AMD Radeon HD 6970 already benchmarked? Enough to beat GTX480 in Tesselation?

[Scali]

Wrong, Almost every game that uses DX11 runs fine on the Radeons, by the time a game comes out using a lot of tessellation power these cards will have run their course.

Almost every game that uses DX11 so far, is an AMD-sponsored game.
Now we are seeing the first nVidia-sponsored DX11-games.

 

[badb0y]

Almost every game that uses DX11 so far, is an AMD-sponsored game.
Now we are seeing the first nVidia-sponsored DX11-games.

So shouldn't you wait before you pull your guins out? We can only judge based on what's out now, not what is going to be out in 1 year.

 

[Scali]

So shouldn't you wait before you pull your guins out? We can only judge based on what's out now, not what is going to be out in 1 year.

I'm not a gamer. I'm a developer. I want good tessellation hardware now, not in 1 year.
Heck, I've wanted good tessellation hardware many years ago.

 

[n0x1ous]

I dunno, checkbox feature seems appropriate, yet again?

Yes, that's what I was looking for. There in hardware but won't be supported at all....

 

[Martimus]

Kinda reminds you of the AMD of 2005-2006 leading up to Conroe release when they coasted for a while and it bit them in the ass when the competition caught up.

I hope not, but I get a dejavu'ee feeling about it. Tessellation should have been in the bag for AMD.

Here's my mental analogy. We all feel a little over-exposed to the Physx hype, right?

Well imagine how surprised we'd all be if Physx made it into the DX12 spec, Nvidia releases their first DX12 part before AMD (and does well in Physx as we'd all expect) and then AMD comes round late to the DX12 release scene but with their first DX12 (and first Physx chip) just clobbering Nvidia's best Physx parts despite the lengthy history Nvidia has had to perfect their Physx hardware?

That's how I personally feel about AMD and tessellation. I'm just gobsmacked that despite their experience with the technology and the history of making it work and so on that they got one-upped by Nvidia right out of the gate with Nvidia's first foray into the technology.

Being a CPU guy more so than a GPU guy, this would be like if Intel's first effort at integrating the memory controller (something AMD had been perfecting for years) came out of the gate above and beyond the performance of AMD's most advanced IMC at the time.

Yes, but other than patents, it is usually better to get into a technology later than earlier. There are many reasons for this, but I will go over a few based on my design and manufacturing experience:

1. You don't have any legacy designs that push down the efficiency of your current design (complete redesigns are costly in both time and money, and you are likely to have learned that portions of your initial design were flawed.) If those legacy designs are major portions of the design (require a large amount of time or money to correct) you are likely to need to hold on to it while you try to incrementally improve the design. Without having any legacy, you are free to design something avoiding those known inefficiencies in your competitors design.

2. You can leverage the current designs of your competitors to reduce your own R&D budgets. You won't need nearly as much time or money to design a similar function part that your competitor already designed. This means that you won't be that far behind, and will have less red ink to make up with your initial design (allowing you to be more flexible in your second generation design as well, since you don't need to sell as many parts from the first generation to make up the costs). This part is VERY important. I remember a project I worked on where we could not even start working on the third generation product because we hadn't sold enough of the first and second generation to cover our expenses on R&D. I know at least a half dozen areas that we could easily improve with the next iteration of design, but it wasn't considered financially sound to continue to iterate the design.

3. You can build your manufacturing around more current equipment, or just plain more effective equipment for the design. Since you don't have any legacy manufacturing equipment for the design, you don't have as many limitations to what you can build since you are buying all of the manufacturing equipment from scratch. As a bonus, your equipment is likely to be more efficient than your competitors legacy equipment, so your manufacturing costs are likely to be lower than your competitors.

4. Compatibility. You have no current lineup, so you don't have to make any design concessions in order to maintain compatibility to your legacy products. This way you can have higher performing parts than your competitor.

 

[SirPauly]

We can only judge based on what's out now, not what is going to be out in 1 year.

That's what synthetics and extremer tests are for me. To use only current titles and try to gauge what may be offered for the future, well, pretty hard to gauge. Individuals own their hardware for different windows of time -- 6 months -- 1 year -- 1 1/2 -- 2 to 3 years.

