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AMD Reveals the Radeon RX 6000 Series, Coming November 18th

462 points by jsheard 6y ago

taurath 6y ago
Big shot across the bow of Nvidia - the whole 30-series stock problems seem like a big miscalculation right now. Granted it’s still early as this is just announced, so no real world benchmarks, but their 3090 competitor coming in at $500 under Nvidia makes it a really tough sell - not that a lot of people have even gotten them at this point. Rumors of Nvidia making TI versions in literal months after the 30-series launch are probably true.
- overcast 6y ago
  When has there ever been enough stock on highend GPUs?
  - bcrosby95 6y ago
    Yes. The exception was when bitcoin prices went crazy and miners were buying them all up.
    - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
      That was mostly limited to AMD cards though.
      - diab0lic 6y ago
        Right but if you're a gamer and you wanted an AMD card and can't get one because of crypto demand you'll buy an Nvidia card, thus causing demand to spike. Obviously it didn't spike as high as AMD but consumers will feel the shortage if demand spikes over supply, which happened in this case.
      - colejohnson66 6y ago
        Nvidia as well made “crypto mining” cards that were just a mainline card without video output. I recall a video by LinusTechTips who attempted to get video output from one of them. Edit: Here’s the video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=TY4s35uULg4 https://youtube.com/watch?v=TY4s35uULg4
      - onli 6y ago
        There was a time period where pretty much the only gpu you could get was a GTX 1050 Ti. At first it was only AMD cards, right, but things changed after a while.
      - Macha 6y ago
        I seem to remember the 1070/1070ti/1080 being affected too. The lower and higher end (1060/1080ti) were the main ones to escape
  - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
    Obviously YMMV but as an example, I don't remember it being that hard to get my 980Ti back when it was somewhat new.
  - Tuna-Fish 6y ago
    It's not just that there is not enough to meet the usual demand, the supply is definitely much lower than typical. I see numbers for a major European distributor network, and there is maybe a fifth of the supply of what there was for the 2000 series, same time after launch. Something is very definitely wrong.
    - quantummkv 6y ago
      Nvidia's issues might have to do with the yield issue on the new and untested Samsung 8nm process. But AMD is on the tried and tested 7nm TSMC process. I doubt they will have the fab issues, given that Apple's move to 5nm would have freed up a lot of capacity for AMD to use.
      - Miraste 6y ago
        > new and untested Samsung 8nm process. It is not new and untested, it's been in use since 2018.
        kllrnohj 6y ago
        It's been used since 2018 for smaller, power optimized designs. This would be the first significant high performance design, and at comparatively huge die sizes. Also claimed the process was semi-custom for nvidia, not the "standard" 8nm. Unclear what exactly was different, though, but depending on the changes (if any) it may actually not be yielding as well as a 2 year old process should
    - zimpenfish 6y ago
      Currently at day 41 of waiting for my 3080 card in the UK.
  - deeeeplearning 6y ago
    Appears to be some evidence that most of the 3xxx cards were bought out by bots. Most sites were sold out more or less instantly and there's now a large supply available on ebay/amazon/etc for way over retail prices.
    - vkou 6y ago
      As a shareholder and a capitalist, I am deeply disappointed that NVidia is leaving hundreds of dollars of profit per card on the table, by allowing scalpers to pick it up. But on a serious note - why are they doing so? Surely, they have good predictions of supply and demand - why are EBay resellers reaping the profits from the gap between the two? Why aren't these cards retailing for $1000, with price reductions happening as demand drops below supply?
      - potiuper 6y ago
        NVidia does not sell the cards direct, the retailer does. Retailer does not want to deal with that much volatility in price as customers would demand refunds, so it is left to the scalpers to take on the supply risk. It is surprising that the retail version of the cards are available upon release as is and not dedicated for a period of time to OEMs - Apple, Alienware, etc. (volume customers) negotiated for guaranteed supply at premium rates.
    - snvzz 6y ago
      Considering how bad Ampere lineup is against AMD, particularly when price taken into consideration, these scalpers are going to lose money. They need to sell the cards at higher than official price to make money, which is going to be hard. And I do not feel sorry for them.
  - mdoms 6y ago
    Before Bitcoin stock was rarely a problem.
    - bart_spoon 6y ago
      Deep learning, cryptocurrency, and the resurgence of PC gaming have all taken place over the last decade, so its hard to pin production issues on any single factor. Personally, I think its less due to these and more due to people using bots to buy up stock for scalping. The same stocking issues have happened for the new Xbox and Playstation, and even for non-tech hardware, like the newest Warhammer 40k box set. The bot scalping issue is just becoming more pervasive.
      - saberdancer 6y ago
        Add Covid-19 to the list, lot of people at home. Another aspect is VR which needs as much hardware as you can give it.
        thrwyoilarticle 6y ago
        Also 1440p was largely ignored, so in a jump from 1080p to 4K there's a massive increase in demand from the hardware. And at the same time, we want better refresh rates than ever. 4 times the pixels and 3 times the frames isn't easy!
        saberdancer 6y ago
        I recently moved from 1080p 16:9 at 60Hz to 1440p 21:9 at 160Hz. 6 times the amount of pixel/frames. One of the reasons why performance isn't stellar even though I bought 3080 at the same time. Most games can't run anywhere near 160 fps.
  - freeflight 6y ago
    Prior to the big cryptomining/ML hypes. Back then these highend-GPUs used to be prestige projects that mostly existed for the marketing of "We have the fastest GPU!", the real money on consumer markets was made with the bulk of the volume in the mid-range.
  - m463 6y ago
    Right before a new generation comes out?
- tomerico 6y ago
  Addressing the price difference between RTX 3090 and 6900 XT: 3090 is priced at $1500 for its 24GB RAM which enables ML & Rendering use cases (Nvidia is segmenting the market by RAM capacity). AMD's 6900XT has the same 16GB of RAM as 6800XT, with less support on the ML side. Their target market is gamers enthusiasts who wanted the absolute fastest GPU.
  - athorax 6y ago
    Agreed, the 3090 is definitely meant for ML, but my guess is people are largely buying it for gaming purposes.
    - llampx 6y ago
      Wouldn't the Titan series be more meant for ML?
      - colejohnson66 6y ago
        I thought Quadros were meant for non-gaming workloads and the Titans were just more powerful than the top-tier mainstream/gaming card? Or have things changed?
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        andoriyu 6y ago
        Yes, Quadro was for non-gaming workloads. Titan meant a different thing with every new iteration. Some were explicitly "non-gaming card that you can play games on" other were "got tier gaming card". RTX Titan for example was not as good in FP64 calculation compared to RTX Quadro. While first Titan was good at both. Nvidia kept changing what Titan means in order to extract most amount of money without hurting Quadro sales. Even at its peak certain things were software limited for Titan, but not for Quadro. Nvidia has tons of artificial limitations for each of their graphics card once you go beyond gaming.
      - 6y ago
- quantummkv 6y ago
  But will even the TI versions work here? A 3090TI or 3080TI for example would have to launch at the most at the same price as their base models to stay competitive. That would result in a massive PR headache. Also, would the TI versions actually help? Even a 100$ markup on a 3080TI would bring it close to the 6900 XT pricing. And the 3080TI cannot come close the 3090/6900 XT performance for that markup or otherwise it would risk cannibalizing Nvidia's own products. Nvidia's only hope at this point is that either AMD fudged the benchmarks by a large margin or AMD gets hit with the same inventory issues.
  - dannyw 6y ago
    NVIDIA can resort to paying developers to only optimise for NVIDIA performance and/or cripple AMD performance.
    - snvzz 6y ago
      I wouldn't put it past NVIDIA considering their scummy history[0]. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0L3OTZ13Os https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0L3OTZ13Os
    - dathinab 6y ago
      They kind of do that anyway in a slightly more roundabout way then you described. (In the way they use their devs to help AAA games to fix some issues under some circumstances, there had been cases where optimizations speed up Nvidea but hindered AMD due to architectural differences but, surely it was all accidentally).
    - lini 6y ago
      But will game studios do it now that both next gen consoles use AMD's RDNA 2 chips?
    - rasz 6y ago
      They already implemented this plan 20 years ago, "Nvidia, the way it's meant to be played!" means things like: https://techreport.com/news/14707/ubisoft-comments-on-assassins-creed-dx10-1-controversy-updated/ https://techreport.com/news/14707/ubisoft-comments-on-assass... "Radeon HD .. gains of up to 20%.... Currently, only Radeon HD 3000-series GPUs are DX10.1-capable, and given AMD’s struggles of late, the positive news about DX10.1 Ubisoft’s announcement about a forthcoming patch for the game. The announcement included a rather cryptic explanation of why the DX10.1 code improved performance, but strangely, it also said Ubisoft would be stripping out DX10.1 in the upcoming patch Ubisoft decided to nix DX10.1 support in response to pressure from Nvidia after the GPU maker sponsored Assassin’s Creed via its The Way It’s Meant To Be Played program." https://techreport.com/review/21404/crysis-2-tessellation-too-much-of-a-good-thing/ https://techreport.com/review/21404/crysis-2-tessellation-to... "Unnecessary geometric detail slows down all GPUs, of course, but it just so happens to have a much larger effect on DX11-capable AMD Radeons than it does on DX11-capable Nvidia GeForces. The Fermi architecture underlying all DX11-class GeForce GPUs dedicates more attention (and transistors) to achieving high geometry processing throughput than the competing Radeon GPU architectures." GameWorks slowing down ATI/AMD users by up to 50% https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/05/amd-says-nvidias-gameworks-completely-sabotaged-witcher-3-performance/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/05/amd-says-nvidias-game... https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2015/03/10/the-witcher-3/ https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2015/03/10/the-witcher-3/
- deleted 6y ago
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- llampx 6y ago
