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[FZ] AMD Fiji 390x Model Now Packed With 8GB HBM Video RAM

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100% sure its...

4096-bit HBM -> 4 GBs -> 512 GB/s
256-bit GDDR5 -> 4 GBs -> 160 GB/s
(With Samsung's 1 GB/8 Gb GDDR5 we could probably see 4 GB + 8 GB models)
 
I think a 8 GB 390X will not happen until they can get 2 GB HBM chips which they are working on at this time and hope to have soon. I know i read it a few weeks ago, so it will come after launch of 4 GB 390X. I really don't see the room on a card for putting 8 HBM chips with 1024 bit memory bus without it being a huge card with extra manufacting cost. If you interleave the chips you will run into many other problems with signals timing, memory clearing, etc. Anytime you interleave/muti-plex something, it's not going to scale 100%. I'm sure they could make it work but you will lose preformance. The best preformance will be from 2 GB HBM chips.
 
I know this is slightly off topic...but am I the only one hoping that something like HBM also replaces DDR3/4 soonish?


On topic: I don't care if it's 4 or 8. For 4K I'll totally be fine with 4 since I doubt that this card would run a Triple A game in 4K with 200% resolution scaling + 4xMSAA and so on.
 
I'm thinking $799 for the 8gb vers and $649 for the 4gb one.

While that sounds like a deal compared to $1000 video cards, people who are buying cards at prices like this are supporting and actively promoting the advancement of permanent price increases among all tiers of video cards. PC gamers will be essentially paying twice as much on a video card over a new console just to be able to game at >=1440p 60fps. There is no price that can be put on someone's hobby, but there is a price range at which people will stop paying. Nvidia opened the flood gates with Titan being in a class entirely by itself and being priced entirely inappropriately, but if AMD reponds with higher-than-ever AMD prices, and people use Titan pricing as validation, then it's a sealed deal and we'll be forever looking at substantially higher prices for new high end video cards.

I want to see Nvidia put in their place, but to me a $750 video card essentially competing with a $1000 video card might as well be like saying a $300 steak at Bob's Meat Factory is every bit, if not better, than the $350 one at John's Cow House.
 
While that sounds like a deal compared to $1000 video cards, people who are buying cards at prices like this are supporting and actively promoting the advancement of permanent price increases among all tiers of video cards. PC gamers will be essentially paying twice as much on a video card over a new console just to be able to game at >=1440p 60fps. There is no price that can be put on someone's hobby, but there is a price range at which people will stop paying. Nvidia opened the flood gates with Titan being in a class entirely by itself and being priced entirely inappropriately, but if AMD reponds with higher-than-ever AMD prices, and people use Titan pricing as validation, then it's a sealed deal and we'll be forever looking at substantially higher prices for new high end video cards.

I want to see Nvidia put in their place, but to me a $750 video card essentially competing with a $1000 video card might as well be like saying a $300 steak at Bob's Meat Factory is every bit, if not better, than the $350 one at John's Cow House.

Until we see lower-performing cards released at higher prices, what's your issue?

The 295x2 already costs ~$700. You're acting like flagship cards not being cost-effective is a new threat to mainstream cards or something. This has literally been happening since the dawn of GPU's.

It's more like saying John's Cow House opened a new restaurant and you're mad even though you've never been to their old place. It shouldn't be relevant to you. Your Outback Steakhouse is still open for business. Relax.
 
I want to see Nvidia put in their place, but to me a $750 video card essentially competing with a $1000 video card might as well be like saying a $300 steak at Bob's Meat Factory is every bit, if not better, than the $350 one at John's Cow House.
If the 390X is $750 for the same performance that's a huge difference, the money saved can buy a monitor or a whole bunch of games.
 
does 4gb of HBM of game data get refreshed faster than 4 gb of GDDR5 ?
just wondering if it could be equal to say 6gb of GDDR5 ?
 
does 4gb of HBM of game data get refreshed faster than 4 gb of GDDR5 ?
just wondering if it could be equal to say 6gb of GDDR5 ?

