issue. I'll take NVIDIA's stellar memory management and compression and tiled rendering over AMD's 1TB of memory bandwidth and 16GB of memory for 4K gaming, and 4K gaming on PCs is well meh, I'm actually regretting getting a 4K monitor and a 1080ti SLI setup something which i will remediate once the 1440P FLAD HDR Gsync monitors come out to the market.
        dragontamer 8y ago
        "Heavy" GPU-accelerated 2d effects, like Optical Flow Time Remapping, are used quite often in my experience. Its the easiest way to get the "cool slo-mo" that made movies like 300 popular. Good Youtubers are using the effect a lot in their videos now. You're right about Adobe being bad with OpenCL, but its just an example. But my overall point is that the 2d video editing community is mostly about FP32. A high end FP32 card caters towards 3d renderers, 2d video editors, and others in the professional marketplace. Davinci Resolve users seem to get a bigger benefit out of Vega cards than 10xx series NVidia cards. So it depends on your video editor. ---------- Aside from scientific compute, I'm having issues figuring out where FP64 support is an issue. All of the applications I'm aware of are FP32. There's a clear difference in the rendering of heavy effects (Optical Flow based Resampling) or 3d editors, so a good GPU really makes a difference in those cases. > And 8GB is more than enough, heck if AMD memory management worked as in dev's would've used it then 4GB is enough for 4K even today, there are plenty of GDC talks about it and how some games on average only accessed 3GB of memory for a given level the biggest ones were from Doom and Witcher 3 iirc. XBox and PS4 Pro are bad examples to use. Those systems have far weaker GPUs, and the textures aren't truly 4k. If you enter a game with 4k texture packs (or 8k texture packs, like Star Citizen), you can expect your memory usage to spike significantly. 8GB is still sufficient, but gamers are expecting better and better textures. 4k + 10-bit HDR textures take up a lot of room.
  - CoolGuySteve 8y ago
    Given the rumors of a $300 2080-equivalent card, I wouldn't be surprised if the Navi architecture is more similar to Zen 2 where an array of cheap 80-100mm dies is placed around a larger 12nm bus die on the same package. AMD has clearly placed a lot of R&D research into that approach and it would allow Ryzen 3000 etc to share a package with a Navi GPU die. It would also explain the mysteriously absent second 7nm die in the Ryzen announcement this past CES.
    - dogma1138 8y ago
      They already confirmed it's monolithic several times.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    - dragontamer 8y ago
      I mean, its a rumor, so I'm pretty much pretending that Navi will be either slower than that, or cost more than $300. Rumor is that AMD had issues figuring out how to architecture chiplets into GPUs. CPUs have a long-history of NUMA / multiple sockets. GPUs history of "Crossfire" and other such technologies is far weaker and has far worse support. It is less clear how software is supposed to represent asymmetric access to memory. How do you build a GPU with a single view of memory, when each die is likely connected to its own set of RAM? Especially with latency being as big of an issue as it is already. I'm sure AMD is working on the problem, but I don't personally expect it to be solved so soon. Yeah, AMD Infinity Fabric is a nifty 50GB/s chiplet bus. But HBM2 is 1TBps, so Infinity Fabric is simply too slow to share data between hypothetical GPU chiplets.
      - CoolGuySteve 8y ago
        Not sure why it would have to look anything like Crossfire. The EPYC Zen 2 cores have increased L3 and then communicate to RAM via the monolithic I/O core. It's very different than traditional NUMA in terms of locality but it's also likely that latencies have been increased. A GPU with the same design would look monolithic as far as software is concerned since modern GPUs are already subdivided into hundreds of compute cores as it is.
- leetcrew 8y ago
  > It’s still a mid range die - TU104, the high end die is the TU102, it’s all relative. yes and no. in a product marketed toward consumers, the price tiers have to be at least somewhat informed by what people are willing/able to pay. a boxster isn't an entry level car just because it's the cheapest one porsche makes.
  - dogma1138 8y ago
    It’s an entry level Porsche, just like an entry level Quadro that may cost twice what a gaming card costs while being a 106 or even 107/8 die form NVIDIA is still a mainstream or low end card die.
zmix 8y ago
2005: it is ridiculous to call a $350 GPU "midrange".
- pizzazzaro 8y ago
  And that statement still holds.
- majewsky 8y ago
  A current midrange GPU is around $150-$250 according to the recommendations on https://logicalincrements.com https://logicalincrements.com (not affiliated, just a fan).

it is ridiculous to call a $750 GPU "midrange".