  I am a huge AMD supporter and recently bought their stock as well, but in terms of competition to NVIDIA for non-gaming purposes they have lot of ground to cover. NVENC for example is great for video encoding and supported in a lot of video editing programs. I use AMF in ffmpeg but from my understanding, NVENC is faster and with the 3000 series, better quality. Same with CUDA vs ROCm.
  - subtypefiddler 6y ago
    It's not just CUDA vs ROCm, ROCm has come a long way and is pretty compelling right now. What they lack is the proper hardware acceleration (e.g tensor cores).
    - porphyra 6y ago
      ROCm has come a long way but still has a long way to go. It still doesn't support the 5700 XT (or at least, not very well) --- only the Radeon Instinct and Vega are supported. You can find salty GitHub threads about this dating to the very start of when Navi was just released: https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/887#issuecomment-605711172 https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/887#issueco... And getting ROCm set up is still a buggy experience with tons of fiddling in the deep inner workings of Linux so it is nearly impossible for the average machine learning engineer to use. It is compelling for certain bespoke projects like Europe's shiny new supercomputer, but for the vast majority of machine learning, it is totally unusable. By now in ML world the word "gpu" is synonymous with "nvidia".
      - subtypefiddler 6y ago
        Full disclosure, European here and in our team everyone is found of Linux so not representative of your average MLEngineer. We actually had more issues with nvidia drivers messing up newcomers' machines during updates than with setting up AMD GPUs, but then again n is small (and AMD GPUs were for playing around rather than real work). Still, a Titan Xp has CUDA support and plenty of memory, but it's better, IME, to upgrade to a model with less memory but higher cuda compute and access to tensor cores.
- deleted 6y ago
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- Koliakis 6y ago
  Add to that, it's likely they won't have as many supply issues as nVidia because they're using TSMC and TSMC is totally on the ball when it comes to yields (unlike Samsung).
  - jonplackett 6y ago
    I was thinking this too - is this really just another TSMC victory - like it is with AMD on TSMC vs Intel still not making it to 10nm, and Apple making gains on A14 (soon to be compared VS intel no doubt) - it's the process that's driving efficiency for sure. How much is this one really about TSMC 7nm vs Samsung 8nm?
    - carlhjerpe 6y ago
      I find it interesting that this isn't brought up more often. And it's also rather impressive that Intel isn't further behind. Then again, I'm rooting for AMD all the way until they become the new evil.
    - redisman 6y ago
      > A14 (soon to be compared VS intel no doubt) Isn’t A14 a “5nm” process chip? Why would it be compared to intel and their 14nm++++?
      - jonplackett 6y ago
        I mean it will be compared by Apple, when they launch their new apple silicon macs and want to show off how much faster their chips are than previous Intel - likely taking all the credit, when a large part is down to TSMC's 5nm process.
        Jenya_ 6y ago
        The 5nm process from TSMC could be less of a success, as say Anandtech editor on Twitter (his A14 review incoming) https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/jjwtjy/andrei_fanandtech_on_twitter_5nmn5_looks_to_be/ https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/jjwtjy/andrei_fan...
xvf22 6y ago
Performance is better than I expected, especially for 300w and while not verified externally, it looks like AMD is finally competetive with the top end. If they can get the required share of TSMC volume, then Nvidia may feel a bit of pain since Samsung seems unable to meet the demand.
- Tuna-Fish 6y ago
  Note that the 6900xt benchmark was running in "rage mode", and therefore was not inside 300W. Then again, the card they are comparing to is ~380W, so there is some room to play with while still being more power-efficient than the competition.
  - filmor 6y ago
    "Rage" mode, what a nice name choice coming from ex-ATi :)
  - 013a 6y ago
    Also important to note that it had Smart Memory Access on, which requires a Ryzen CPU (and furthermore, did they say specifically a Ryzen 5xxx CPU?)
    - kllrnohj 6y ago
      They said Ryzen 5xxx and x570 chipset.
      - noir_lord 6y ago
        500 series, that would cover B550.
      - rasz 6y ago
        Which is Intel level of dubious fake market segmentation considering those are no longer Chipsets, but rather southbridges sitting away from main PCIE lanes and memory buses.
singhkays 6y ago
Surprised they were able to catch up to Nvidia's latest cards after foregoing high-end for a while. "Catch-up" seems to be AMD's forte lately. But we'll need to wait for real world testing to see how accurate these claims are.
- mrweasel 6y ago
  Yeah, I want to see actual tests before I’m convinced that they’re on par with Nvidia. If AMD turns out to have caught up with Nvidia I will be very impressed, that cannot be easy to do while managing the same on the CPU side at the same time.
  - devonkim 6y ago
    There's enough break-downs I'm seeing where these new cards aren't really caught up with the newest RTX cards because DLSS 2.0 is the big differentiator and stuff like nVidia Broadcast just aren't there for AMD. The other suspicious comparisons are AMD benchmarks against RTX 2080 Ti when the newest RTX cards _all_ blow away the RTX 2080 Ti in almost every metric. However, what I'm seeing out of this mess is that AMD is absolutely competitive on a watt-per-performance basis now. The other problem is that AMD is so far behind nVidia in software (read: AI research mindshare) that it's not clear if we'll be able to see that many titles take on raytracing in future titles or adopt the work necessary to do ML-based upscaling with AMD as the baseline software stack rather than DLSS.
    - cma 6y ago
      DLSS 2.0, even though it doesn't require individual game training like 1.0, still isn't a generic feature available to any game that puts in the effort to support it, because Nvidia locks it down with watermarks and a non-redistribute let dll until you get approval and are added to their whitelist. Only a handful of games are whitelisted, giving a big disadvantage to indie games vs AAA.
      - NikolaeVarius 6y ago
josalhor 6y ago
They claim to have a competitor for the 3090 at a price 30% lower (500$ less). Impressive claim.
- pixelpoet 6y ago
  I think Nvidia's claim that the 3090 costs anywhere near $1500 is even more bold. They might as well claim it costs $15, for all the good it does anyone actually trying to buy one.
  - snvzz 6y ago
    If there's no availability for the NVIDIA cards, and the AMD cards are actually available, what it means in terms of pricing is that the gap is even bigger than $500. Considering these NVIDIA cards have capped FP32/64 performance and don't have ML drivers like Titan series do, the one sensible case for buying them is gone.
    - zamadatix 6y ago
      3090 is still great for rendering workloads where you want the VRAM and ray tracing hardware but don't want to pay the Quadro tax. Other than that though yeah it's just the "don't care about price" performer.
      - snvzz 6y ago
        That's only if the drivers allow for leveraging that. AIUI FP32 and FP64 are gimped.
        zamadatix 6y ago
        They have some gimped capabilities(I don't think FP32 as that's needed for games) but as I said you don't need any of those features for most 3D rendering tools so it's not worth worrying about the driver, you can see the 3090 wipe the floor with the Titan RTX in rendering workloads here https://techgage.com/article/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3090-proviz-performance/ https://techgage.com/article/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3090-proviz-... "it has half <category> performance" doesn't immediately make it worth 4x the money on an uncapped card, especially if your task doesn't involve a capped feature.
abledon 6y ago
hmm. 16 GB VRAM vs 3070 8 GB... looks better for fitting TF models in memory
- minimaxir 6y ago
  You won't be fitting a TensorFlow model into an AMD GPU anytime soon. (despite many efforts to address that)
  - abledon 6y ago
    https://rocmdocs.amd.com/en/latest/ https://rocmdocs.amd.com/en/latest/ Isn't a solution?
    - dogma1138 6y ago
      ROCm is only available on Linux and doesn’t support NAVI GPUs. Overall if you need to have a solution that just works with any ML framework out there Radeon GPUs aren’t fit for purpose.
    - FredFS456 6y ago
      https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm#Hardware-and-Software-Support https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm#Hardware-and-Softw... Note that ROCm does not have support for even the current-generation of gaming GPUs (Navi).
    - diab0lic 6y ago
      I have not tried this in a while but no. It requires a very involved setup compared to it's CUDA counterpart and certain functionalities don't work / performance characteristics for specific operations can vary wildly. If it look at the amount of time necessary to deal with it the calculus quickly swings in favor of just purchasing an Nvidia card. Edit: And some sibling comments have pointed out that it doesn't function on current gen cards. Nvidia still firmly leads the software game in this regard. I'm really hopeful this will change in the future but I had the same criticisms four years ago when I bought my last AMD card and nothing has changed yet.
piinbinary 6y ago
While RTX is still a selling point for Nvidia over AMD right now (it has more developmentand broader support than AMD's ray tracing), I think that a lot of gamers aren't going to be willing to pay the premium to get it (to say nothing of availability)
- silentwanderer 6y ago
  The only sticking point for me is that Nvidia has features like DLSS that could extend the longevity of my card
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    AMD has technology to compete with DLSS (or so I've read), but talk is cheap and nvidia are already walking the walk. DLSS could be an absolute godsend for VR, if you imagine the next gen of HMDs at ridiculous pixel densities but the game can cheat and basically fake your peripheral vision.
  - throwaway2048 6y ago
    Only if games support them, which relatively few do atm. Generally speaking manufacturing proprietary features like that see poor support long term. Physx, hairworks, SLI all come to mind.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    AMD has come out with a DLSS equivalent, though more details need to be given. That being said, AMD cards tend to age better than NVidia cards. My R9 290X went from being inferior to a 780Ti to 12-15% faster.
    - p1necone 6y ago
      AMD hasn't come out with anything like DLSS yet, but they've said they're "working on it".
      - sudosysgen 6y ago
randompwd 6y ago
Having owned an r9 380, I can safely say I will never buy an AMD gpu again. Buggiest drivers(windows), even for day to day work. And lackluster support to boot.
- pimeys 6y ago
  Having RX 580 at work and it's way nicer with Linux compared to whatever NVIDIA offers. The 6900 XT will definitely replace my 2080Ti.
  - eloff 6y ago
