7 ms·

The R9 Fury is AMD’s best card in years, but just who is it for?

67 points by Audiophilip 11y ago

fegu 11y ago
I wish reviewers would include some measure (real, not paper) on GPGPU performance. WPA hashes per second is a widely known reference number for integer performance. Neural network training is a similar one for floats.
- raverbashing 11y ago
  Yeah, it seems this is becoming more relevant than FPSs on a game nowadays
ComputerGuru 11y ago
The R9 Fury is for me and anyone else who's main machine is a virtual one. nVidia has locked out its consumer graphics cards from being passed-through to a virtual machine unless you buy their multi-thousand-dollar workstation graphics cards, while AMD lets you pass your graphics cards through to your VMs, no problem. Edit: For clarification, if you want to use a virtual machine directly (i.e. not in a window or a virtual terminal on another machine running a virtual machine browser), keyboard and mousing directly into the VM and having the VM direct its output directly to a video card/monitor, you must "pass through" the video card so the VM "owns" it exclusively and the host machine does not. Regardless of whether you want gaming-level graphics or just basic VGA output, you need to give it an actual, real graphics card (there are exceptions with new cards by nVidia that understand VMs and let you "create" a graphics card out of a subsection of a more powerful card, but at prohibitive prices). AMD's entire graphics card lineup, from their $20 to their $700 GPUs will let you do this. nVidia's cards detect they're being passed-through to a VM and won't install the drivers, unless you perform a (risky) hardware hack or use their professional graphics cards that a) aren't designed nor optimized for consumer graphics card use, and b) cost at least an order of magnitude more than their regular graphics cards.
- Fr0styMatt8 11y ago
  I really wish AMD would promote this type of thing more heavily in general (having advanced features that Nvidia restricts to their high-cost cards). I seem to remember a similar thing with AMD being fantastic for Bitcoin mining and from memory it's because Nvidia gimped certain features that were on the cards, while AMD did not. (on that note, I'm constantly annoyed that despite it being Nvidia specific, everyone supports CUDA for everything cool). I understand companies have to do this to segregate their products and that it's impractical to have separate fab lines for a chip family for this kind of difference. It's still something I think AMD has a competitive advantage on though and they really need to push that alone (unless they just don't really want to - to sell their own high-end professional cards). A worse example of this is Nvidia cards not running in systems that have AMD graphics cards in them. Which means, for example, you can't buy a low/mid-range Nvidia card to sit in your system as a dedicated PhysX/CUDA card. I'd consider such a setup for my system and I imagine there's probably others like me out there.
  - steckerbrett 11y ago
    AMD didn't expose the necessary features for good SHA256 performance on their GPUs either, for a while you had to hack their SDK to get them.
    - noipv4 11y ago
      IIRC, it was the BFI_INT instruction.
  - woadwarrior01 11y ago
    The bitcoin mining edge that AMD cards had over Nvidia cards was came down to the AMD ISA having a single cycle hardware rotate instruction, which the NVIDIA cards lacked. Also the AMD philosophy of many dumb cores vs the Nvidia's philosophy of fewer smarter cores made a significant difference.
    - optimiz3 11y ago
andy_ppp 11y ago
The performance difference are a few percent right? About 10-15 FPS? I guess nvidia are still considered the best but that means AMD have to reduce prices, which is better for me. Reminds me that the nvidia graphics card in my MacBook is going wrong. Hmmm.
- digitalzombie 11y ago
  Depending on the gen, there was a recall recently for MacBook btw, a few months back. My buddy got recall and they gave him his money back IIRC.
  - andy_ppp 11y ago
    Yes, even though mine is not involved in the recall it exhibits all of the same signs as those that are. Hmmm.
    - STRML 11y ago
      Same here. Late 2013? Exact same problems, somewhat mitigated in Yosemite (fewer complete crashes) but still the occasional garbled screen or inability to switch to dGPU. Weirdest problem: can't start up the MacBook (physically) cold without garbled video. Have to start it up, let it warm up a bit and get the juju flowing, then hard reboot.