 

[SlowSpyder]

It is amazing that tessellation is such a hot topic for a few people right now. But they were not complaining about Nvidia not having any tessellation capability for years.

Well, reading through this thread it is obvious to me. I need to unload my Radeon and buy a GTX480. My Radeon doesn't play Heaven Benchmark fast enough. It's such a good game.

 

[at80eighty]

my radeon doesn't play heaven benchmark fast enough. It's such a good game.

el oh el

 

[Genx87]

It is amazing that tessellation is such a hot topic for a few people right now. But they were not complaining about Nvidia not having any tessellation capability for years.

Well, reading through this thread it is obvious to me. I need to unload my Radeon and buy a GTX480. My Radeon doesn't play Heaven Benchmark fast enough. It's such a good game.

DX11 hasnt been out for years.

 

[Arkadrel]

Its just funny that after the release of barts, the hot topic on these forums is it tessellation power. Not the fact that it brought down prices of other cards, not that it has 3d, not that it can support 6 monitors. Non of the pros, only its single con. I'd say nVidia PR did a great job.

+1 interwebs to you too.

Yes nvidia are the master of PR/Spin and marketing/dirty deals, they make Intel look bad at it lmao. Without it, I dont think theyd be as well off as they are today.

Today's controversy is brought to you, in part, by 'the way it's meant to be portrayed' (TWIMTBP) and the correlated forum presence.

Boss: "Gaming benchmarks on the 6800 are fine? Crossfire is fine? Uh oh! Run the tessellation machine!"

Underling: "But boss, where are the tessellation games...the gaming benchmarks are fine in both camps?!"

Boss: "Forget the games kid! (stamps out his cigarette) Run Unigine! Run some synthetic tessellation only benchmarks! That we beat 'em in something will stop the cards from flying off the shelves!"

Underling: "Yes Sir!"

Underling runs to different forums: "Hey guys! Seen this latest benchmark that has little impact on how games in general are played right now? Give it a long look! (Damn I better hurry up, the 6800 has just been released, gotta stop the flow of the 9:1 DX11 marketshare holder!)" Victory Green Team! Yay!!!!

Underling: "Oh wait, the 6850 actually is pretty good bang for the buck....hrm, better not let my boss see that I run AMD"

Blah blah blah blah, I see through it. I'm not the only one.

hahahaha lmao ... thats probably an exaggeration.. but might not be that far off.

 

[SlowSpyder]

DX11 hasnt been out for years.

But the way Physx is pushed by people here, (even though it's not part of DX) I would think that wouldn't matter. There are some parallels. Hardware accelerated physics is very likely the future. Tessellation was obviously the future when looking forward from the Radeon 8500 release. Neither is (was) part of DX. Both had a handful of games that used the technology. TruForm tessellation has been replaced by the tessellation spec in DX, my guess is Physx will be a fart in the wind as well.

Here is a list of games that supported Trufrom: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TruForm#Games_with_TruForm_support

So we have ATI that has a feature that can add to the immersion of a game, that appears to be part of the future of gaming from back then, but this technology wasn't used by Nvidia. Where was the angst back then? It seems like this is only a hot topic now that Nvidia has a superior tessellator setup.

Honest question, I don't use any games that use tessellation, are there games that a Radeon cannot play to a satisfactory level that uses tessellation now? When games that use heavy tessellation come, will most of us still be gaming on Radeon 5870's and GTX480's? I keep my cards for about 12 - 18 months, maybe longer if it really suits my needs.

 

[Scali]

Its just funny that after the release of barts, the hot topic on these forums is it tessellation power.

I can't speak for other people, but I've been talking about tessellation even before the 5000-series had been out (and actually implementing it on a GeForce 8800GTS).
I had also said that I was rather underwhelmed with the scaling of tessellation of the 5000-series, even before Fermi was out.
I then said that I was hoping that AMD would address it in their next generation... so I was a bit disappointed with Barts.