    Yeah, the nvidia driver support on Linux was so bad that I rage quit Linux and bought a Spanish windows 8 (I was in Latin America at the time) at a ridiculous price after days of troubleshooting a black screen on boot. AMD had been rock solid for me with Linux ever since I realized that was the issue and bought an AMD card. I'll never go back to nvidia until they make Linux drivers a priority. I still have the Spanish windows that I use for games with my very old nvidia graphics card. It's time to retire that system soon.
  - philliphaydon 6y ago
    I moved from Nvidia to AMD because of driver issues in linux. Definitely had less issues with AMD. I’ll be replacing the 5700xt with 6800xt.
  - heelix 6y ago
    Ended up with the last few weeks of December off last year and sat down with the mission of getting my Centos 8 box to work with steam. The RX580 worked lovely for VIM, but... went on a grand adventure to get their drivers working. Oh what a pain. Took me, with my limited knowledge most of that time to sort out the potion miscibility roles between steam, centos, and amd. About January, they released a set of updates where all the planets aligned. Went from a grand adventure to a handful of commands. The rest of this year has continued to be a non-event for updates. I'll be looking at one of the ATI cards as lord knows I've failed to find any 3080s, of any make, in stock since launch.
tmaly 6y ago
26.8 Billion transistors, that boggles my mind. How do you even begin to think about testing hardware like that for correctness? I remember my days as an intern at Intel. I remember someone using genetic algorithms to try to construct a test suite for some chip. But it was no where near that transistor count.
- andy_ppp 6y ago
  You break it down into smaller parts and test those as discrete units.
  - Tomte 6y ago
    Not just that: you have dozens, hundreds or thousands of unit A, and of unit B, and of unit C. You test each of these units once, and then some measure of interplay.
    - colejohnson66 6y ago
      How long would formal verification on something this big even take?
      - KSS42 6y ago
        Do you mean RTL to gates formal verification?
        colejohnson66 6y ago
        Yes. Also, I’m assuming[a] that a GPU would take about the same as a CPU because despite GPUs having billions more transistors, they have a lot of duplicated modules compared to a CPU which has many more different modules but probably only one or two of each (per core). [a]: My knowledge of creating hardware is very limited. So I could be completely wrong.
- read_if_gay_ 6y ago
  > I remember someone using genetic algorithms to try to construct a test suite for some chip. Could you expand a bit on how that worked? Seems like an interesting application.
vernie 6y ago
Does it come with an improvement in driver quality?
- aejnsn 6y ago
  Literally, I Ctrl+F'ed to look for a comment to this effect. Preach on. I would buy one if I could run it reliably in my Linux setup.
detaro 6y ago
What's the story with ML stuff on AMD consumer GPUs nowadays? Gotten better, or still "buy NVidia for that"?
- deleted 6y ago
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- dragontamer 6y ago
  ROCm is spotty for AMD GPUs. Definitely don't buy these GPUs until AFTER ROCm has declared support. The NAVI line was never officially supported by ROCm (though ROCm 3.7 in August seemed to get some compiles working for the 5700 XT, a year after its release). ------- Generally speaking, ROCm support only comes to cards that have a "Machine Intelligence" analog. MI50 is similar to Radeon VII, so both cards were supported in ROCm. The Rx 580 was similar to MI8, and therefore both were supported. The Rx 550 had no similar MI card, and had issues that are yet resolved today. Rx 570 had no MI card, but apparently its similar enough to the 580 that I'm not hearing many issues. In effect: AMD only focuses their software development / support on Machine Intelligence cards. The cards that happen to line up to the MI-line happen to work... but the cards outside of the MI line are spotty and inconsistent.
  - philjohn 6y ago
    AMD is segmenting to Gaming (RDNA) and Compute (CDNA) - CDNA is essentially a continuation of Vega, which was a beast for compute.
    - dragontamer 6y ago
      RDNA's ISA is impressive. Load/store asymmetry, Subvector execution, 1024 vGPRs (!!!!), unlimited sGPRs (not quite, but no longer shared at least), etc. etc. Based on the ISA alone, I'd prefer compute-applications to move to RDNA frankly. Its clearly a better designed architecture. ------------ I can't find any public information on CDNA. I've even emailed ORNL for information, but they responded back saying that NDAs prevent them from saying anything. Whether CDNA is based on NAVI or Vega will be a big question as Frontier launches next year. I hope its Navi based, I really do, because its just better. But I'd "understand" if ROCm can't be ported easily to Wave32 or other issues (RDNA is a huge architectural change).
01100011 6y ago
Good showing from AMD. It will be interesting to see how Nvidia responds. I'm curious if AMD will also suffer from supply issues. Does AMD allow running in "rage mode" without voiding the warranty? Is that something that a 3rd party mfg will offer to cover?
- zamalek 6y ago
  I assume so, given that Ryzen runs in "rage mode" all the time (and RDNA2 is the first architecture where people from the Zen team have been involved). I also assume that you are going to need a high-end case (notwithstanding the PSU) to provide adequate cooling because, if it is anything like Ryzen, it will react strongly to the cooling available to it. It will likely be noisy and, as always with OC, not all cards will have the same headroom: it allows them to avoid promising headroom that may not exist on your individual card.
  - kllrnohj 6y ago
    > given that Ryzen runs in "rage mode" all the time It doesn't. "Rage mode" would be equivalent to Ryzen's PBO. Which is definitely not on by default. It's likely equivalent to just dragging the power limit slider to the highest it goes on MSI afterburner. Letting boost go out of power spec limits, but nothing more. Which can still give decent gains (look at how power starved Ampere is, for example). But the only noteworthy thing here is just it's in the official control panel instead of a 3rd party app.
    - zamadatix 6y ago
      Small correction - Rage mode increases the power budget but AMD confirmed it does not max out the power budget the same as sliding the slider all the way to the right. Speculation point: because of this I almost wonder if it's equivalent to selecting a higher TDP rather than a warranty violating OC like PBO was. One of the things people railed on Nvidia for was for ever slightly less perf you could get a much lower wattage card that was quieter, maybe this was the response to that?
CivBase 6y ago
This is great! I was ready to update to an RTX 30-series card once they were finally available, but now I'm strongly considering a RX 6000-series card. Of course, even if AMD's benchmarks are representative of how the card will actually perform and even with the lower price, I still have to consider Nvidia for their software features. Shadow Play, G-Sync, and RTX Voice are some nice features. Not to mention DLSS... With the $1000 price tag on the RX 6900 XT, though, I think Nvidia would be crazy to not lower the price of the RTX 3090.
- djsumdog 6y ago
  We'll have to wait for the benchmarks and YouTube videos. What if the new AMD cards look amazing without DLSS and have comparable framerates? I current have a small-form-factor case with a 2080-Ti in it. As it stand, the biggest nVidia card I can put in would be the 3080. I'm curious if the 6900 XT is a two slot design, or if it's massive like the 8090 with the three slot requirement.
  - moonbas3 6y ago
    It's 2.5 slots and shorter than the 3090. https://twitter.com/Radeon/status/1321590889396002816/photo/1 https://twitter.com/Radeon/status/1321590889396002816/photo/...
- snvzz 6y ago
  >Shadow Play, G-Sync, and RTX Voice are some nice features. Not to mention DLSS... AIUI AMD has their own alternatives to all of these (minus RTX Voice, which I hadn't even heard about until your mention). I do not know how good they are, but I expect there to not be much difference. As DLSS 2.0, they're supposedly releasing a competitor in next month's drivers.
  - CivBase 6y ago
    I had not heard of ReLive until now, but it's nice to know that AMD has an alternative to ShadowPlay. FreeSync is an adaptive-sync solution, but it isn't a complete alternative to G-Sync. G-Sync displays require special hardware from Nvidia, must adhere to a series of certifications from Nvidia, and don't always support adaptive-sync at low framerates. RTX Voice is probably not super important for a lot of people. However, as someone who prefers to not wear headphones for long periods of time, it sounds like an extremely useful technology. And DLSS 2.0 is a pretty big deal for anyone with a 4K screen. I don't have a 4K monitor, but I regularly connect my computer to my 4K TV so I would probably leverage DLSS often. I hope AMD's upcoming solution is comparable, but I need to see it before I give them credit for it.
Aaronstotle 6y ago
Glad to see competition returning to this space, consumers are in a great place right now.
mchusma 6y ago
Does AMD have anything like DLSS?
- snvzz 6y ago
  Shortly after DLSS 1.0, AMD released a scaler that's better than DLSS 1.0's under an open license, which NVIDIA proceeded to immediately implement on their drivers, except with a two digit penalty of performance, whereas AMD took a negligible <2%, even on their older cards. As for DLSS 2.0, there's supposedly going to be a new scaler to compete with it on the new drivers next month. I don't know which technology will actually look or perform better, but I do not expect the difference to be dramatic either way.
  - zionic 6y ago
    This is false, none of AMD’s scalars have beat DLSS1.0’s quality, or the substantial improvement brought by DLSS2.0
    - aoeusnth1 6y ago
      Can either of you cite sources instead of making assertions?
djsumdog 6y ago
I find it interesting they're going with the 6xxx naming scheme. So the Radeon VII was pretty much a market failure, right?
- KSS42 6y ago
  It wasn't really meant for gaming. Just a opportunistic card in between Vega and RDNA.
sroussey 6y ago
I half expected them to move their GPU to a chiplet design this year. Also, curious if their APUs next year will be Zen3+RDND2. They have tended to be a year behind when they integrate the two. But I suspect the extra interactions between teams will fix it this time around.
- bob1029 6y ago
  I think chiplet design is coming with RDNA3. AMD has been putting out material regarding CDNA & InfinityFabric 3 for the datacenter market. See: https://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/AMD-IF.jpg https://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/AMD-I...
- shantara 6y ago
  RDNA2 seems to be based on the R&D AMD already done for Sony and Microsoft when designing new consoles. It brings largely the same architecture and feature set to the PC platform, with the exception of the proprietary storage technologies. I think it's going to be the next year when we'll see AMD making some improvements beyond the current console status quo.
  - zamadatix 6y ago
    It wasn't in the video announcement but AMD has confirmed Microsoft's DirectStorage API will be supported on RDNA2 cards in Windows 10. Worth noting Nvidia also got onboard this train with the 3xxx GPUs as well so it's not some console only proprietary feature.
- llampx 6y ago