      - andy_ppp 11y ago
        Oh I should be careful what I'm saying, my problems are limited to intermittent screen craziness (flickering of the top half of the screen), GPU switching is a non issue because I have a program I use that forces discrete GPU. And most importantly no crashes recently.
lqdc13 11y ago
It is very much application-dependent. For games they might be similar, but that's about it. AMD cards tend to have much better integer performance, which is good for cryptography-related tasks. NVidia has way more RAM + better float performance. Plus the fact that many libs only implement things with cuda as backend and not opencl, you are pretty much stuck with only one viable option.
- dogma1138 11y ago
  NVIDIA was only faster in half/mixed precision compute, in full precision AMD was faster (with the exception of Titan cards besides the Titan X which doesn't have good full precision support either). AMD has also always loaded the cards with much more RAM (8GB vs 3GB in the previous gen) and with much higher memory bandwidth (512bit vs 384bit), NVIDIA countered it with effective memory management and compression support. It's a bit funny that in the previous gen AMD boasted that 8GB is needed for 4K while NVIDIA was shipping cards with only 3, now AMD is pointing with a smirk when AMD can't ship it's high end cards with more than 4GB due to current HBM limitations while NVIDIA is shipping 6 and 12GB cards.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- kenrikm 11y ago
  Yes it is too early. Wrong thread.
  - powertower 11y ago
    Wow. I just noticed that too. Deleted.
linky123 11y ago
CUDA is so important to us, we don't even consider AMD.
- Zardoz84 11y ago
  Your are looked to a single vendor on his proprietary language ? You should move to use OpenCL ASAP.
  - linky123 11y ago
    Yes. It provides the performance we need. Nothing else comes close.
ploxiln 11y ago
The reason I tend to be more interested in AMD graphics cards is that I want basically workable open source drivers in Linux. AMD pays a couple of people to maintain the upstream linux driver for their cards, NVidia doesn't. So if you have an AMD card that isn't totally new in the last 2 months, you get a working proper resolution desktop with no hassle. (So for this strategy to work with the Fury, you'd probably have to wait another month or two.) I still dual-boot windows just to play recent games, it pretty much always works better than the alternatives, like the closed source Catalyst driver, wine, even native ports. An NVidia card would probably work a bit better for this purpose, and their closed source drivers for linux are also better, but for me the open source drivers are the more significant factor.
- Zardoz84 11y ago
  But the AMD drivers keeps being a piece of shit on Linux ? I know that improve a lot (from buggy desktop to usable), but lags behind NVIDIA drivers or are at similar level. I'm too tired of fight with issues of these drivers, plus AMD have a bad tendency of drop support for old video cards. I can understand that they drop support for desktop old cards, but not should be too fast with notebooks cards, that can't replace the GPU.
- dogma1138 11y ago
  NVIDIA releases Linux and BSD drivers every month together with the Windows drivers (Linux drivers are released 1 week earlier usually) They aren't GPL but the shader compilers in the drivers are considered "trade secrets" in this industry, AMD doesn't release those under GPL or any other OSS license either. If you want you have nouveau driers which NVIDIA sorta supports, but they are a piece of crap compared to the "retail" ones. From testing both NVIDIA and AMD drivers for Steam OS i have to say that NVIDIA is lightyears a head of anything AMD or ATI has ever put out on Linux. The drivers are stable, allow for overclocking, have full NVAPI support, a much better OpenGL mini driver (only ones to support 4.3) and are even aware of WINE and similar solutions and optimize it in the driver. Now with NVIDIA buying Transgaming (probably for Tegra based consoles) the support for non-native games will probably even be better, i wont be surprised if enough legal loopholes to be found (Wine has some issues with requiring certain DLL's ;)) to see NVIDIA supports running games with no official linux support through their Geforce Experience software which is now rumored to come out after the trasngaming purchase.