It’s still a mid range die - TU104, the high end die is the TU102, it’s all relative. We’re about 1 month away from NVIDIA’s next quarterly report it will be really interesting to see how much revenue they got so far from Turing especially considering the 2060 was released only 1 month prior to the date their revenue will be reported on.

dragontamer 8y ago
The 2080 is 545mm^2. Intel's "HCC" 18-core Skylake Xeon is 485mm^2. There's nothing "mid-range" about a die at 545mm^2. Yeah, there are higher-end XCC Intel chips or higher end NVidia chips. But by any practical measurement, things pushing 500mm^2 or bigger is downright massive. Radeon VII is ~350mm^2, but on a very expensive 7nm process. Hard to tell what "high end" or "mid range" will be at 7nm right now, since there aren't too many chips being made to compare against.
- dogma1138 8y ago
  Again it’s all relative, NVIDIA always used big dies to win and they are making money hand over fist. It doesn’t change the fact that the TU104 is a mid range die as far as the Turing lineup goes doesn’t matter if it’s 500mm^2 or 5M^2. Radeon 7 is a fairly large die for its processes on a very expensive node using the fastest memory around which barely beats the 1080ti and brings next to nothing new to the table over Vega, heck i doesn’t bring that many new things over Fiji but at least they finally have dot product support. The simple reality is that for gaming the 2080 is still a better pick if only because of the RTX features. For compute the 2080 might edge it depending on the workload and especially for DL/ML due to the craptastic state of AMDs ecosystem even today. For HPC as in FP64 then the Rad 7 is worse perf/$ than the Titan V you can buy a Titan V 24GB for £2400 today and get 7 tflops of FP64. The only case where the Radeon 7 would be better than the 2080 is likely in a small subset of GPU accelerated software that properly supports AMD GPUs e.g. blender.
  - dragontamer 8y ago
    > The simple reality is that for gaming the 2080 is still a better pick if only because of the RTX features. I think there's a strong argument to future-proofing 4k gaming experiences. I think the 1080 Ti is a better pick, but the 1080 Ti is sold out in the US Market. The 2080's 8GB of VRAM is usable today, but I'm not entirely sure how long it will be before 4k games blow through that. 1080 Ti had 11GB of VRAM, Radeon 7 is a bit overkill at 16. But 8GB is solidly a mid-range VRAM size. > The only case where the Radeon 7 would be better than the 2080 is likely in a small subset of GPU accelerated software that properly supports AMD GPUs e.g. blender. FP32 performance is also used in Adobe Premier (video editors). But yo man, 3d renders (like Blender) can take hours under normal circumstances. Its a solid market to try to accelerate.
    - dogma1138 8y ago
      Adobe Premiere doesn't care about the GPU much, even with pretty heavy effects and 8K you wouldn't notice the difference between a 1060 and a 2080ti, but one thing you usually don't want to do is to pair it with an AMD GPU due Adobe's craptastic support. https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Premiere-Pro-CC-2018-NVIDIA-GeForce-vs-AMD-Radeon-Vega-1206/ https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Premiere-Pro-CC-2... And 8GB is more than enough, heck if AMD memory management worked as in dev's would've used it then 4GB is enough for 4K even today, there are plenty of GDC talks about it and how some games on average only accessed 3GB of memory for a given level the biggest ones were from Doom and Witcher 3 iirc. This is how the Xbox One X can do 4K even if it's at 30fps with only 12GB of RAM shared between the GPU and CPU and how even the PS4 pro can do 4K with 8GB and in all cases when they can't it's not a memory limitation but rather a fill rate / horsepower issue. I'll take NVIDIA's stellar memory management and compression and tiled rendering over AMD's 1TB of memory bandwidth and 16GB of memory for 4K gaming, and 4K gaming on PCs is well meh, I'm actually regretting getting a 4K monitor and a 1080ti SLI setup something which i will remediate once the 1440P FLAD HDR Gsync monitors come out to the market.
      - dragontamer 8y ago