  Being realistic, I believe they will hamstring their desktop APUs to stay at an entry-level performance-wise, firstly because APUs are generally bought by the budget-conscious, and secondly because why cannibalize their own product line by not selling a separate CPU and GPU to the discerning gamer? Laptops are a different story. I started thinking this way after seeing basically no improvement from the 2200G and 2400G to the 3400G.
finikytou 6y ago
for people in deep learning. I want to have a small and performant test server and was thinking of running it on a geforce 3070 (8gb). considering AMD doesn't support CUDA would I kill myself getting a 6800XT instead?
- dhagz 6y ago
  Honestly? I'd go with a Jetson dev kit. A couple hundred bucks and a whole lot of performance. Plus you get CUDA.
  - finikytou 6y ago
    I was looking at the 4gb version would I be abble to do most of the kaggle as practice?
  - easde 6y ago
    An old $100 PC with an RTX 2060 6GB would be a lot faster than a Jetson NX and only about $400 total.
- singhrac 6y ago
  I think you will still likely encounter a lot of upgrade headaches. If you can wait, see if PyTorch/TF add the 6800XT to their test servers (it seems they current test using a Vega 20, but I'm not certain).
- easde 6y ago
  You'll want tensor cores, so I would stick to the 2000 or 3000-series Nvidia cards. Not to mention the headaches of using AMD cards with any ML framework.
- snvzz 6y ago
  Careful, there's no ML drivers for Ampere and FP32/64 is capped. These are gaming cards. They'll charge you more for the compute cards, when/if they're available.
  - zamadatix 6y ago
0-_-0 6y ago
At this point a big advantage of Nvidia is DLSS an machine learning and a big advantage of AMD is that future console games will be optimised for its CPU+GPU architecture. I'm personally hoping to buy a TSMC card from Nvidia with a bump in memory capacity in the (hopefully near) future.
Animats 6y ago
It's sort of funny. During the period when GPUs were useful for cryptocurrency mining, demand pushed the price of NVidia GPU boards up above $1000, about 2x the usual price. This was a previously unknown price point for gamer-level GPU boards. Once mining demand declined, NVidia kept the price of their new high-end products above $1000, and sales continued. Now $1000+ is the new normal.
- jbay808 6y ago
  I think demand from machine learning applications has also helped keep prices high.
- deafcalculus 6y ago
  Die size is up too. At over 600 mm2, it’s a huge chip.
- jahabrewer 6y ago
  Who cares? The RTX 3090 is not for gamers.
  - snvzz 6y ago
    Who's it for, then? They've got no ML drivers and capped FP32/64 performance.
- globular-toast 6y ago
  It's actually insane. I haven't been running a high end gpu for several years now. The last one I had was an 8800GT. When I got that gpu I felt like I had "made it" in terms of being able to afford the hardware I always wanted as a child. Now with all this news about new gpus I decided to look on ebay for a mid-range AMD chip from the previous generation. Still going for £200-300! I can't justify spending that much on games. Honestly are gamers just expected to have no other hobbies any more?
  - lhl 6y ago
    A quick search shows the 8800GT was released in Oct 2007 and was 180 GBP. [0] Using an inflation calculator this comes out to 256 GBP today, [1] so about the same price as the cards you're looking at. That being said, it looks like even in 2019 average weekly wages (in GBP) have declined since 2008, so accounting for inflation, most Britons are maybe just simply poorer now [2] (2020 of course has been even worse. [3]) Anyway, ignoring all that, IMO gaming is still more affordable than it's ever been - you can get a used Xbox One S for about $100 on eBay, or for PC gaming, you can get a used RX 470 or GTX 1060 for a bit less than that, which are fine GPUs for 1080p gaming performance. Also, even relatively modern AAA games can now be played at low-medium settings at 720 or 1080p30 without a dedicated GPU on a late-model Ryzen APU. [0] https://www.theregister.com/Print/2007/11/12/review_nvidia_geforce_8800_gt/ https://www.theregister.com/Print/2007/11/12/review_nvidia_g... [1] https://www.hl.co.uk/tools/calculators/inflation-calculator https://www.hl.co.uk/tools/calculators/inflation-calculator [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49328855 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49328855 [3] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/wage-growth https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/wage-growth
FatDrunknStupid 6y ago
ZX=Spectrum
StillBored 6y ago
Re ML: AMD seem to play less games with product segmentation, and it allows them to drive a truck through the pricing models of their competitors. Presumably, if the price/perf is good enough here, that will do to nvidia's ML market lock, what is going on with intel's midrange xeon line at the moment. The smart money is buying AMD and porting their stuff.
ksec 6y ago
Keep wondering how is Apple going compete in the GPU space. Especially on Mac Pro with ultra low volume. Would have been happy to see the RX6000 on a Mac.
- lifty 6y ago
  Why not continue to use AMG GPU's like they have been doing until now? They need figure if the driver has any issues with the new architecture, but it shouldn't be a problem.
  - ksec 6y ago
    They could, but I remember reading some WWDC slides that suggest ARM Mac will only be using Apple GPU. Had Apple state Mac Pro would stay on x86 I would not have such concern, but they intend to go all in. Which means Mac Pro will get an ARM chip and an Apple GPU.
    - lifty 6y ago
      Well, I expect them to ship an ARM GPU with every Mac Pro, but in addition to that, also a beefy external GPU. The OS would switch between them based on the workload, live they've done before.
      - ksec 6y ago
        External GPU are not supported on ARM Mac. ( At least initially ) as per WWDC slides / documents.
- kilo_bravo_3 6y ago
  I imagine Apple will keep buying GPUs for their high-end devices. Being on ARM doesn't mean a GPU won't work.
- pram 6y ago
  Big Sur has RDNA2 drivers already, I wouldn't doubt an 6900XT MPX eventually.
Kye 6y ago
It's surreal having an integrated GPU in a small non-gaming laptop that isn't completely useless (Vega 6 on a Ryzen 5 4500U). AMD is on fire. I hope they keep it up until I get ready to build a real gaming computer.
holoduke 6y ago
26.8 billion of transistors. Pretty impressive. Roughly 2 years ago vega20 and tu10 series have around 13 billion. 4 years ago most common models +-7m and if you look further back it roughly doubles every 2 years. In 2031 we will have mainstream GPUs with 1 trillion transistors. Compare that with the 1996 voodoo 1 with just 1 million transistors.
- sushshshsh 6y ago
  And still the voodoo 1 games were the most captivating. We went from "3d in arcades only" to "3d anytime you want" :)
  - PaulKeeble 6y ago
    For IIRC about £80. They weren't all that expensive. I remember fondly that click as the relay switched over the connection to the 3dfx card. Even by the time Nvidia got on the scene with the GeForce 256 we were still talking £180 for the SDR model and about £220 for the DDR high end model. The market has got massive as have the silicon dies and the price per generation just keeps climbing.
mastax 6y ago
Rumors were that AMD wanted to push the performance and price so they weren't stuck being the discount option forever. This looks like it'll do that. Performance and power efficiency look good, and they implemented most of the Nvidia early adopter features. If they want to really compete with Nvidia as a premium option they'll need to match the non-performance features that Nvidia has: - Driver stability. Nvidia is not perfect but the 5700 series was awful from AMD (had to return mine). They need to at least match Nvidia. - DLSS. It started out as a gimmick but with DLSS 2.0 it's just 70%+ free performance improvement with the only downside being somewhat limited game support. - Video Encoder. Nvidia's encoder has very high quality and is well supported by streaming and recording software. I wonder what sort of improvements the RX 6000 series has? - CUDA, Tensor Cores, Ansel, etc. I don't really use these things but if I'm paying the same amount I want similar capabilities. It's kinda crazy that they're using the same silicon in all three cards; the 6800 has 1/4 of the CUs disabled! It is a big chip for 7nm, though. AMD has said that availability won't be an issue (which could give them a leg up on Nvidia in the near term), but I do have to wonder about it. The 80CU 6900XT was rumored months ago and there was a lot of speculation and incredulity about the memory system to feed all those cores. GDDR6X is Nvidia exclusive so some said a 512-bit bus, or HBM2, or even a combination of HBM and GDDR6. The big cache is an interesting solution, I'm curious how it'll perform. It makes sense in a gaming context where a lot of buffers and textures get reused over the course of a frame. I'm a bit worried about tail latency affecting the 99-percentile frame times which have a huge impact on the subjective experience of smoothness. Also bad for massively parallel compute work.
- M277 6y ago
  Am I the only one who notices a clear difference between DLSS 2 and native image? I get that "native" is also flawed due to TAA, but DLSS still has some work to do with regards to image clarity imho.
  - dragontamer 6y ago
    I can see the visual downgrade. IMO, VRS (variable rate shading), which is in all major GPU providers (NVidia, AMD, and even Intel iGPUs / Xe), provides the "upscaling-ish" performance gains that we want for the next generation. Its much harder to see the difference between native and VRS. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/variable-rate-shading-a-scalpel-in-a-world-of-sledgehammers/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/variable-rate-shading... ----- Its not a "competitive" feature, because everyone is doing it. But it basically accomplishes the same thing: carefully upscaling results (2x2 instead of 1x1) in locations where the gamer probably won't notice.
new_realist 6y ago
Will this finally support the UP3218K on Linux?
shmerl 6y ago
Good announcement. Looking forward to Linux gaming benchmarks.
fomine3 6y ago
As usual and also on competitor, their benchmarks is hype-ish. They overclocked their product in some benchmark and they show "Up To FPS" benchmark that I rarely see in reviewer's benchmark. We need to wait review embargo, as usual.
fomine3 6y ago
Does they said HDMI 2.1 support? It's important to support 4K+HFR+HDR monitor setup.
- lclc98 6y ago
  Specs[1] don't say which version of HDMI but under "Supported Rendering Format" it does mention HDMI 4k support. [1] https://www.amd.com/en/products/graphics/amd-radeon-rx-6800 https://www.amd.com/en/products/graphics/amd-radeon-rx-6800
  - fomine3 6y ago
    HDMI 2.0 is enough to handle "HDMI 4K". So sadly I should assume that it only support HDMI 2.0.
- Strom 6y ago
  Yes HDMI 2.1 with VRR is confirmed at the bottom of the official product page. https://www.amd.com/en/graphics/amd-radeon-rx-6000-series https://www.amd.com/en/graphics/amd-radeon-rx-6000-series
cwhiz 6y ago
In order to achieve peak performance, you need a Ryzen CPU. I’m not sure how I feel about that.
pjmlp 6y ago
DirectX 12 Ultimate support, nice catching up.
zohairshaikh72 6y ago
I'm glad I waited before investing in 3k series