67 points by Audiophilip 11y ago

fegu 11y ago

I wish reviewers would include some measure (real, not paper) on GPGPU performance. WPA hashes per second is a widely known reference number for integer performance. Neural network training is a similar one for floats.

raverbashing 11y ago
Yeah, it seems this is becoming more relevant than FPSs on a game nowadays

ComputerGuru 11y ago

The R9 Fury is for me and anyone else who's main machine is a virtual one. nVidia has locked out its consumer graphics cards from being passed-through to a virtual machine unless you buy their multi-thousand-dollar workstation graphics cards, while AMD lets you pass your graphics cards through to your VMs, no problem. Edit: For clarification, if you want to use a virtual machine directly (i.e. not in a window or a virtual terminal on another machine running a virtual machine browser), keyboard and mousing directly into the VM and having the VM direct its output directly to a video card/monitor, you must "pass through" the video card so the VM "owns" it exclusively and the host machine does not. Regardless of whether you want gaming-level graphics or just basic VGA output, you need to give it an actual, real graphics card (there are exceptions with new cards by nVidia that understand VMs and let you "create" a graphics card out of a subsection of a more powerful card, but at prohibitive prices). AMD's entire graphics card lineup, from their $20 to their $700 GPUs will let you do this. nVidia's cards detect they're being passed-through to a VM and won't install the drivers, unless you perform a (risky) hardware hack or use their professional graphics cards that a) aren't designed nor optimized for consumer graphics card use, and b) cost at least an order of magnitude more than their regular graphics cards.

Fr0styMatt8 11y ago
I really wish AMD would promote this type of thing more heavily in general (having advanced features that Nvidia restricts to their high-cost cards). I seem to remember a similar thing with AMD being fantastic for Bitcoin mining and from memory it's because Nvidia gimped certain features that were on the cards, while AMD did not. (on that note, I'm constantly annoyed that despite it being Nvidia specific, everyone supports CUDA for everything cool). I understand companies have to do this to segregate their products and that it's impractical to have separate fab lines for a chip family for this kind of difference. It's still something I think AMD has a competitive advantage on though and they really need to push that alone (unless they just don't really want to - to sell their own high-end professional cards). A worse example of this is Nvidia cards not running in systems that have AMD graphics cards in them. Which means, for example, you can't buy a low/mid-range Nvidia card to sit in your system as a dedicated PhysX/CUDA card. I'd consider such a setup for my system and I imagine there's probably others like me out there.
- steckerbrett 11y ago
  AMD didn't expose the necessary features for good SHA256 performance on their GPUs either, for a while you had to hack their SDK to get them.
  - noipv4 11y ago
    IIRC, it was the BFI_INT instruction.
- woadwarrior01 11y ago
  The bitcoin mining edge that AMD cards had over Nvidia cards was came down to the AMD ISA having a single cycle hardware rotate instruction, which the NVIDIA cards lacked. Also the AMD philosophy of many dumb cores vs the Nvidia's philosophy of fewer smarter cores made a significant difference.
  - optimiz3 11y ago

andy_ppp 11y ago

The performance difference are a few percent right? About 10-15 FPS? I guess nvidia are still considered the best but that means AMD have to reduce prices, which is better for me. Reminds me that the nvidia graphics card in my MacBook is going wrong. Hmmm.

digitalzombie 11y ago
Depending on the gen, there was a recall recently for MacBook btw, a few months back. My buddy got recall and they gave him his money back IIRC.
- andy_ppp 11y ago
  Yes, even though mine is not involved in the recall it exhibits all of the same signs as those that are. Hmmm.
  - STRML 11y ago
    Same here. Late 2013? Exact same problems, somewhat mitigated in Yosemite (fewer complete crashes) but still the occasional garbled screen or inability to switch to dGPU. Weirdest problem: can't start up the MacBook (physically) cold without garbled video. Have to start it up, let it warm up a bit and get the juju flowing, then hard reboot.
    - andy_ppp 11y ago
      Oh I should be careful what I'm saying, my problems are limited to intermittent screen craziness (flickering of the top half of the screen), GPU switching is a non issue because I have a program I use that forces discrete GPU. And most importantly no crashes recently.