 

[blastingcap]

I can't speak for other people, but I've been talking about tessellation even before the 5000-series had been out (and actually implementing it on a GeForce 8800GTS).
I had also said that I was rather underwhelmed with the scaling of tessellation of the 5000-series, even before Fermi was out.
I then said that I was hoping that AMD would address it in their next generation... so I was a bit disappointed with Barts.

Barts is basically a refresh, which caught me by surprise--I thought it would also have 4D shaders etc. but nope. Cayman is the one with the new arch and the slide saying it has scalable tessellation which implies that they split up their geometry engine.

 

[Triggaaar]

Ok Scali, so you think tesselation is an important feature to develop, for the long term progress of graphics cards. Fair enough. But:

are there games that a Radeon cannot play to a satisfactory level that uses tessellation now?

As Steve says, we won't be keeping these cards for that long, so while we want progress, the most important thing for a card now is that it works well with the games that are out now/coming out soon.

 

[SirPauly]

But the way Physx is pushed by people here, (even though it's not part of DX) I would think that wouldn't matter. There are some parallels. Hardware accelerated physics is very likely the future. Tessellation was obviously the future when looking forward from the Radeon 8500 release. Neither is (was) part of DX. Both had a handful of games that used the technology. TruForm tessellation has been replaced by the tessellation spec in DX, my guess is Physx will be a fart in the wind as well.

Here is a list of games that supported Trufrom: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TruForm#Games_with_TruForm_support

So we have ATI that has a feature that can add to the immersion of a game, that appears to be part of the future of gaming from back then, but this technology wasn't used by Nvidia. Where was the angst back then? It seems like this is only a hot topic now that Nvidia has a superior tessellator setup.

Honest question, I don't use any games that use tessellation, are there games that a Radeon cannot play to a satisfactory level that uses tessellation now? When games that use heavy tessellation come, will most of us still be gaming on Radeon 5870's and GTX480's? I keep my cards for about 12 - 18 months, maybe longer if it really suits my needs.

Truform, from my understanding, was N-Patches and supported by DirectX. Personally enjoyed the feature in Half-life and Myth 3.

 

[extra]

Right. And AMD had no reason to send that email out that was directly caused by Nvidia. It is simply that "AMD's tessellation units aren't as strong as Nvidia's" in isolation that caused it. That's exactly what everyone believes in this scenario. Where's the 'eye rolling' emoticon?

<snip> is pretty good bang for the buck....hrm, better not let my boss see that I run AMD"

Blah blah blah blah, I see through it. I'm not the only one.

Hahahaha, awesome post. And yeah, I agree. Both camps tessellation is fast enough for usage in games...you can make a benchmark that shows anything.

 

[Genx87]

But the way Physx is pushed by people here, (even though it's not part of DX) I would think that wouldn't matter. There are some parallels. Hardware accelerated physics is very likely the future. Tessellation was obviously the future when looking forward from the Radeon 8500 release. Neither is (was) part of DX. Both had a handful of games that used the technology. TruForm tessellation has been replaced by the tessellation spec in DX, my guess is Physx will be a fart in the wind as well.

Here is a list of games that supported Trufrom: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TruForm#Games_with_TruForm_support

So we have ATI that has a feature that can add to the immersion of a game, that appears to be part of the future of gaming from back then, but this technology wasn't used by Nvidia. Where was the angst back then? It seems like this is only a hot topic now that Nvidia has a superior tessellator setup.

Honest question, I don't use any games that use tessellation, are there games that a Radeon cannot play to a satisfactory level that uses tessellation now? When games that use heavy tessellation come, will most of us still be gaming on Radeon 5870's and GTX480's? I keep my cards for about 12 - 18 months, maybe longer if it really suits my needs.

The most obvious reason to me was ATI pushed Truform, it probably wasnt very good, and well, ATI and now AMD dont have the relations necessary to pull it off. Unlike Nvidia which can push PhysX until the industry settles on a standard. I suspect OpenCL will be the API used on both cards for Physics calls. WHich company has had better and more robust support of OpenCL? And Tesselation will also become more utilized now that Nvidia is pushing it going forward with Fermi and later based products.