462 points by jsheard 6y ago

Big shot across the bow of Nvidia - the whole 30-series stock problems seem like a big miscalculation right now. Granted it’s still early as this is just announced, so no real world benchmarks, but their 3090 competitor coming in at $500 under Nvidia makes it a really tough sell - not that a lot of people have even gotten them at this point. Rumors of Nvidia making TI versions in literal months after the 30-series launch are probably true.

overcast 6y ago
When has there ever been enough stock on highend GPUs?
- bcrosby95 6y ago
  Yes. The exception was when bitcoin prices went crazy and miners were buying them all up.
  - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
    That was mostly limited to AMD cards though.
    - diab0lic 6y ago
      Right but if you're a gamer and you wanted an AMD card and can't get one because of crypto demand you'll buy an Nvidia card, thus causing demand to spike. Obviously it didn't spike as high as AMD but consumers will feel the shortage if demand spikes over supply, which happened in this case.
    - colejohnson66 6y ago
      Nvidia as well made “crypto mining” cards that were just a mainline card without video output. I recall a video by LinusTechTips who attempted to get video output from one of them. Edit: Here’s the video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=TY4s35uULg4 https://youtube.com/watch?v=TY4s35uULg4
    - onli 6y ago
      There was a time period where pretty much the only gpu you could get was a GTX 1050 Ti. At first it was only AMD cards, right, but things changed after a while.
    - Macha 6y ago
      I seem to remember the 1070/1070ti/1080 being affected too. The lower and higher end (1060/1080ti) were the main ones to escape
- read_if_gay_ 6y ago
  Obviously YMMV but as an example, I don't remember it being that hard to get my 980Ti back when it was somewhat new.
- Tuna-Fish 6y ago
  It's not just that there is not enough to meet the usual demand, the supply is definitely much lower than typical. I see numbers for a major European distributor network, and there is maybe a fifth of the supply of what there was for the 2000 series, same time after launch. Something is very definitely wrong.
  - quantummkv 6y ago
    Nvidia's issues might have to do with the yield issue on the new and untested Samsung 8nm process. But AMD is on the tried and tested 7nm TSMC process. I doubt they will have the fab issues, given that Apple's move to 5nm would have freed up a lot of capacity for AMD to use.
    - Miraste 6y ago
      > new and untested Samsung 8nm process. It is not new and untested, it's been in use since 2018.
      - kllrnohj 6y ago
        It's been used since 2018 for smaller, power optimized designs. This would be the first significant high performance design, and at comparatively huge die sizes. Also claimed the process was semi-custom for nvidia, not the "standard" 8nm. Unclear what exactly was different, though, but depending on the changes (if any) it may actually not be yielding as well as a 2 year old process should
  - zimpenfish 6y ago
    Currently at day 41 of waiting for my 3080 card in the UK.
- deeeeplearning 6y ago
  Appears to be some evidence that most of the 3xxx cards were bought out by bots. Most sites were sold out more or less instantly and there's now a large supply available on ebay/amazon/etc for way over retail prices.
  - vkou 6y ago
    As a shareholder and a capitalist, I am deeply disappointed that NVidia is leaving hundreds of dollars of profit per card on the table, by allowing scalpers to pick it up. But on a serious note - why are they doing so? Surely, they have good predictions of supply and demand - why are EBay resellers reaping the profits from the gap between the two? Why aren't these cards retailing for $1000, with price reductions happening as demand drops below supply?
    - potiuper 6y ago
      NVidia does not sell the cards direct, the retailer does. Retailer does not want to deal with that much volatility in price as customers would demand refunds, so it is left to the scalpers to take on the supply risk. It is surprising that the retail version of the cards are available upon release as is and not dedicated for a period of time to OEMs - Apple, Alienware, etc. (volume customers) negotiated for guaranteed supply at premium rates.
  - snvzz 6y ago
    Considering how bad Ampere lineup is against AMD, particularly when price taken into consideration, these scalpers are going to lose money. They need to sell the cards at higher than official price to make money, which is going to be hard. And I do not feel sorry for them.
- mdoms 6y ago
  Before Bitcoin stock was rarely a problem.
  - bart_spoon 6y ago
    Deep learning, cryptocurrency, and the resurgence of PC gaming have all taken place over the last decade, so its hard to pin production issues on any single factor. Personally, I think its less due to these and more due to people using bots to buy up stock for scalping. The same stocking issues have happened for the new Xbox and Playstation, and even for non-tech hardware, like the newest Warhammer 40k box set. The bot scalping issue is just becoming more pervasive.
    - saberdancer 6y ago
      Add Covid-19 to the list, lot of people at home. Another aspect is VR which needs as much hardware as you can give it.
      - thrwyoilarticle 6y ago
        Also 1440p was largely ignored, so in a jump from 1080p to 4K there's a massive increase in demand from the hardware. And at the same time, we want better refresh rates than ever. 4 times the pixels and 3 times the frames isn't easy!
        saberdancer 6y ago
        I recently moved from 1080p 16:9 at 60Hz to 1440p 21:9 at 160Hz. 6 times the amount of pixel/frames. One of the reasons why performance isn't stellar even though I bought 3080 at the same time. Most games can't run anywhere near 160 fps.
- freeflight 6y ago
  Prior to the big cryptomining/ML hypes. Back then these highend-GPUs used to be prestige projects that mostly existed for the marketing of "We have the fastest GPU!", the real money on consumer markets was made with the bulk of the volume in the mid-range.
- m463 6y ago
  Right before a new generation comes out?
tomerico 6y ago
Addressing the price difference between RTX 3090 and 6900 XT: 3090 is priced at $1500 for its 24GB RAM which enables ML & Rendering use cases (Nvidia is segmenting the market by RAM capacity). AMD's 6900XT has the same 16GB of RAM as 6800XT, with less support on the ML side. Their target market is gamers enthusiasts who wanted the absolute fastest GPU.
- athorax 6y ago
  Agreed, the 3090 is definitely meant for ML, but my guess is people are largely buying it for gaming purposes.
  - llampx 6y ago
    Wouldn't the Titan series be more meant for ML?
    - colejohnson66 6y ago
      I thought Quadros were meant for non-gaming workloads and the Titans were just more powerful than the top-tier mainstream/gaming card? Or have things changed?
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - andoriyu 6y ago
        Yes, Quadro was for non-gaming workloads. Titan meant a different thing with every new iteration. Some were explicitly "non-gaming card that you can play games on" other were "got tier gaming card". RTX Titan for example was not as good in FP64 calculation compared to RTX Quadro. While first Titan was good at both. Nvidia kept changing what Titan means in order to extract most amount of money without hurting Quadro sales. Even at its peak certain things were software limited for Titan, but not for Quadro. Nvidia has tons of artificial limitations for each of their graphics card once you go beyond gaming.
    - 6y ago
quantummkv 6y ago
But will even the TI versions work here? A 3090TI or 3080TI for example would have to launch at the most at the same price as their base models to stay competitive. That would result in a massive PR headache. Also, would the TI versions actually help? Even a 100$ markup on a 3080TI would bring it close to the 6900 XT pricing. And the 3080TI cannot come close the 3090/6900 XT performance for that markup or otherwise it would risk cannibalizing Nvidia's own products. Nvidia's only hope at this point is that either AMD fudged the benchmarks by a large margin or AMD gets hit with the same inventory issues.
- dannyw 6y ago
  NVIDIA can resort to paying developers to only optimise for NVIDIA performance and/or cripple AMD performance.
  - snvzz 6y ago
    I wouldn't put it past NVIDIA considering their scummy history[0]. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0L3OTZ13Os https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0L3OTZ13Os
  - dathinab 6y ago
    They kind of do that anyway in a slightly more roundabout way then you described. (In the way they use their devs to help AAA games to fix some issues under some circumstances, there had been cases where optimizations speed up Nvidea but hindered AMD due to architectural differences but, surely it was all accidentally).
  - lini 6y ago
    But will game studios do it now that both next gen consoles use AMD's RDNA 2 chips?
  - rasz 6y ago
    They already implemented this plan 20 years ago, "Nvidia, the way it's meant to be played!" means things like: https://techreport.com/news/14707/ubisoft-comments-on-assassins-creed-dx10-1-controversy-updated/ https://techreport.com/news/14707/ubisoft-comments-on-assass... "Radeon HD .. gains of up to 20%.... Currently, only Radeon HD 3000-series GPUs are DX10.1-capable, and given AMD’s struggles of late, the positive news about DX10.1 Ubisoft’s announcement about a forthcoming patch for the game. The announcement included a rather cryptic explanation of why the DX10.1 code improved performance, but strangely, it also said Ubisoft would be stripping out DX10.1 in the upcoming patch Ubisoft decided to nix DX10.1 support in response to pressure from Nvidia after the GPU maker sponsored Assassin’s Creed via its The Way It’s Meant To Be Played program." https://techreport.com/review/21404/crysis-2-tessellation-too-much-of-a-good-thing/ https://techreport.com/review/21404/crysis-2-tessellation-to... "Unnecessary geometric detail slows down all GPUs, of course, but it just so happens to have a much larger effect on DX11-capable AMD Radeons than it does on DX11-capable Nvidia GeForces. The Fermi architecture underlying all DX11-class GeForce GPUs dedicates more attention (and transistors) to achieving high geometry processing throughput than the competing Radeon GPU architectures." GameWorks slowing down ATI/AMD users by up to 50% https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/05/amd-says-nvidias-gameworks-completely-sabotaged-witcher-3-performance/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/05/amd-says-nvidias-game... https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2015/03/10/the-witcher-3/ https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2015/03/10/the-witcher-3/
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
llampx 6y ago
I am a huge AMD supporter and recently bought their stock as well, but in terms of competition to NVIDIA for non-gaming purposes they have lot of ground to cover. NVENC for example is great for video encoding and supported in a lot of video editing programs. I use AMF in ffmpeg but from my understanding, NVENC is faster and with the 3000 series, better quality. Same with CUDA vs ROCm.
- subtypefiddler 6y ago
  It's not just CUDA vs ROCm, ROCm has come a long way and is pretty compelling right now. What they lack is the proper hardware acceleration (e.g tensor cores).
  - porphyra 6y ago
    ROCm has come a long way but still has a long way to go. It still doesn't support the 5700 XT (or at least, not very well) --- only the Radeon Instinct and Vega are supported. You can find salty GitHub threads about this dating to the very start of when Navi was just released: https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/887#issuecomment-605711172 https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/887#issueco... And getting ROCm set up is still a buggy experience with tons of fiddling in the deep inner workings of Linux so it is nearly impossible for the average machine learning engineer to use. It is compelling for certain bespoke projects like Europe's shiny new supercomputer, but for the vast majority of machine learning, it is totally unusable. By now in ML world the word "gpu" is synonymous with "nvidia".
    - subtypefiddler 6y ago
      Full disclosure, European here and in our team everyone is found of Linux so not representative of your average MLEngineer. We actually had more issues with nvidia drivers messing up newcomers' machines during updates than with setting up AMD GPUs, but then again n is small (and AMD GPUs were for playing around rather than real work). Still, a Titan Xp has CUDA support and plenty of memory, but it's better, IME, to upgrade to a model with less memory but higher cuda compute and access to tensor cores.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Koliakis 6y ago
Add to that, it's likely they won't have as many supply issues as nVidia because they're using TSMC and TSMC is totally on the ball when it comes to yields (unlike Samsung).
- jonplackett 6y ago
  I was thinking this too - is this really just another TSMC victory - like it is with AMD on TSMC vs Intel still not making it to 10nm, and Apple making gains on A14 (soon to be compared VS intel no doubt) - it's the process that's driving efficiency for sure. How much is this one really about TSMC 7nm vs Samsung 8nm?
  - carlhjerpe 6y ago
    I find it interesting that this isn't brought up more often. And it's also rather impressive that Intel isn't further behind. Then again, I'm rooting for AMD all the way until they become the new evil.
  - redisman 6y ago
    > A14 (soon to be compared VS intel no doubt) Isn’t A14 a “5nm” process chip? Why would it be compared to intel and their 14nm++++?
    - jonplackett 6y ago
      I mean it will be compared by Apple, when they launch their new apple silicon macs and want to show off how much faster their chips are than previous Intel - likely taking all the credit, when a large part is down to TSMC's 5nm process.
      - Jenya_ 6y ago
        The 5nm process from TSMC could be less of a success, as say Anandtech editor on Twitter (his A14 review incoming) https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/jjwtjy/andrei_fanandtech_on_twitter_5nmn5_looks_to_be/ https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/jjwtjy/andrei_fan...