Bandwidth is different to capacity. You need capacity to load raw art assets to be manipulated to render a scene, but it always starts with raw assets (can be in multiple formats, even compressed textures, but most developers use raw to not lose fidelity in subsequent steps). If you lack capacity, the vram has to be constantly flushed to load new art, this causes stutters in the case of small transfers, and major fps tanking in the case of large asset transfers from system ram.

To give some perspective, each raw 2K texture is 16MB (2048 x 2048 x 4 channel = 16MB) in vram. Each 4k texture is 64MB. This is why SoM ultra HD texture pack struggles even at 1080p on cards with less than 4GB vram.
 
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Bandwidth is different to capacity. You need capacity to load raw art assets to be manipulated to render a scene, but it always starts with raw assets (can be in multiple formats, even compressed textures, but most developers use raw to not lose fidelity in subsequent steps). If you lack capacity, the vram has to be constantly flushed to load new art, this causes stutters in the case of small transfers, and major fps tanking in the case of large asset transfers from system ram.
ok thanks
 
HBM or GDDR5 doent matter needs to pass through PCIe, if a game engine doesnt prepare for this you will see stutters everywhere, think about it, there are games with installations of 20gb, no gpu have that kind of vram so they need to stream textures in and out, the less vram you have the more in and out, and more probs of the game to need a texture that is sitting on the ram, causing stutters
 
I know this is slightly off topic...but am I the only one hoping that something like HBM also replaces DDR3/4 soonish?


On topic: I don't care if it's 4 or 8. For 4K I'll totally be fine with 4 since I doubt that this card would run a Triple A game in 4K with 200% resolution scaling + 4xMSAA and so on.
The better question is why would you think it would even be necessary to run at 4K with 200% resolution scaling? And you want to throw AA on top of that? Those are completely ludicrous settings.
 
While that sounds like a deal compared to $1000 video cards, people who are buying cards at prices like this are supporting and actively promoting the advancement of permanent price increases among all tiers of video cards. PC gamers will be essentially paying twice as much on a video card over a new console just to be able to game at >=1440p 60fps. There is no price that can be put on someone's hobby, but there is a price range at which people will stop paying. Nvidia opened the flood gates with Titan being in a class entirely by itself and being priced entirely inappropriately, but if AMD reponds with higher-than-ever AMD prices, and people use Titan pricing as validation, then it's a sealed deal and we'll be forever looking at substantially higher prices for new high end video cards.

I want to see Nvidia put in their place, but to me a $750 video card essentially competing with a $1000 video card might as well be like saying a $300 steak at Bob's Meat Factory is every bit, if not better, than the $350 one at John's Cow House.
They have to price them higher because unlike food, video cards become more complex and more expensive to make every year.

Seems this is part of the reason it was delayed:
http://wccftech.com/amd-r9-390x-8-gb-hbm/
 
And a new case for those who don't have a spot for a AIO cooler. 🙂

I'm sorry...but...people who buy in that price category generally don't buy low end 10$ plastic cases.


The better question is why would you think it would even be necessary to run at 4K with 200% resolution scaling? And you want to throw AA on top of that? Those are completely ludicrous settings.


That's what I'm saying. 4GB of Vram for 4K is actually plenty...I was just trying to give people an idea how much it would take to actually make use of this...which essentially would mean 8K (res scaling) PLUS some MSAA...that's nothing any GPU can currently handle. As to people saying 4GB is not enough for 4K...I disagree...lots. I mean, sure...if you play in 4K with 4xMSAA you can in some games actually get to like 3.5 to 3.8 GB of Vram. But GPUs that can still run a game fast enough in 4K with 4xMSAA enabled? Yea....no. You'll need a multi GPU setup for that, anyway.

And with DX12, Vulkan, Mantle (yes yes, Mantle is "dead", I get it) etc comes Split frame rendering...which allows multi GPU setups to actually partially split their Vram...which means that instead of 4 + 4 = 4 it's more like 4 + 4 = 7 (Some data is still cloned).


So no matter how I look at it...unless the 390X is actually capable of producing 60+ frames on max settings in all games on its own in 4K...4GB is plenty, especially with future APIs finally getting rid of 4+4=4
 
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