        "Heavy" GPU-accelerated 2d effects, like Optical Flow Time Remapping, are used quite often in my experience. Its the easiest way to get the "cool slo-mo" that made movies like 300 popular. Good Youtubers are using the effect a lot in their videos now. You're right about Adobe being bad with OpenCL, but its just an example. But my overall point is that the 2d video editing community is mostly about FP32. A high end FP32 card caters towards 3d renderers, 2d video editors, and others in the professional marketplace. Davinci Resolve users seem to get a bigger benefit out of Vega cards than 10xx series NVidia cards. So it depends on your video editor. ---------- Aside from scientific compute, I'm having issues figuring out where FP64 support is an issue. All of the applications I'm aware of are FP32. There's a clear difference in the rendering of heavy effects (Optical Flow based Resampling) or 3d editors, so a good GPU really makes a difference in those cases. > And 8GB is more than enough, heck if AMD memory management worked as in dev's would've used it then 4GB is enough for 4K even today, there are plenty of GDC talks about it and how some games on average only accessed 3GB of memory for a given level the biggest ones were from Doom and Witcher 3 iirc. XBox and PS4 Pro are bad examples to use. Those systems have far weaker GPUs, and the textures aren't truly 4k. If you enter a game with 4k texture packs (or 8k texture packs, like Star Citizen), you can expect your memory usage to spike significantly. 8GB is still sufficient, but gamers are expecting better and better textures. 4k + 10-bit HDR textures take up a lot of room.
- CoolGuySteve 8y ago
  Given the rumors of a $300 2080-equivalent card, I wouldn't be surprised if the Navi architecture is more similar to Zen 2 where an array of cheap 80-100mm dies is placed around a larger 12nm bus die on the same package. AMD has clearly placed a lot of R&D research into that approach and it would allow Ryzen 3000 etc to share a package with a Navi GPU die. It would also explain the mysteriously absent second 7nm die in the Ryzen announcement this past CES.
  - dogma1138 8y ago
    They already confirmed it's monolithic several times.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - dragontamer 8y ago
    I mean, its a rumor, so I'm pretty much pretending that Navi will be either slower than that, or cost more than $300. Rumor is that AMD had issues figuring out how to architecture chiplets into GPUs. CPUs have a long-history of NUMA / multiple sockets. GPUs history of "Crossfire" and other such technologies is far weaker and has far worse support. It is less clear how software is supposed to represent asymmetric access to memory. How do you build a GPU with a single view of memory, when each die is likely connected to its own set of RAM? Especially with latency being as big of an issue as it is already. I'm sure AMD is working on the problem, but I don't personally expect it to be solved so soon. Yeah, AMD Infinity Fabric is a nifty 50GB/s chiplet bus. But HBM2 is 1TBps, so Infinity Fabric is simply too slow to share data between hypothetical GPU chiplets.
    - CoolGuySteve 8y ago
      Not sure why it would have to look anything like Crossfire. The EPYC Zen 2 cores have increased L3 and then communicate to RAM via the monolithic I/O core. It's very different than traditional NUMA in terms of locality but it's also likely that latencies have been increased. A GPU with the same design would look monolithic as far as software is concerned since modern GPUs are already subdivided into hundreds of compute cores as it is.
leetcrew 8y ago
> It’s still a mid range die - TU104, the high end die is the TU102, it’s all relative. yes and no. in a product marketed toward consumers, the price tiers have to be at least somewhat informed by what people are willing/able to pay. a boxster isn't an entry level car just because it's the cheapest one porsche makes.
- dogma1138 8y ago
  It’s an entry level Porsche, just like an entry level Quadro that may cost twice what a gaming card costs while being a 106 or even 107/8 die form NVIDIA is still a mainstream or low end card die.

zmix 8y ago

2005: it is ridiculous to call a $350 GPU "midrange".

pizzazzaro 8y ago
And that statement still holds.
majewsky 8y ago
A current midrange GPU is around $150-$250 according to the recommendations on https://logicalincrements.com https://logicalincrements.com (not affiliated, just a fan).