xvf22 6y ago

Performance is better than I expected, especially for 300w and while not verified externally, it looks like AMD is finally competetive with the top end. If they can get the required share of TSMC volume, then Nvidia may feel a bit of pain since Samsung seems unable to meet the demand.

Tuna-Fish 6y ago
Note that the 6900xt benchmark was running in "rage mode", and therefore was not inside 300W. Then again, the card they are comparing to is ~380W, so there is some room to play with while still being more power-efficient than the competition.
- filmor 6y ago
  "Rage" mode, what a nice name choice coming from ex-ATi :)
- 013a 6y ago
  Also important to note that it had Smart Memory Access on, which requires a Ryzen CPU (and furthermore, did they say specifically a Ryzen 5xxx CPU?)
  - kllrnohj 6y ago
    They said Ryzen 5xxx and x570 chipset.
    - noir_lord 6y ago
      500 series, that would cover B550.
    - rasz 6y ago
      Which is Intel level of dubious fake market segmentation considering those are no longer Chipsets, but rather southbridges sitting away from main PCIE lanes and memory buses.

singhkays 6y ago

Surprised they were able to catch up to Nvidia's latest cards after foregoing high-end for a while. "Catch-up" seems to be AMD's forte lately. But we'll need to wait for real world testing to see how accurate these claims are.

mrweasel 6y ago
Yeah, I want to see actual tests before I’m convinced that they’re on par with Nvidia. If AMD turns out to have caught up with Nvidia I will be very impressed, that cannot be easy to do while managing the same on the CPU side at the same time.
- devonkim 6y ago
  There's enough break-downs I'm seeing where these new cards aren't really caught up with the newest RTX cards because DLSS 2.0 is the big differentiator and stuff like nVidia Broadcast just aren't there for AMD. The other suspicious comparisons are AMD benchmarks against RTX 2080 Ti when the newest RTX cards _all_ blow away the RTX 2080 Ti in almost every metric. However, what I'm seeing out of this mess is that AMD is absolutely competitive on a watt-per-performance basis now. The other problem is that AMD is so far behind nVidia in software (read: AI research mindshare) that it's not clear if we'll be able to see that many titles take on raytracing in future titles or adopt the work necessary to do ML-based upscaling with AMD as the baseline software stack rather than DLSS.
  - cma 6y ago
    DLSS 2.0, even though it doesn't require individual game training like 1.0, still isn't a generic feature available to any game that puts in the effort to support it, because Nvidia locks it down with watermarks and a non-redistribute let dll until you get approval and are added to their whitelist. Only a handful of games are whitelisted, giving a big disadvantage to indie games vs AAA.
    - NikolaeVarius 6y ago

josalhor 6y ago

They claim to have a competitor for the 3090 at a price 30% lower (500$ less). Impressive claim.

pixelpoet 6y ago
I think Nvidia's claim that the 3090 costs anywhere near $1500 is even more bold. They might as well claim it costs $15, for all the good it does anyone actually trying to buy one.
- snvzz 6y ago
  If there's no availability for the NVIDIA cards, and the AMD cards are actually available, what it means in terms of pricing is that the gap is even bigger than $500. Considering these NVIDIA cards have capped FP32/64 performance and don't have ML drivers like Titan series do, the one sensible case for buying them is gone.
  - zamadatix 6y ago
    3090 is still great for rendering workloads where you want the VRAM and ray tracing hardware but don't want to pay the Quadro tax. Other than that though yeah it's just the "don't care about price" performer.
    - snvzz 6y ago
      That's only if the drivers allow for leveraging that. AIUI FP32 and FP64 are gimped.
      - zamadatix 6y ago
        They have some gimped capabilities(I don't think FP32 as that's needed for games) but as I said you don't need any of those features for most 3D rendering tools so it's not worth worrying about the driver, you can see the 3090 wipe the floor with the Titan RTX in rendering workloads here https://techgage.com/article/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3090-proviz-performance/ https://techgage.com/article/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3090-proviz-... "it has half <category> performance" doesn't immediately make it worth 4x the money on an uncapped card, especially if your task doesn't involve a capped feature.

abledon 6y ago

hmm. 16 GB VRAM vs 3070 8 GB... looks better for fitting TF models in memory

minimaxir 6y ago
You won't be fitting a TensorFlow model into an AMD GPU anytime soon. (despite many efforts to address that)
- abledon 6y ago
  https://rocmdocs.amd.com/en/latest/ https://rocmdocs.amd.com/en/latest/ Isn't a solution?
  - dogma1138 6y ago
    ROCm is only available on Linux and doesn’t support NAVI GPUs. Overall if you need to have a solution that just works with any ML framework out there Radeon GPUs aren’t fit for purpose.
  - FredFS456 6y ago
    https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm#Hardware-and-Software-Support https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm#Hardware-and-Softw... Note that ROCm does not have support for even the current-generation of gaming GPUs (Navi).
  - diab0lic 6y ago
    I have not tried this in a while but no. It requires a very involved setup compared to it's CUDA counterpart and certain functionalities don't work / performance characteristics for specific operations can vary wildly. If it look at the amount of time necessary to deal with it the calculus quickly swings in favor of just purchasing an Nvidia card. Edit: And some sibling comments have pointed out that it doesn't function on current gen cards. Nvidia still firmly leads the software game in this regard. I'm really hopeful this will change in the future but I had the same criticisms four years ago when I bought my last AMD card and nothing has changed yet.

piinbinary 6y ago

While RTX is still a selling point for Nvidia over AMD right now (it has more developmentand broader support than AMD's ray tracing), I think that a lot of gamers aren't going to be willing to pay the premium to get it (to say nothing of availability)

silentwanderer 6y ago
The only sticking point for me is that Nvidia has features like DLSS that could extend the longevity of my card
- mhh__ 6y ago
  AMD has technology to compete with DLSS (or so I've read), but talk is cheap and nvidia are already walking the walk. DLSS could be an absolute godsend for VR, if you imagine the next gen of HMDs at ridiculous pixel densities but the game can cheat and basically fake your peripheral vision.
- throwaway2048 6y ago
  Only if games support them, which relatively few do atm. Generally speaking manufacturing proprietary features like that see poor support long term. Physx, hairworks, SLI all come to mind.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  AMD has come out with a DLSS equivalent, though more details need to be given. That being said, AMD cards tend to age better than NVidia cards. My R9 290X went from being inferior to a 780Ti to 12-15% faster.
  - p1necone 6y ago
    AMD hasn't come out with anything like DLSS yet, but they've said they're "working on it".
    - sudosysgen 6y ago

randompwd 6y ago

Having owned an r9 380, I can safely say I will never buy an AMD gpu again. Buggiest drivers(windows), even for day to day work. And lackluster support to boot.

pimeys 6y ago
Having RX 580 at work and it's way nicer with Linux compared to whatever NVIDIA offers. The 6900 XT will definitely replace my 2080Ti.
- eloff 6y ago
  Yeah, the nvidia driver support on Linux was so bad that I rage quit Linux and bought a Spanish windows 8 (I was in Latin America at the time) at a ridiculous price after days of troubleshooting a black screen on boot. AMD had been rock solid for me with Linux ever since I realized that was the issue and bought an AMD card. I'll never go back to nvidia until they make Linux drivers a priority. I still have the Spanish windows that I use for games with my very old nvidia graphics card. It's time to retire that system soon.
- philliphaydon 6y ago
  I moved from Nvidia to AMD because of driver issues in linux. Definitely had less issues with AMD. I’ll be replacing the 5700xt with 6800xt.
- heelix 6y ago
  Ended up with the last few weeks of December off last year and sat down with the mission of getting my Centos 8 box to work with steam. The RX580 worked lovely for VIM, but... went on a grand adventure to get their drivers working. Oh what a pain. Took me, with my limited knowledge most of that time to sort out the potion miscibility roles between steam, centos, and amd. About January, they released a set of updates where all the planets aligned. Went from a grand adventure to a handful of commands. The rest of this year has continued to be a non-event for updates. I'll be looking at one of the ATI cards as lord knows I've failed to find any 3080s, of any make, in stock since launch.