lqdc13 11y ago

It is very much application-dependent. For games they might be similar, but that's about it. AMD cards tend to have much better integer performance, which is good for cryptography-related tasks. NVidia has way more RAM + better float performance. Plus the fact that many libs only implement things with cuda as backend and not opencl, you are pretty much stuck with only one viable option.

dogma1138 11y ago
NVIDIA was only faster in half/mixed precision compute, in full precision AMD was faster (with the exception of Titan cards besides the Titan X which doesn't have good full precision support either). AMD has also always loaded the cards with much more RAM (8GB vs 3GB in the previous gen) and with much higher memory bandwidth (512bit vs 384bit), NVIDIA countered it with effective memory management and compression support. It's a bit funny that in the previous gen AMD boasted that 8GB is needed for 4K while NVIDIA was shipping cards with only 3, now AMD is pointing with a smirk when AMD can't ship it's high end cards with more than 4GB due to current HBM limitations while NVIDIA is shipping 6 and 12GB cards.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

kenrikm 11y ago
Yes it is too early. Wrong thread.
- powertower 11y ago
  Wow. I just noticed that too. Deleted.

linky123 11y ago

CUDA is so important to us, we don't even consider AMD.

Zardoz84 11y ago
Your are looked to a single vendor on his proprietary language ? You should move to use OpenCL ASAP.
- linky123 11y ago
  Yes. It provides the performance we need. Nothing else comes close.

ploxiln 11y ago

The reason I tend to be more interested in AMD graphics cards is that I want basically workable open source drivers in Linux. AMD pays a couple of people to maintain the upstream linux driver for their cards, NVidia doesn't. So if you have an AMD card that isn't totally new in the last 2 months, you get a working proper resolution desktop with no hassle. (So for this strategy to work with the Fury, you'd probably have to wait another month or two.) I still dual-boot windows just to play recent games, it pretty much always works better than the alternatives, like the closed source Catalyst driver, wine, even native ports. An NVidia card would probably work a bit better for this purpose, and their closed source drivers for linux are also better, but for me the open source drivers are the more significant factor.

Zardoz84 11y ago
But the AMD drivers keeps being a piece of shit on Linux ? I know that improve a lot (from buggy desktop to usable), but lags behind NVIDIA drivers or are at similar level. I'm too tired of fight with issues of these drivers, plus AMD have a bad tendency of drop support for old video cards. I can understand that they drop support for desktop old cards, but not should be too fast with notebooks cards, that can't replace the GPU.
dogma1138 11y ago
NVIDIA releases Linux and BSD drivers every month together with the Windows drivers (Linux drivers are released 1 week earlier usually) They aren't GPL but the shader compilers in the drivers are considered "trade secrets" in this industry, AMD doesn't release those under GPL or any other OSS license either. If you want you have nouveau driers which NVIDIA sorta supports, but they are a piece of crap compared to the "retail" ones. From testing both NVIDIA and AMD drivers for Steam OS i have to say that NVIDIA is lightyears a head of anything AMD or ATI has ever put out on Linux. The drivers are stable, allow for overclocking, have full NVAPI support, a much better OpenGL mini driver (only ones to support 4.3) and are even aware of WINE and similar solutions and optimize it in the driver. Now with NVIDIA buying Transgaming (probably for Tegra based consoles) the support for non-native games will probably even be better, i wont be surprised if enough legal loopholes to be found (Wine has some issues with requiring certain DLL's ;)) to see NVIDIA supports running games with no official linux support through their Geforce Experience software which is now rumored to come out after the trasngaming purchase.