 

[Martimus]

The most obvious reason to me was ATI pushed Truform, it probably wasnt very good, and well, ATI and now AMD dont have the relations necessary to pull it off. Unlike Nvidia which can push PhysX until the industry settles on a standard. I suspect OpenCL will be the API used on both cards for Physics calls. WHich company has had better and more robust support of OpenCL? And Tesselation will also become more utilized now that Nvidia is pushing it going forward with Fermi and later based products.

Generally, given equal equal R&D budgets, the company that supports a feature second will do it better for the reasons I posted above. So it is likely the company trailing in this regard will have the superior solution when the feature is actually used.

That said, I have no idea who is leading in this area.

 

[Scali]

As Steve says, we won't be keeping these cards for that long, so while we want progress, the most important thing for a card now is that it works well with the games that are out now/coming out soon.

And you can't say for sure what will happen with the games that will be coming out soon. Let's say that people who buy a 6800-series card now, will be using it for about 2-3 years before they upgrade. That's quite some time, and quite a lot of games to be released.
We'll know for sure in 2-3 years, whether AMD or nVidia took the right approach with the current generations.

 

[Chiropteran]

Almost every game that uses DX11 so far, is an AMD-sponsored game.

Funny how that happens when nVidia is 9 months late to the DX11 party.

And you can't say for sure what will happen with the games that will be coming out soon. Let's say that people who buy a 6800-series card now, will be using it for about 2-3 years before they upgrade. That's quite some time, and quite a lot of games to be released.

What about all the people that bought an nvidia card 9 months ago? They have no tesselation or DX11 support at all, are they going to be using those cards for another 1.5-2 years?

 

[Scali]

Funny how that happens when nVidia is 9 months late to the DX11 party.

Yea, but that was not my point (nVidia was focusing more on PhysX in their sponsored games at the time, but that's another story).
What I meant was: it's not too surprising that a lot of current DX11 games are rather AMD-friendly (although ironically even some of the AMD-sponsored games work better on nVidia cards). I think from now on, that is going to change, as nVidia is now moving the focus to DX11, and their TWIMTBP program includes more developers and more technologies than AMD's.

What about all the people that bought an nvidia card 9 months ago? They have no tesselation or DX11 support at all, are they going to be using those cards for another 1.5-2 years?

Probably, but why do you ask, and why ask me?

 

[Chiropteran]

Probably, but why do you ask, and why ask me?

I am just trying to figure out what your point is. You are complaining that maybe the 6850 cards you buy today will be outdated in 2-3 years, something that is really just speculation. Yet you can look at the past and see that just about any nvidia card you bought 9 months ago is already out of date on current games. So what exactly is so bad about a 6850 hypotheticaly being a little slow when it comes to games 2 years from now?

 

[Scali]

I am just trying to figure out what your point is. You are complaining that maybe the 6850 cards you buy today will be outdated in 2-3 years, something that is really just speculation. Yet you can look at the past and see that just about any nvidia card you bought 9 months ago is already out of date on current games. So what exactly is so bad about a 6850 hypotheticaly being a little slow when it comes to games 2 years from now?

The difference is, those nVidia cards you speak of, are not DX11 cards. They were never marketed as such, and people were never promised any tessellation.
People buying these cards know (or should know) full well that they have not bought the latest technology, and will be missing out.

The story with 6800-series is a bit different. They are supposed to be cutting-edge right now, the latest DX11 cards, and AMD has been promoting DX11 and tessellation for a while now. So it would be a bit of a letdown if they turn out not to be able to run DX11 games very well. After all, that is what the people were promised by AMD.
Or the other way around, if developers bow down to AMD's wishes, then the nVidia users won't be able to enjoy their DX11 cards to the fullest either. But somehow I don't see that happening.

 

[Skurge]

I want more news about the 6970, not another tessellation discussion.

 

[Chiropteran]

The story with 6800-series is a bit different. They are supposed to be cutting-edge right now, the latest DX11 cards,

No, they aren't. These newly released cards are the new budget mid-range cards. The cutting-edge stuff is coming out in a month.