tmaly 6y ago

26.8 Billion transistors, that boggles my mind. How do you even begin to think about testing hardware like that for correctness? I remember my days as an intern at Intel. I remember someone using genetic algorithms to try to construct a test suite for some chip. But it was no where near that transistor count.

andy_ppp 6y ago
You break it down into smaller parts and test those as discrete units.
- Tomte 6y ago
  Not just that: you have dozens, hundreds or thousands of unit A, and of unit B, and of unit C. You test each of these units once, and then some measure of interplay.
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
    How long would formal verification on something this big even take?
    - KSS42 6y ago
      Do you mean RTL to gates formal verification?
      - colejohnson66 6y ago
        Yes. Also, I’m assuming[a] that a GPU would take about the same as a CPU because despite GPUs having billions more transistors, they have a lot of duplicated modules compared to a CPU which has many more different modules but probably only one or two of each (per core). [a]: My knowledge of creating hardware is very limited. So I could be completely wrong.
read_if_gay_ 6y ago
> I remember someone using genetic algorithms to try to construct a test suite for some chip. Could you expand a bit on how that worked? Seems like an interesting application.

vernie 6y ago

Does it come with an improvement in driver quality?

aejnsn 6y ago
Literally, I Ctrl+F'ed to look for a comment to this effect. Preach on. I would buy one if I could run it reliably in my Linux setup.

detaro 6y ago

What's the story with ML stuff on AMD consumer GPUs nowadays? Gotten better, or still "buy NVidia for that"?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dragontamer 6y ago
ROCm is spotty for AMD GPUs. Definitely don't buy these GPUs until AFTER ROCm has declared support. The NAVI line was never officially supported by ROCm (though ROCm 3.7 in August seemed to get some compiles working for the 5700 XT, a year after its release). ------- Generally speaking, ROCm support only comes to cards that have a "Machine Intelligence" analog. MI50 is similar to Radeon VII, so both cards were supported in ROCm. The Rx 580 was similar to MI8, and therefore both were supported. The Rx 550 had no similar MI card, and had issues that are yet resolved today. Rx 570 had no MI card, but apparently its similar enough to the 580 that I'm not hearing many issues. In effect: AMD only focuses their software development / support on Machine Intelligence cards. The cards that happen to line up to the MI-line happen to work... but the cards outside of the MI line are spotty and inconsistent.
- philjohn 6y ago
  AMD is segmenting to Gaming (RDNA) and Compute (CDNA) - CDNA is essentially a continuation of Vega, which was a beast for compute.
  - dragontamer 6y ago
    RDNA's ISA is impressive. Load/store asymmetry, Subvector execution, 1024 vGPRs (!!!!), unlimited sGPRs (not quite, but no longer shared at least), etc. etc. Based on the ISA alone, I'd prefer compute-applications to move to RDNA frankly. Its clearly a better designed architecture. ------------ I can't find any public information on CDNA. I've even emailed ORNL for information, but they responded back saying that NDAs prevent them from saying anything. Whether CDNA is based on NAVI or Vega will be a big question as Frontier launches next year. I hope its Navi based, I really do, because its just better. But I'd "understand" if ROCm can't be ported easily to Wave32 or other issues (RDNA is a huge architectural change).

01100011 6y ago

Good showing from AMD. It will be interesting to see how Nvidia responds. I'm curious if AMD will also suffer from supply issues. Does AMD allow running in "rage mode" without voiding the warranty? Is that something that a 3rd party mfg will offer to cover?

zamalek 6y ago
I assume so, given that Ryzen runs in "rage mode" all the time (and RDNA2 is the first architecture where people from the Zen team have been involved). I also assume that you are going to need a high-end case (notwithstanding the PSU) to provide adequate cooling because, if it is anything like Ryzen, it will react strongly to the cooling available to it. It will likely be noisy and, as always with OC, not all cards will have the same headroom: it allows them to avoid promising headroom that may not exist on your individual card.
- kllrnohj 6y ago
  > given that Ryzen runs in "rage mode" all the time It doesn't. "Rage mode" would be equivalent to Ryzen's PBO. Which is definitely not on by default. It's likely equivalent to just dragging the power limit slider to the highest it goes on MSI afterburner. Letting boost go out of power spec limits, but nothing more. Which can still give decent gains (look at how power starved Ampere is, for example). But the only noteworthy thing here is just it's in the official control panel instead of a 3rd party app.
  - zamadatix 6y ago
    Small correction - Rage mode increases the power budget but AMD confirmed it does not max out the power budget the same as sliding the slider all the way to the right. Speculation point: because of this I almost wonder if it's equivalent to selecting a higher TDP rather than a warranty violating OC like PBO was. One of the things people railed on Nvidia for was for ever slightly less perf you could get a much lower wattage card that was quieter, maybe this was the response to that?

CivBase 6y ago

This is great! I was ready to update to an RTX 30-series card once they were finally available, but now I'm strongly considering a RX 6000-series card. Of course, even if AMD's benchmarks are representative of how the card will actually perform and even with the lower price, I still have to consider Nvidia for their software features. Shadow Play, G-Sync, and RTX Voice are some nice features. Not to mention DLSS... With the $1000 price tag on the RX 6900 XT, though, I think Nvidia would be crazy to not lower the price of the RTX 3090.

djsumdog 6y ago
We'll have to wait for the benchmarks and YouTube videos. What if the new AMD cards look amazing without DLSS and have comparable framerates? I current have a small-form-factor case with a 2080-Ti in it. As it stand, the biggest nVidia card I can put in would be the 3080. I'm curious if the 6900 XT is a two slot design, or if it's massive like the 8090 with the three slot requirement.
- moonbas3 6y ago
  It's 2.5 slots and shorter than the 3090. https://twitter.com/Radeon/status/1321590889396002816/photo/1 https://twitter.com/Radeon/status/1321590889396002816/photo/...
snvzz 6y ago
>Shadow Play, G-Sync, and RTX Voice are some nice features. Not to mention DLSS... AIUI AMD has their own alternatives to all of these (minus RTX Voice, which I hadn't even heard about until your mention). I do not know how good they are, but I expect there to not be much difference. As DLSS 2.0, they're supposedly releasing a competitor in next month's drivers.
- CivBase 6y ago
  I had not heard of ReLive until now, but it's nice to know that AMD has an alternative to ShadowPlay. FreeSync is an adaptive-sync solution, but it isn't a complete alternative to G-Sync. G-Sync displays require special hardware from Nvidia, must adhere to a series of certifications from Nvidia, and don't always support adaptive-sync at low framerates. RTX Voice is probably not super important for a lot of people. However, as someone who prefers to not wear headphones for long periods of time, it sounds like an extremely useful technology. And DLSS 2.0 is a pretty big deal for anyone with a 4K screen. I don't have a 4K monitor, but I regularly connect my computer to my 4K TV so I would probably leverage DLSS often. I hope AMD's upcoming solution is comparable, but I need to see it before I give them credit for it.

Aaronstotle 6y ago

Glad to see competition returning to this space, consumers are in a great place right now.

mchusma 6y ago

Does AMD have anything like DLSS?

snvzz 6y ago
Shortly after DLSS 1.0, AMD released a scaler that's better than DLSS 1.0's under an open license, which NVIDIA proceeded to immediately implement on their drivers, except with a two digit penalty of performance, whereas AMD took a negligible <2%, even on their older cards. As for DLSS 2.0, there's supposedly going to be a new scaler to compete with it on the new drivers next month. I don't know which technology will actually look or perform better, but I do not expect the difference to be dramatic either way.
- zionic 6y ago
  This is false, none of AMD’s scalars have beat DLSS1.0’s quality, or the substantial improvement brought by DLSS2.0
  - aoeusnth1 6y ago
    Can either of you cite sources instead of making assertions?

djsumdog 6y ago

I find it interesting they're going with the 6xxx naming scheme. So the Radeon VII was pretty much a market failure, right?

KSS42 6y ago
It wasn't really meant for gaming. Just a opportunistic card in between Vega and RDNA.

sroussey 6y ago

I half expected them to move their GPU to a chiplet design this year. Also, curious if their APUs next year will be Zen3+RDND2. They have tended to be a year behind when they integrate the two. But I suspect the extra interactions between teams will fix it this time around.

bob1029 6y ago
I think chiplet design is coming with RDNA3. AMD has been putting out material regarding CDNA & InfinityFabric 3 for the datacenter market. See: https://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/AMD-IF.jpg https://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/AMD-I...
shantara 6y ago
RDNA2 seems to be based on the R&D AMD already done for Sony and Microsoft when designing new consoles. It brings largely the same architecture and feature set to the PC platform, with the exception of the proprietary storage technologies. I think it's going to be the next year when we'll see AMD making some improvements beyond the current console status quo.
- zamadatix 6y ago
  It wasn't in the video announcement but AMD has confirmed Microsoft's DirectStorage API will be supported on RDNA2 cards in Windows 10. Worth noting Nvidia also got onboard this train with the 3xxx GPUs as well so it's not some console only proprietary feature.
llampx 6y ago
Being realistic, I believe they will hamstring their desktop APUs to stay at an entry-level performance-wise, firstly because APUs are generally bought by the budget-conscious, and secondly because why cannibalize their own product line by not selling a separate CPU and GPU to the discerning gamer? Laptops are a different story. I started thinking this way after seeing basically no improvement from the 2200G and 2400G to the 3400G.

finikytou 6y ago

for people in deep learning. I want to have a small and performant test server and was thinking of running it on a geforce 3070 (8gb). considering AMD doesn't support CUDA would I kill myself getting a 6800XT instead?

dhagz 6y ago
Honestly? I'd go with a Jetson dev kit. A couple hundred bucks and a whole lot of performance. Plus you get CUDA.
- finikytou 6y ago
  I was looking at the 4gb version would I be abble to do most of the kaggle as practice?
- easde 6y ago
  An old $100 PC with an RTX 2060 6GB would be a lot faster than a Jetson NX and only about $400 total.
singhrac 6y ago
I think you will still likely encounter a lot of upgrade headaches. If you can wait, see if PyTorch/TF add the 6800XT to their test servers (it seems they current test using a Vega 20, but I'm not certain).
easde 6y ago
You'll want tensor cores, so I would stick to the 2000 or 3000-series Nvidia cards. Not to mention the headaches of using AMD cards with any ML framework.
snvzz 6y ago
Careful, there's no ML drivers for Ampere and FP32/64 is capped. These are gaming cards. They'll charge you more for the compute cards, when/if they're available.
- zamadatix 6y ago

0-_-0 6y ago

At this point a big advantage of Nvidia is DLSS an machine learning and a big advantage of AMD is that future console games will be optimised for its CPU+GPU architecture. I'm personally hoping to buy a TSMC card from Nvidia with a bump in memory capacity in the (hopefully near) future.

Animats 6y ago

It's sort of funny. During the period when GPUs were useful for cryptocurrency mining, demand pushed the price of NVidia GPU boards up above $1000, about 2x the usual price. This was a previously unknown price point for gamer-level GPU boards. Once mining demand declined, NVidia kept the price of their new high-end products above $1000, and sales continued. Now $1000+ is the new normal.

jbay808 6y ago
I think demand from machine learning applications has also helped keep prices high.
deafcalculus 6y ago
Die size is up too. At over 600 mm2, it’s a huge chip.
jahabrewer 6y ago
Who cares? The RTX 3090 is not for gamers.
- snvzz 6y ago
  Who's it for, then? They've got no ML drivers and capped FP32/64 performance.
globular-toast 6y ago
It's actually insane. I haven't been running a high end gpu for several years now. The last one I had was an 8800GT. When I got that gpu I felt like I had "made it" in terms of being able to afford the hardware I always wanted as a child. Now with all this news about new gpus I decided to look on ebay for a mid-range AMD chip from the previous generation. Still going for £200-300! I can't justify spending that much on games. Honestly are gamers just expected to have no other hobbies any more?
- lhl 6y ago
  A quick search shows the 8800GT was released in Oct 2007 and was 180 GBP. [0] Using an inflation calculator this comes out to 256 GBP today, [1] so about the same price as the cards you're looking at. That being said, it looks like even in 2019 average weekly wages (in GBP) have declined since 2008, so accounting for inflation, most Britons are maybe just simply poorer now [2] (2020 of course has been even worse. [3]) Anyway, ignoring all that, IMO gaming is still more affordable than it's ever been - you can get a used Xbox One S for about $100 on eBay, or for PC gaming, you can get a used RX 470 or GTX 1060 for a bit less than that, which are fine GPUs for 1080p gaming performance. Also, even relatively modern AAA games can now be played at low-medium settings at 720 or 1080p30 without a dedicated GPU on a late-model Ryzen APU. [0] https://www.theregister.com/Print/2007/11/12/review_nvidia_geforce_8800_gt/ https://www.theregister.com/Print/2007/11/12/review_nvidia_g... [1] https://www.hl.co.uk/tools/calculators/inflation-calculator https://www.hl.co.uk/tools/calculators/inflation-calculator [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49328855 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49328855 [3] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/wage-growth https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/wage-growth

FatDrunknStupid 6y ago

ZX=Spectrum

StillBored 6y ago

Re ML: AMD seem to play less games with product segmentation, and it allows them to drive a truck through the pricing models of their competitors. Presumably, if the price/perf is good enough here, that will do to nvidia's ML market lock, what is going on with intel's midrange xeon line at the moment. The smart money is buying AMD and porting their stuff.

ksec 6y ago

Keep wondering how is Apple going compete in the GPU space. Especially on Mac Pro with ultra low volume. Would have been happy to see the RX6000 on a Mac.

lifty 6y ago
Why not continue to use AMG GPU's like they have been doing until now? They need figure if the driver has any issues with the new architecture, but it shouldn't be a problem.
- ksec 6y ago
  They could, but I remember reading some WWDC slides that suggest ARM Mac will only be using Apple GPU. Had Apple state Mac Pro would stay on x86 I would not have such concern, but they intend to go all in. Which means Mac Pro will get an ARM chip and an Apple GPU.
  - lifty 6y ago
    Well, I expect them to ship an ARM GPU with every Mac Pro, but in addition to that, also a beefy external GPU. The OS would switch between them based on the workload, live they've done before.
    - ksec 6y ago
      External GPU are not supported on ARM Mac. ( At least initially ) as per WWDC slides / documents.
kilo_bravo_3 6y ago
I imagine Apple will keep buying GPUs for their high-end devices. Being on ARM doesn't mean a GPU won't work.
pram 6y ago
Big Sur has RDNA2 drivers already, I wouldn't doubt an 6900XT MPX eventually.

Kye 6y ago

It's surreal having an integrated GPU in a small non-gaming laptop that isn't completely useless (Vega 6 on a Ryzen 5 4500U). AMD is on fire. I hope they keep it up until I get ready to build a real gaming computer.

holoduke 6y ago

26.8 billion of transistors. Pretty impressive. Roughly 2 years ago vega20 and tu10 series have around 13 billion. 4 years ago most common models +-7m and if you look further back it roughly doubles every 2 years. In 2031 we will have mainstream GPUs with 1 trillion transistors. Compare that with the 1996 voodoo 1 with just 1 million transistors.

sushshshsh 6y ago
And still the voodoo 1 games were the most captivating. We went from "3d in arcades only" to "3d anytime you want" :)
- PaulKeeble 6y ago
  For IIRC about £80. They weren't all that expensive. I remember fondly that click as the relay switched over the connection to the 3dfx card. Even by the time Nvidia got on the scene with the GeForce 256 we were still talking £180 for the SDR model and about £220 for the DDR high end model. The market has got massive as have the silicon dies and the price per generation just keeps climbing.

mastax 6y ago

Rumors were that AMD wanted to push the performance and price so they weren't stuck being the discount option forever. This looks like it'll do that. Performance and power efficiency look good, and they implemented most of the Nvidia early adopter features. If they want to really compete with Nvidia as a premium option they'll need to match the non-performance features that Nvidia has: - Driver stability. Nvidia is not perfect but the 5700 series was awful from AMD (had to return mine). They need to at least match Nvidia. - DLSS. It started out as a gimmick but with DLSS 2.0 it's just 70%+ free performance improvement with the only downside being somewhat limited game support. - Video Encoder. Nvidia's encoder has very high quality and is well supported by streaming and recording software. I wonder what sort of improvements the RX 6000 series has? - CUDA, Tensor Cores, Ansel, etc. I don't really use these things but if I'm paying the same amount I want similar capabilities. It's kinda crazy that they're using the same silicon in all three cards; the 6800 has 1/4 of the CUs disabled! It is a big chip for 7nm, though. AMD has said that availability won't be an issue (which could give them a leg up on Nvidia in the near term), but I do have to wonder about it. The 80CU 6900XT was rumored months ago and there was a lot of speculation and incredulity about the memory system to feed all those cores. GDDR6X is Nvidia exclusive so some said a 512-bit bus, or HBM2, or even a combination of HBM and GDDR6. The big cache is an interesting solution, I'm curious how it'll perform. It makes sense in a gaming context where a lot of buffers and textures get reused over the course of a frame. I'm a bit worried about tail latency affecting the 99-percentile frame times which have a huge impact on the subjective experience of smoothness. Also bad for massively parallel compute work.

M277 6y ago
Am I the only one who notices a clear difference between DLSS 2 and native image? I get that "native" is also flawed due to TAA, but DLSS still has some work to do with regards to image clarity imho.
- dragontamer 6y ago
  I can see the visual downgrade. IMO, VRS (variable rate shading), which is in all major GPU providers (NVidia, AMD, and even Intel iGPUs / Xe), provides the "upscaling-ish" performance gains that we want for the next generation. Its much harder to see the difference between native and VRS. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/variable-rate-shading-a-scalpel-in-a-world-of-sledgehammers/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/variable-rate-shading... ----- Its not a "competitive" feature, because everyone is doing it. But it basically accomplishes the same thing: carefully upscaling results (2x2 instead of 1x1) in locations where the gamer probably won't notice.

new_realist 6y ago

Will this finally support the UP3218K on Linux?

shmerl 6y ago

Good announcement. Looking forward to Linux gaming benchmarks.

fomine3 6y ago

As usual and also on competitor, their benchmarks is hype-ish. They overclocked their product in some benchmark and they show "Up To FPS" benchmark that I rarely see in reviewer's benchmark. We need to wait review embargo, as usual.

fomine3 6y ago

Does they said HDMI 2.1 support? It's important to support 4K+HFR+HDR monitor setup.

lclc98 6y ago
Specs[1] don't say which version of HDMI but under "Supported Rendering Format" it does mention HDMI 4k support. [1] https://www.amd.com/en/products/graphics/amd-radeon-rx-6800 https://www.amd.com/en/products/graphics/amd-radeon-rx-6800
- fomine3 6y ago
  HDMI 2.0 is enough to handle "HDMI 4K". So sadly I should assume that it only support HDMI 2.0.
Strom 6y ago
Yes HDMI 2.1 with VRR is confirmed at the bottom of the official product page. https://www.amd.com/en/graphics/amd-radeon-rx-6000-series https://www.amd.com/en/graphics/amd-radeon-rx-6000-series

cwhiz 6y ago

In order to achieve peak performance, you need a Ryzen CPU. I’m not sure how I feel about that.

pjmlp 6y ago

DirectX 12 Ultimate support, nice catching up.

zohairshaikh72 6y ago

I'm glad I waited before investing in 3k series